Repressed memories

The Conciliarist Tradition

Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300-1870

Francis Oakley

Oxford University Press, $80, 298 pp.

The magisterial article on "Councils" in the authoritative 1911 Dictionnaire de Theologie Catholique includes a list of the general councils of the Catholic Church. This list passes straight from the Council of Vienne, convoked by Pope Clement V in 1311, to the Council of Florence convoked by Eugenius IV in 1439. Unwitting readers of the dictionary would hardly suspect that the author had silently edited out no fewer than three early-fifteenth-century assemblies, long accepted as general councils of the Catholic Church--the Councils of Pisa, Constance, and Basel.

This "bold exercise in the politics of oblivion," as Francis Oakley describes it, was just one instance of a general trend in the years following the solemn definition of papal infallibility in 1870. Ultramontane theology was busy eliminating all trace of an embarrassing historical anomaly, the drastic challenge which the so-called conciliar movement of the first half of the fifteenth century presented to the quasi-monarchical understanding of papal primacy enshrined in the 1870 decree.

Between 1378 and 1409, the Western church had been a monster with two heads, and the religious allegiance of Europe was divided between two rival claimants to the papacy, one based in Rome, the other (better organized and better supported) in Avignon. In 1409, the cardinals of both obediences sought to end the bewilderment of Christendom by convening a council at Pisa, where they deposed both claimants and elected a consensus pope, the brilliant Greek Franciscan, Alexander V. Unfortunately, the deposed popes refused to accept their dismissal, and though Alexander died within a year of his election, the Pisan cardinals chose a successor, John XXIII. There were now, therefore, three popes, of whom John XXIII (a brutal former pirate and notorious womanizer, elected partly because the cardinals were afraid of what he might do to them if they didn't, and partly because they felt that the bark of Peter needed a strong hand at the tiller) had the best theoretical claim, and in fact commanded most religious and political support.

The situation was finally resolved when, under pressure from King (subsequently Emperor) Sigismund of Germany, John XXIII reluctantly convened the Council of Constance, which proceeded to depose him and the other two popes (the Roman claimant, Gregory XII, was permitted the diplomatic fiction of a resignation). The cardinals together with thirty delegates appointed by the council then elected a new pope, Martin V, accepted by (almost) everyone, and the schism was at an end.

The deposition and election of popes by a council obviously had far-reaching implications for ecclesiology: By what authority had these actions been carried out? Constance obligingly provided an answer. In its decree Haec sancta, it solemnly defined, as a truth of the Catholic faith, the authority of a general council over all Christians, including even a legitimately elected pope, and in its decree Frequens it bound future popes to convene regular general councils, effectively constituting the council, not the pope, as the custodian of the church's well-being and the instrument of its reform.

Unsurprisingly, Rome was never comfortable with all this. Martin V duly convened the Council of Basel in accordance with the decree Frequens, but subsequent Renaissance popes repudiated any suggestion of conciliar superiority, and the "politics of oblivion" got under way, as Roman theologians and apologists began rewriting history. Almost nobody, not even Martin V, had questioned the validity of John XXIII's election--his magnificent monument in the Baptistry at Florence describes him as "formerly pope," not pseudo-pope, and that was the universal perception, even in Rome. Indeed, if John had not been pope until deposed, the validity of Martin V's election, and those of his successors, would be undermined, since Martin had been elected by the council John had convened. For centuries, therefore, theologians were confronted by an uncomfortable and intractable fact. A real live pope had been deposed, kicking and screaming, by a general council, acting on its own authority. Later Roman theologians argued either that Haec sancta was promulgated without papal agreement or subsequent endorsement, and was therefore nugatory; or else that it was an emergency measure, valid for its time but with no general application. Because of an otherwise irresolvable schism, that particular general council had perhaps possessed authority over those particular rival popes, but only because no one could be certain who was the real pope, and nothing could or should be deduced from this to the diminishment of the "plenitude of power" granted by Christ to Peter. History was tidied up, and John XXIII was edited out of the official list of popes endorsed by Rome, and was redescribed as an "antipope," a move decisively clinched in 1958, when the newly elected Angelo Roncalli, a former seminary professor of church history, and in this at least a good ultramontane, adopted the name John XXIII, rather than John XXIV.