Haec sancta (1),
however, did not say, “Even someone of papal dignity should obey a general
council.” It said, “Even if someone of papal dignity existed, he should obey
the Council of Constance.” In this way—that is, within this conditional
mood—the decree casts doubt on the existence of a true pope at that moment in
time. The underlying thought that was used here was that if there were three
popes, and therefore all three of them were suspected to be false, one could
not know which one was the true pope. Therefore it was allowed, by using
epikeia, to state that everyone should obey an authority that certainly was not
false, namely, the general Council of Constance, even when papal support for it
was lacking. Probably many of the fathers, including Jean Gerson, did not doubt
that John XXIII was in fact the true pope, but everyone nevertheless knew that,
were it to succeed in ending the schism, the council had to deal with those who
did not accept him as true pope.
. . .
With Haec sancta, the Council of Constance proclaimed its
superiority, and that of any other legitimate general council, and its
authority to end the schism; but it proposed in the same decree three possible
definitions of a legitimate general council. It was thus the product of a
consensus arising out of a diversity in thought about sovereignty in the
church. (Michiel Decaluwe, “Three Ways to Read the Constance Decree Haec sancta
(1415): Francis Zabarella, Jean Gerson, and the Traditional Papal View of
General Councils,” in The Church, the Councils, and Reform: The Legacy of the
Fifteenth Century, ed Gerald Christianson, Thomas M. Izbicki, and Christopher
Bellitto [Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008], 133,
139)
