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.

If Rome consistently downplayed the significance of the Council of Constance, the rest of the Catholic world did not. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, some of the church's greatest minds accepted and taught that a general council possessed authority superior to that of the pope, and built on that perception in resisting the growing jurisdictional and doctrinal claims of the papacy. In France, Spain, Germany, Austria, and even in the parts of Italy under Austrian or Spanish domination, the practical administration of the regional churches was predicated on that understanding of the qualified authority of the popes. The University of Paris was the home of conciliar theology, and in the theology of "Gallicanism" the implications of conciliar theory were erected into a complete ecclesiology, emphasizing the dignity and coresponsibility of the whole episcopate, and the autonomy of the church of France (and other local churches) under papal primacy.

But this was not at all a narrowly French phenomenon. Catholics everywhere sought to place bounds on papal authority. English recusants, anxious to distance themselves from the more extreme claims of the Counter Reformation popes and show themselves capable of loyalty to a Protestant government; the prince-bishops of Germany seeking to order their own affairs or to accommodate the demands of a local prince; Catholic states like the Republic of Venice concerned to limit papal interference--all embraced versions of conciliarism.

Versions, because conciliarism was never a monolith. Some versions of it drew close parallels between the structures of civil society and those of the church, and invoked natural law in their arguments against overweening papal claims. Some versions of conciliarism were positively antipapal, or envisaged general councils as a regular and frequent feature of the church's life. Yet one of the greatest exponents of the Gallican version of conciliarism, Bishop Jacques Benigne Bossuet, was uneasy with accounts of the church that compared it to a secular political organism; he venerated papal authority and even thought the pope infallible, provided he acted in concert with other bishops; and he held that general councils were rare events to be held only in emergency. For him, conciliarism was essentially a teaching about the shared responsibility of the whole episcopate, whether gathered in council or scattered in the dioceses.

The demise of conciliarism was both relatively recent and far from inevitable. The French Revolution was the key event, sweeping away the prince-bishoprics that in Enlightenment Europe had asserted episcopal rights against a weakened papacy, and shattering the church of France that had been the torchbearer for conciliar and episcopalist theory. The persecution of the popes by the revolutionary regimes and by Napoleon turned the papacy into an emblem of martyred fidelity to the gospel, and a rallying point even for French bishops. In the run-up to the First Vatican Council, ultramontanism--the high doctrine of papal supremacy--despite the protests of theologians as great as John Henry Newman, and under the prompting sometimes of popular enthusiasm from below and sometimes divisive papal encouragement from above, became increasingly identified as the essence of Catholic Christianity.

Francis Oakley's wonderfully rich study of the conciliar tradition, the mature distillation of a lifetime of scholarly engagement with the subject by a great scholar, is more than a historical exploration of the varieties of a defunct theology. The church, he believes, has been laundering its past since 1870, rewriting its history to marginalize as eccentric or un-Catholic what was for more than half a millennium a mainstream dimension of its theology, and one with much to say to current concerns about collegiality. We have, he argues, allowed ourselves "to concede to the empire of the present an unwarranted degree over the stubborn confusion of the past." This "repression of memory" has narrowed and impoverished Catholic thinking about episcopate and papacy, and in any case, the ghost of conciliarism is not so easily laid.

Institutional "countermemories," Oakley argues, have a habit of surfacing to disrupt tidy orthodoxies. His own book is a shining example of what real learning can do to ensure that that happens, and to encourage a more nuanced and three-dimensional grip on what our tradition actually contains. This elegant and vividly written book is never jargon-ridden or obscure; it is closely argued, and makes demands on its readers. It is also hugely important, a model of the service the church historian has to offer the church. Catholicism has always appealed to tradition as a vehicle of truth. Oakley here reminds us that the tradition is more complex, more conflicted, and incomparably more challenging than we are prone to imagine.

Eamon Duffy is professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Magdalene College. He is the author of The Stripping of the Altars (Yale University Press), among other books.