Commenting on Conciliarism and the Babylon Captivity of the Church (1309-1377), Catholic historian Christopher Bellito wrote:
Conciliarism did not come from nowhere: A number of church traditions supported some conciliar ideas. One precedent for the conciliarist position reflected the relationship between an abbot and his monks. Monastic tradition had long held that when an abbot or abbess was to be elected or when important decisions had to be made for the monastery, the monks or nuns gathered together to vote, because all had a stake in the outcome. Sometimes, a delegation of older, wiser monks or nuns could decide or the entire community; this procedure became important for the cardinals, who regarded themselves as the older, wise members of the church’s body. Another precedent occurred at medieval universities where individual students and faculty members could vote on certain issues. Sometimes, they gathered together by nationality or academic disciple to cast a bloc vote. Some conciliarists found more ancient precedents supporting their position in the first communities described in the Acts of the Apostles, in the “Council of Jerusalem,” and in the earliest general councils (especially Nicaea I, Constantinople I, and to some extent, Ephesus) because the pope’s role at them was relatively minor, if not nonexistent.
On the other side of the debate about conciliar and papal authority, papalists said only a pope could call a general council: Without a pope, there was in fact no legitimate general council, despite what its members might say about their own gathering. Moreover, according to this position, a pope could go his entire papacy without calling a general council; if he did call one, he was clearly in charge and he had to ratify the council’s decisions in order for them to take effect. The papalists, however, had a hard time making their case because the papacy itself—one or the other or both, depending on where you stood during the schism—was creating the need for a resolution.
The Rome-Avignon split gave conciliarists the chance to put their ideas into practice. The extreme and extraordinary circumstance of the Great Western Schism seemed to fit their case exactly. It appeared a general council could, and now would, take place without a pope.
Frustrated cardinals from both the Roman and Avignon curias came together to call a council at Pisa in 1409. Though we have not dwelt on councils like Pisa that did not make the “top twenty-one” list of general councils, this meeting eventually led to the conciliar resolution of the schism at Constance. The cardinals believed that they had the authority to call Pisa because the schism was an emergency situation; as part of the papacy and as the church’s wiser segment, they had a duty to protect the church. The cardinals met over the objections of the Roman and Avignon popes, neither of whom accepted the council at Pisa.
The Pisan council deposed the Avignon pope Benedict XIII and the Roman pope Gregory XII on the charges of heresy and schism. The problem at Pisa was that not everyone agreed on the schism. The problem at Pisa was that not everyone agreed on the solution to the schism. In their rush to elect a pope who would theoretically gain everyone’s obedience, the cardinals did not make sure everybody involved would follow the new pope, whoever he was. Without this prior agreement to accept whoever was elected, this schism of two papacies split further into three papacies. The “counciliar” or “Pisan” pope, Alexander V, could not rally all Christians around him and gain complete acceptance, even though the cardinals at Pisa elected him unanimously. Alexander V then named his own college of cardinals, bringing the total to three popes, three curias, and three colleges of cardinals. Pisa only made matters worse. (Christopher M. Bellitto, The General Councils: A History of the Twenty-One Church Councils from Nicaea to Vatican II [New York: Paulist Press, 2002], 83-85)
Elsewhere commenting on the legacy of Conciliarism, Bellito noted:
Looking back from the end of this part of the story, conciliarism probably constitutes the most interesting chapter in the history of the general councils. But it seems to have played itself out by the middle of the fifteenth century. Conciliarism had flourished during the crisis of the schism, which made the papal position weak, but it altered in its own extremism and in the face of the papal recovery of power under Martin V and Eugene IV. Conciliar ideas remained in the air, however, to such an extent that a later pope, Pius II, felt compelled to issue a condemnation of conciliarism, called Execrabilis, in 1460.
Pius II, a former conciliarist, went straight after conciliarism’s central principle. He said some people “imbued with a spirit of rebellion” claimed it was permissible to appeal over a pope’s head to a general council. Calling this idea “a horrible abuse” and “a deadly poison,” he condemned such appeals, calling them “erroneous and abominable . . . null and void.” Conciliarism was not completely dead, though, and its fifteenth-century examples of challenging papal authority would have great implications for the sixteenth century.
The fate of conciliarism was not the only legacy of the turbulent fifteenth-century general councils. Another had to do with reformers that were absolutely necessary but never made substantial progress. The topic of reform had been overlooked while general councils and popes fought for power. As a result, Constance and Basel-Ferrara-Florence-Rome failed to fix troubles the church simply had to face: worldliness, simony, greed, ambition, pluralism and absenteeism, poor clerical training, and bishops interested in everything but shepherding their dioceses.
Constance and the various stages of Basel had legislated some reforms, but popes and bishops mainly ignored them—or, at best, took very small steps to correct the mounting abuses in the dioceses and parishes of Christianity. At Constance, delegates turned their attention to improving priestly education, morality, and service—especially on the parish level. But these ideas remained proposals and died in committee because the issue of reuniting the papacy dominated the council. Constance dud successfully legislate some reformers in the church’s higher levels: The delegates voted to curb simony and heavy taxation, particularly connected to the papacy Two decades later, the Basel sessions battling Eugene IV in 1433 and 1435 addressed papal abuses by restricting (and in some cases outlawing) the high revenues and fees the papacy demanded when appointing many church officials.
But Basel’s reforms, like Constance’s before them, languished because popes were interested in demonstrating the papacy’s ultimate power in the church. Fifteenth-century popes after Constance and Basel-Ferrara-Florence-Rome were not about to follow those general councils’ rules. Although the fifteenth-century councils may have been thrilled some Christians, real problems in the church that required attention grew as popes and general councils competed. Because reforms were not put into place, the church would soon need more general councils, especially after a theology professor named Martin Luther proposed some striking approaches to the church’s problems. (Ibid., 94-95)
