Well before Martin Luther came along, the Roman Catholic Church had problems that stemmed directly from the very structures that were designed (theologically and politically) to unify church and society. The so-called Western Schism witnessed a papal crisis – three popes at one time – that only the Council of Constance (1414-1418) could solve. (Warning to triumphalist Protestants: this was the Council that also condemned those good old forerunners of the Reformation, John Hus and John Wycliffe.)
Here is Francis Oakley on Constance:
A divided Christendom had indeed been reunited but only because a general council, acting in the absence of its papal head, had formally claimed on certain crucial issues to be the legitimate repository of supreme power in the Church, had been able to vindicate that claim, and had been willing to do so even to the point of trying and deposing popes. In the month prior to the papal election and as part of the reform package to which all the conciliar nations had already given their approval, it had also gone on to set up constitutional machinery designed to prevent in the future any reversion to papal absolutism. In the decree Frequens it decreed that general councils were to be assembled, the first in five years’ time, the second in seventh, and thereafter at regular ten-year intervals. In this decree . . . the fathers at Constance were careful to ensure that, even if the pope chose not to convoke them, general councils would assemble automatically at nothing less than ten-yearly intervals and, in the unhappy event of renewed schism, within no more than a year of its outbreak. (42)
In other words, a century before the Reformation, the papacy was on the ropes and apparently chastened. The Restoration popes were also increasingly limited in their power, not simply by councils but also by the circumstances of European politics.
Loss of control and concomitant loss of revenues notwithstanding, possession of the actual substance of power over the provincial churches of Christendom mattered less, it seems, than the retention of a theoretically supreme authority over the universal Church. Its almost inevitable corollary, however, the revenues flowing in to Rome from the Church at large having been grievously diminished, was the pressing need for the popes of the Restoration era to turn inward and to focus their attention on the government of the papal states upon which they had now come to depend for a full half of their overall revenues. In effect, however grandiose their theoretical powers as supreme pontiffs and however much people continued to pay lip service to that position, they themselves had to concentrate a good deal of their day-to-day effort on their role as Italian princes, involving themselves in the complex diplomacy and ever-shifting coalitions required by the need to protect their Italian principality, to maintain, accordingly, the balance of power in Italy, to save off the recurrent threat of French and Spanish intervention in the politics of the peninsula, and when such efforts failed, to control and diminish the extent of that intervention. (53)
Such diminished authority was obviously crucial for the assertion of the provincial churches’ authority (subsidiarity in action?), which of course happened in spades with Luther’s appeal to the German nobility, Henry VIII’s “reform” of the Church of England, the rise of city churches in Switzerland, and the eventual emergence of a Dutch Reformed Church in rebellion against Spain. Still, conciliarism was key to Protestantism’s rise and to Trent’s failure to resolve Rome’s constitutional crisis.
In November 1518, in anticipation of the papal sentence, and again in 1520, Luther himself appealed from the judgment of the pope to that of a future general council. In his appeals, ironically enough, he drew the legal sections from the text of the earlier appeal launched by the theologians of Paris. For the pope, it may be, that was worrying enough in itself, but probably less worrying than those later calls, emanating from Catholic as well as Lutheran circles, for the assembly of a ‘general, free Christian council in German lands’. But, for one reason or another, worry did not prove enough to precipitate any sort of action that was truly timely, decisive, and effective. In that respect, two particularly surprising things may be noted about the response of the popes to the Protestant challenge. First, their failure for the better part of a quarter-century to convoke the general council for which so many Christian leaders called and upon the determinations of which so many anxious and conflicted spirits reposed their hopes. Second, when finally it did assemble, and despite the challenge laid down by the novel Protestant ecclesiologies of the day, the failure of that long-awaited council to promulgate any dogmatic decree on the nature of the Christian Church – and that despite its readiness to address so many other controverted issues. (58)
Again, I wonder when Jason and the Callers’ theory of papal sufficiency is going to catch up with historical reality.
Postscript: Oakley apparently has not left conciliarism to the archives or study carrel.
Old Life 