Authoritative & Ignored

By Francis Oakley
Commonweal
October 15, 2014

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/authoritative-ignored

Francis Oakley

Human beings chart their collective past, like their individual ones, via anniversaries, and this year has been particularly rife with important memorializations. June saw the seventieth anniversary of D-day in 1944, a date that increasingly tests the limits of living memory. In August we observed the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War. Go further back, and you enter a remoteness where anniversaries more typically engage the historian than the man on the street. Well, I’m a historian; and it is a sixth-hundredth anniversary to which, somewhat forlornly, I wish to draw attention. Forlornly, because I am guessing that we are unlikely to hear much about it, and least of all from church-connected sources. Yet the anniversary marks a truly great ecclesiastical event—one on which the fate of the universal church was directly dependent. November 16, 1414, saw the opening at Constance of a general council of the Latin Church. Both for what it was and what it did, the council was an event of great and historic significance. In size alone—and it was far better attended than the later, iconic Council of Trent—Constance was perhaps the most imposing of all medieval representative assemblies, ecclesiastical or secular. A citizen of Constance who was charged with helping find quarters for the flood of visitors listed, in addition to popes John XXIII (the first John XXIII, the one who had convoked the council) and Martin V, some five patriarchs, 33 cardinals, 47 archbishops, 249 bishops and suffragan bishops, 247 abbots and priors, 217 doctors of theology, 361 doctors of both laws, 5,300 “simple priests and scholars,” 3,000 and more merchants, shopkeepers, craftsmen, musicians, and players—and over 700 “harlots in brothels.” The council, moreover, attracted not only the papal but also the imperial chancery, as well as the official representatives of a host of European countries; one historian has called it the nearest medieval equivalent to the United Nations. And what did the council do? Quite a lot, in fact, not least of all the passage of a series of reforming measures, one of which—the decree Frequens (1417)—mandated the automatic assembly of frequent general councils, thereby making them a regular and continuing part of church governance. Had the popes not chosen to ignore that decree, the abuses of the late-medieval church might well have been remedied and the great “rupture” of Protestant Reformation avoided. But the council’s most important achievement was its success in bringing about what years of negotiation, diplomatic pressure, and even military action had failed to achieve—namely, the ending of the Great Schism of the West, which, after a disputed papal election and nearly forty years of debilitating deadlock, had seen Latin Christendom divided first into two and then into three rival “obediences,” each presided over by its own claimant to the papal throne.