Council of Constance
The Council of Constance (Latin: Concilium Constantiense;[1] German: Konzil von Konstanz) was an ecumenical council of the Catholic Church that was held from 1414 to 1418 in the Bishopric of Constance (Konstanz) in present-day Germany. The council ended the Western Schism by deposing or accepting the resignation of the remaining papal claimants and by electing Pope Martin V. It was the last papal election to take place outside of Italy.
Council of Constance
1414–1418
Sigismund von Luxemburg and Antipope John XXIII, confirmed by Pope Gregory XII
600
Deposition of John XXIII and Benedict XIII, condemnation of Jan Hus, election of Martin V, Haec sancta, Frequens
The council also condemned Jan Hus as a heretic and facilitated his execution by the civil authority, and ruled on issues of national sovereignty, the rights of pagans and just war, in response to a conflict between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Kingdom of Poland and the Order of the Teutonic Knights.
The council is also important for its role in the debates over ecclesial conciliarism and papal supremacy. Constance issued two particularly significant decrees regarding the constitution of the Catholic Church: Haec sancta (1415), which asserted the superiority of ecumenical councils over popes in at least certain situations, and Frequens (1417), which provided for councils to be held automatically every ten years. The status of these decrees proved controversial in the centuries after the council, and Frequens was never put into practice. Though Haec sancta, at least, continued to be accepted as binding by much of the church up to the 19th century, present-day Catholic theologians generally regard these decrees as either invalid or as practical responses to a particular situation without wider implications.
Participants[edit]
Sigismund arrived on Christmas Eve 1414 and exercised a profound and continuous influence on the course of the council in his capacity of imperial protector of the church. An innovation at the council was that instead of voting as individuals, the bishops voted in national blocs. The vote by nations was in great measure the initiative of the English, German, and French members. The legality of this measure, in imitation of the "nations" of the universities, was more than questionable, but during February 1415 it carried and thenceforth was accepted in practice, though never authorized by any formal decree of the council. The four "nations" consisted of England, France, Italy, and Germany, with Poles, Hungarians, Danes, and Scandinavians counted with the Germans. While the Italian representatives made up half of those in attendance, they were equal in influence to the English, who sent twenty deputies and three bishops. The Spanish deputies (from Portugal, Castile, Navarre and Aragon), initially absent, joined the council at the twenty-first session, constituting upon arrival the fifth nation.[4]
Later status[edit]
Although Pope Martin V did not directly challenge the decrees of the council, his successor Eugenius IV repudiated an attempt by a faction at the Council of Basel to declare the provisions of Haec sancta and Frequens a matter of faith. His 1439 bull on the matter, Moyses vir Dei, was underwritten by the Council of Florence.[11] In convening the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–17), Pope Julius II further pronounced that Frequens had lost its force;[12] Lateran V is sometimes seen as having itself abrogated Haec sancta, though the reading is controversial.[13] Either way, while Rome itself came to reject the provisions made by the council, significant parts of the Church, notably in France, continued to uphold the validity of its decisions long after the event: Haec sancta was reaffirmed in the Gallican Articles of 1682, and even during the First Vatican Council of 1869–70 the French-American bishop of St. Augustine, Florida, Augustin Vérot, attempted to read Haec sancta into the record of deliberations.[14]
Despite the apparently definitive rejection of conciliarism at the First Vatican Council, the debate over the status of Constance was renewed in the 20th century. In the 1960s, in the context of the Second Vatican Council, the reformist Catholic theologian Hans Küng and the historian Paul de Vooght argued in defense of the dogmatic character of Haec sancta, suggesting that its terms could be reconciled with the definition of papal supremacy at Vatican I.[15] Küng's argument received support from prelates such as Cardinal Franz König.[16] Other Catholic historians adopted different views: Hubert Jedin considered Haec sancta to be an emergency measure with no binding validity beyond its immediate context, while Joseph Gill rejected the validity of the session that passed the decree altogether.[17] The debate over Haec sancta subsided in the 1970s, however, without resolution.[18]