Conciliarism

• 1. Introduction

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  Conciliarism named a question that split the Catholic Church across the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. Did supreme authority rest with the pope, or with an ecumenical council that could act apart from him, despite him, or even against his will? The dispute took root in the Western Schism, when rival popes reigned at once in Rome and in Avignon. One proposal called for both men to abdicate together, clearing the way for a single new election. Each side's political backers would withdraw their support to force the issue.

  The Council of Pisa convened in 1409 to end the standoff and failed. The Council of Constance followed from 1414 to 1418, achieved more, and declared itself superior to the pope outright. Conciliarism reached its high point at the Council of Basel, which ran from 1431 to 1449.

  The pope and the papacy ultimately prevailed. The Fifth Lateran Council condemned conciliarism between 1512 and 1517, confirming papal power and teaching authority once again. Papal authority reached its own peak later, with the doctrine of papal infallibility. The First Vatican Council promulgated papal infallibility in 1870, an irony given conciliarism's own history. The pope's victory looked inevitable in hindsight. It was not obvious to the theologians who spent generations arguing the opposite.

• 2. Roots And Rivals

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  The First Council of Nicaea gathered in 325. Conciliar theorists later pointed to it as proof that some of the Church's biggest decisions had always run through councils. Conciliarism also leaned on corporate theories of the Church, arguments that let members restrain or judge their head whenever his actions endangered the whole body.

  In his Defensor Pacis, written in 1324, Marsilius of Padua argued that the universal Church was made up of the faithful, not the priesthood. He pressed the point further. The inequality built into the priesthood had no basis in divine law. Jesus, not the pope, was the Church's only true head.

  William of Ockham, who died in 1349, wrote some of the earliest texts laying out conciliarism's basic logic. His target was Pope John XXII, whom he wanted removed from office. John had revoked a decree favoring the Spiritual Franciscans' teaching that Christ and the apostles owned nothing, individually or in common. Ockham argued that election by the faithful, or by their chosen representatives, conferred the papacy in the first place. That same electing power, he wrote, also limited how far papal authority could reach. For him, the universal church meant the congregation of the faithful itself. That was the body Jesus had promised to the Apostles, not the institution built on top of it.

  Ockham's arguments were aimed at a single pope. Within decades, a far larger crisis would give conciliarism a much bigger stage to test them on.

• 3. Building The Theory

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  Conrad of Gelnhausen helped found the conciliar movement in the late 14th century. He answered the Western Schism of 1378 by calling for an independent General Council to resolve it. Henry of Langenstein, a scholastic philosopher, echoed Conrad's call for a General Council.

  The canonists and theologians who backed conciliar superiority read the same sources as Marsilius and William, but interpreted them far more conservatively. They wanted to unify, defend, and reform the institution under clerical control, not push a Franciscan agenda or a lay one. Jean Gerson, Pierre d'Ailly, and Francesco Zabarella led this more clerical strand of conciliarism. Nicholas of Cusa later synthesized their work, balancing hierarchy against consent and the representation of the faithful.

  Writing in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, John Kilcullen noted that "in France conciliarism was one of the sources of Gallicanism."

  This clerical, careful version of conciliarism built the intellectual case that popes would spend generations trying to dismantle.

• 4. The Papal Defense

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  Juan de Torquemada defended papal supremacy in his Summa de ecclesia, a work he completed around 1453.

  A generation later, Thomas Cajetan pressed the argument further in his work On the Comparison of the Authority of Pope and Council. "Peter alone had the vicariate of Jesus Christ and only he received the power of jurisdiction immediately from Christ in an ordinary way, so that the others (the Apostles) were to receive it from him in the ordinary course of the law and were subject to him," Cajetan wrote. He added: "Christ gave the plenitude of ecclesiastical power not to the community of the Church but to a single person in it."

  Pope Pius II stood out as conciliarism's most determined papal opponent. Historian Michael de la Bédoyère described Pius II's position directly. Pius II insisted "that the doctrine holding General Councils of the Church to be superior to the Pope was heretical." Pius II's own bull, Execrabilis, condemned conciliarism outright.

  The debate did not stay buried. It would resurface at a council convened generations later, in the 20th century.

• 5. Echoes At Vatican II

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  Conciliarist strains of thought never fully disappeared from the Church, even after centuries of official condemnation. Catholic teaching continues to hold that the Pope is the Vicar of Christ. That title carries supreme and universal primacy, both of honour and of jurisdiction, over the Church.

  The convocation of the Second Vatican Council, in the 20th century, reawakened interest in conciliarism within Catholic Church circles.

  Professor David D'Avray observed that the council's documents emphasize episcopal authority, both individual and collegial. But he noted that this authority appears joined to papal authority in those documents, not placed above it. D'Avray's distinction between conjoined and superior marks where the argument stands today, still unresolved in the language the Church uses about itself.