The Fourth General Council of the Lateran, 1215
The long reign of Alexander III was followed by a period of seventeen years in which the Church saw a succession of no fewer than five popes–the faithful if aged coadjutors of the great legist. When...
View ArticleThe First General Council of Lyons, 1245
The vast achievement of the General Council of 1215–the fourth in ninety years–might have been expected to make further councils unnecessary for some generations. But General Councils have always been...
View ArticleThe Second General Council of Lyons, 1274
This council has the distinction that, in its inception, and in all that directed its activity, it was the work of a pope who was a saint–Tebaldo Visconti, known in the calendar of the Church as the...
View ArticleThe General Council of Vienne, 1311-12
The legend dies hard of “the Middle Ages” as the golden age of the Christian faith, the time when popes gave the law to a lovingly acquiescent Christendom. This is to neglect such facts as that in one...
View ArticleThe General Council of Constance, 1414-18
There are three really remarkable councils in the fifteenth century– councils of a new kind altogether–that took place all within forty years: Pisa, where two rival popes were declared no popes at all...
View ArticleThe General Council of Basel-Ferrara-Florence, 1431-45
Martin V, before he closed the Council of Constance, duly announced that the General Council would meet five years thence, April 23, 1423, at Pavia. And at the appointed time he sent legates to...
View ArticleThe Fifth General Council of the Lateran, 1512-17
This Fifth General Council of the Lateran really originated in the tangled politics, national and international, of the last years of the reign of Pope Julius II (1503-13) . It was called as the...
View ArticleThe General Council of Trent, 1545-63
Martin Luther’s revolt was, almost from the beginning, an essential matter, i.e., it was explicitly directed against the pope’s essential claim that he is the ruler of the whole Church of Christ. He...
View ArticleThe First General Council of the Vatican, 1869-70
It is not to the nineteenth General Council that, in this summary, we dare propose to link the history of the twentieth, which followed it almost exactly three hundred years later. If we are to see...
View ArticleTHE CHURCH IN CRISIS – Appendix I
Appendix I SOME NOTES ABOUT FURTHER READING There are two indispensable tools for the serious student of the history of the General Councils, one of them a source book and the other a history. The...
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