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It was not the least of the tragedies of Barbarossa's aggression that
it deprived the Church of a great constructive reformer, Alexander III,
nineteen years of whose long reign the emperor contrived to fill with a
struggle where life itself was the issue. Roland Bandinelli is, after
St. Bernard, the greatest personage of his century. He was essentially
of his age, in sympathy with all its aspirations, a pioneer of the new
theological method and, as became Gratian's first great commentator,
possessed of a mind that read principles behind decrees, tendencies in
events. That. such a man should be elected pope in the very maturity of
his powers, and that such a pope should reign for the almost
unprecedented period of two-and-twenty years, ought to have sufficed to
undo all the mistakes of the many less gifted pontiffs who, since the
death of Urban II, had endeavoured to reap the harvest of the great age
of St. Gregory VII. It was, however, fated that Roland Bandinelli came
to his high destiny at a moment of crisis so terrible that the work of
St. Gregory's generation seemed about to be destroyed. The scholar and
thinker must perforce show himself man of action. Not until the new
danger was laid could the slow quiet task be taken up again of renewing
a right spirit within the different members of Christ's mystical body.
Alexander was an old man, close on eighty years of age in all
likelihood, when, in 1179, he managed to summon the General Council [ ]
that would seem the natural place for his great gifts to bear their
fruit.
It was in fact convoked as a reform council, and as a general council
so that the reform decrees might have greater prestige. It opened,
apparently, on the first Monday of Lent (March 5), 1179, and among its
three hundred bishops were representatives of the new Latin hierarchies
of the East. There was also present an envoy from the Greek Churches,
in schism now for a century.
The details of the discussions are less than scanty. There were three
public sessions for the promulgation of the decrees, and the council’s
twenty-seven canons created, by their form, a new precedent in
ecclesiastical legislation. They are longer and fuller than those of
the earlier councils, nor are they set down as mere regulations, but as
the expression of a legislating mind. They are much more detailed and
the reasons that promote the law are given with it. The whole
legislation bears the mark of the trained legal mind that had called
the council and had governed it. Especially is the new spirit shown in
such canons as those [ ] which, together, set up the law creating and
detailing the right of higher authority to intervene in collations to
ecclesiastical benefices wherever the competent, lower authority
neglects to do so, or again in the canon [ ] regulating the procedure
by which bishops may judge their subjects, and their subjects appeal
against their judgement.
Seven canons that deal with abuses show the pope to have been keenly
aware of the damage wrought by the desire of wealth in clergy and laity
alike. The exaction of fees for spiritual services -- burials for
example -- or by reason of installations is forbidden. The pomp and
circumstance of prelates on visitation -- and therefore the expense to
their subjects -- is carefully regulated. No cleric is to hold a
plurality of benefices, nor is he to dispose of ecclesiastical property
by will. The custom that exists in some churches of paying a certain
sum on appointment as dean is abolished. The laity are forbidden to
dispose of ecclesiastical benefices and forbidden, also, to levy taxes
on churches. There is, for the first time in many years, no repetition
of the law forbidding clerical marriage, but the customary canon
against clerical concubinage is repeated. There is, too, a new
prohibition that the clergy are not to frequent convents of women
unless that is their special work; penalties are enacted against
delinquents.
The schism lately patronised by the emperor finds an echo in the
annulment of all ordinations by all the successive anti- popes --
though Alexander showed himself more lenient here than Innocent II,
depriving none of the repentant bishops, merely exacting a public oath
of recognition and loyalty. Of more permanent importance was the
legislation on papal elections that now completed the work of the Roman
council of 1059. Then it had been decided that to elect the pope was
the business of the cardinal clergy of Rome alone. Now -- with the
memory of the schisms in 1130 and 1159 fresh in the mind -- it was laid
down that a two-thirds majority of the voters was necessary for a valid
election. Another canon fixed the age for the episcopate at thirty
years and the priesthood at twenty-four. Clerics were forbidden
henceforward to act as lawyers in the civil courts or as surgeons and
physicians. The power of the bishops was strengthened against the
encroachment of some of the new centralised exempt orders. Monks were
to confine their spiritual activities to their monasteries. The
principle that in capitular discussions the will of the maior et sanior
pars should decide was given the highest, formal, legal sanction. In
cases where more than one person had the right of presentation to a
church and where the patrons could not agree, the appointment was to
rest with higher authority, the custom of installing two or more
rectors with joint authority being condemned.
Like the two first Lateran Councils, the council of 1179 was concerned
with social problems no less than with religious questions properly so
called. Tournaments were strictly forbidden. Although the sacraments
might be given to those fatally injured in them -- if truly repentant
-- on no account, should they die, were they to receive ecclesiastical
burial. The Truce of God was once more proclaimed; pilgrims and all
those who worked for the production of food were taken under the
Church's special protection, military commanders who molested them
being excommunicated. Usurers were once more banished from the Church,
and the rights of lepers to the benefits of the sacraments, and even to
a priest and church of their own where their numbers made this
feasible, were reasserted. Christians who assisted the Saracens were
heavily censured; those, too, who lent themselves out in service to
them, or to the Jews. Excommunication was also laid down as the penalty
for those who robbed and pillaged the victims of shipwreck.
A very celebrated canon denounced the new menace to the Church and to
civilisation presented by the neo-Manichees, and also by the bands of
unemployed mercenary soldiers. Against the heretics the canon appealed
to the Christian princes. Against the vagabond soldiery, brigands who
terrorised whole countrysides, it endeavoured to raise the whole body
of the faithful in a kind of crusade for the home front. The people
were bidden to take courage and to fight manfully against these devils,
and to be assured that, whoever died fighting them, died in a holy war,
meriting thereby pardon for his sins and a blessed eternity. [ ]
Finally the council made it obligatory for every bishop to establish in
his cathedral city a school where clerics and poor scholars might be
taught, such instruction to be given without payment.
The day had not yet come when popes were to proclaim that, as God's
vicars, they had a universal right of supervising earthly governments,
but, as if in preparation for that claim, the newly centralised papal
government of the Church was taking under its strong protection the
cause of the weak and defenceless wherever found. That strength, of
which the Roman Church was more and more aware as it more and more
consciously centralised the organisation of its primacy, it was also
beginning to use to strengthen the episcopal power throughout the world
against lay usurpation and clerical acquiescence in it. To this
noteworthy development, where St. Gregory VII is the pioneer, Alexander
III is one of the chief contributory forces and nowhere more than in
his General Council of 1179.
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