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The Concordat of Worms marked a very definite stage in the long effort
of the Roman Church to reform itself and the churches it governed. One
of the chief instruments it had employed, in order to correct abuses
and to introduce the new discipline, was the council of local prelates
presided over by the pope or by a legate representing him. It was only
fitting that a greater council than any hitherto seen in the West, the
first general council to be held in the West, should seal the treaty
which promised the beginnings of a new age. This was the council
announced as early as June, 1122, and summoned to meet in the Lateran
basilica of Rome for the first Sunday of Lent, 1123.
The official record of the council’s proceedings has perished; but its
canons survive, and there are accounts of the proceedings in
contemporary chronicles. Apparently some five hundred bishops took part
in it, and Calixtus II himself presided. There were two, perhaps three,
public sessions at which the decrees were published. the first on March
18, the last on March 28. Of the machinery by which the decrees were
prepared, of the discussions which preceded their introduction in the
public sessions, we know nothing. The texts of the Concordat of Worms
were read out and solemnly approved, and six of the council’s canons
form a kind of supplement to the pact. Laymen are forbidden to dispose
of Church property; no bishop is to be consecrated who has not been
canonically elected; the ordinations of the different anti-popes are
declared null and void, as are all alienations of Church property made
by them, except where these have been done with the consent of all the
clergy of the churches concerned. In its preoccupation with the
practical problems of church discipline and the extirpation of abuses,
in its concern for the general social well being, the council only
reflected the close relation of the two societies, civil and religious;
and it set the pattern for all the other six councils of the Middle
Ages. Of its twenty-two canons, five repeat previous legislation. [ ]
Of the remaining seventeen, the most important is the twenty- first,
which by making the reception of Holy Orders a diriment impediment to
marriage completes at once the long Western development of clerical
celibacy and the restorative legislation of the previous seventy-four
years. Until now the cleric in major orders who, in contravention of
the existing canons, contracted marriage, had been regarded as the
equal of the cleric who kept a concubine: he must choose between his
clerical career and the woman with whom he lived, whether she be his
wife or not. Under the new legislation it is taken out of the cleric's
power to contract a marriage at all, once he has received Holy Orders.
The whole body of the Church had been roused to recognise in the
layman's hold on ecclesiastical appointments the root of all the
troubles that had for too long degraded it, and to see in a married
clergy, not merely a dangerous innovation in discipline that made
graver clerical abuses easier still, but one of the layman's most
powerful aids in maintaining that hold. The council of 1123 marked the
end of the long campaign of propaganda and the victory of the ancient
tradition. Free of two, at least, of the chains that hampered its
freedom the Church should go forward more easily in its mission of
supernaturalising the life of mankind.
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