Fifth Lateran Council
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5th Lateran Council May 3, 1512 - March 16, 1517 |
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| Accepted by | |
| Convened by | Pope Julius II |
| Bureau | |
| Attendees | about 100 bishops |
| subjects |
New Aristotelianism , the pragmatic sanction of Bourges , concordat with France, interest collection, pawn shops |
| Documents | |
|---|---|
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5 decrees |
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The Fifth Lateran Council was a 1512 to 1517 in the Lateran to Rome which meets Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church. It was convened by Pope Julius II in 1512 , continued under Leo X after his quick election in 1513 and concluded early in 1517. Church reform began, but could not agree on some theological issues.
prehistory
The ecclesiastical political framework around the council is formed by the discussion of conciliarism , which was a product of the previous councils in Constance and Basel . The Council of Basel, which began in 1431, was moved by Pope Eugene IV to Ferrara in 1438/39 against the will of the Council Fathers who met there , where a union with the Eastern Church was to be undertaken. The union was decided in July 1439, but it turned out to be untenable due to historical and theological prejudices. Nevertheless, the negotiation gave the Pope a respectable success over the Council of Basel, which had previously made unsuccessful efforts to meet the Greek delegation.
The now schismatic council of Basel was denied any legitimacy at the papal council in Ferrara or Florence, where it was moved after a year. The radicalism of the council participants there - mainly French and German clergy - caused the European powers to withdraw from the council. They turned back to the Pope.
But that did not mean that the idea of conciliarism simply disappeared like that. On the contrary, both the French king (in the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges ) and the German clergy (in the Mainz acceptance ) had recognized parts of the Basel Council resolutions, including the declaration of the “Tres veritates”, in which the council had sovereignty over the whole Church, including the Pope. The Bourges Pragmatic Sanction is a crucial document of Gallicanism . Because the right to appoint French bishops by the king was recorded in it, the popes sought from then on to withdraw the declaration.
After all these incidents, the papacy, which had been strengthened again after Ferrara and Florence, was not in the mood for another council, if only because the threat of such a council soon became a common weapon of politics. In fact, the French King Louis XII called. In 1511 cardinals opposed to a council in Pisa, the so-called Conciliabulum of Pisa . The convening of this counter-council was the trigger for the convening of the Fifth Lateran Council.
Council process
The Fifth Lateran Council was the 18th Ecumenical Council according to the counting of the Latin Church and the last one to take place in the Lateran . It was convened by Pope Julius II on April 19, 1512 and opened on May 10, 1512. Fifteen cardinals and 79 bishops attended the opening session, almost all of them Italians.
In its rules of procedure, the council stood in opposition to its two immediate predecessors and relied on the practice before Constance. The rules of procedure were determined by the Pope and the decrees were passed as Papal Bulls .
Condemnation of the Counter-Council of Pisa
First, the council went to the disempowerment of the Counter-Council of Pisa , which it condemned as schismatic . The kings of England and Aragon, as well as Emperor Maximilian I, assured the Pope of their support. After Julius II died on February 21, 1513, the French king also dropped the assembly in Pisa. With France was still during the Council by Pope Leo X , the Concordat of Bologna closed (1516), which regulated the relationship between church and state and was confirmed by the council.
Dogmatic definition of the immortality of the individual soul
In its only dogmatic definition, Apostolici Regiminis , the council dealt with the question of the immortality of the individual soul. The Neuaristotelismus had the Averroistic idea resurrected from Monopsychismus. Averroes had been the most important commentator on Aristotelian works in the Middle Ages and, through scholastic theologians like Thomas Aquinas , had received a wide reception in the West too. According to Averroes, the rational soul in all people is numerically the same, so there is no individual soul, but only this general soul and only this is immortal. This was also claimed by neo-Aristotelians such as Pietro Pomponazzi in the 16th century . The council opposed this idea, which was incompatible with Christian theology, and declared in the eighth session on December 19, 1513 that man possesses an individual and immortal soul, which is the prerequisite for personal immortality.
Strive for church reform
On the agenda of the council was again a church reform , which had already been attempted at the previous church assemblies, but never got beyond the beginnings.
There was no shortage of suggestions, and a number of participants spoke up with some violent criticism of the conditions in the church, the accumulation of offices, the neglect of the residence obligation , the privileges of the mendicant orders. A Spanish memorandum said that the judgment must begin in the house of the Lord. The revision of the ecclesiastical code, the unification of the religious system and the liturgy, a new edition of the union negotiations with the separated Eastern Churches and the mission of the newly discovered territories were proposed.
The council could not, however, decide on a harsh reform. It issued some decrees in which bishops, legates and cardinals were instructed in their duties and certain abuses regarding the lax performance of assigned tasks were forbidden. The dignitaries were obliged to take on administrative tasks such as visitations themselves, instead of seeing their office as a sinecure and appointing representatives for all tasks. Furthermore, the council issued regulations on curial taxation, book censorship and non-profit pawn shops.
Even these comparatively soft resolutions could still be undermined by dispensing. There was a lack of will for a consistent line, since Leo X was not a reform pope. The decisions of the council therefore hardly found any echo. This was not least due to its temporal location: when it was closed in the 12th session, it was March 16, 1517. The Reformation began seven months later .
The Reformation was ultimately the trigger for the convening of the Reform Council of Trento (1545–1563).
See also
literature
- Hubert Jedin : Short Council History . 6th edition, Herder-Verlag, Freiburg 1978.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Hubert Jedin, Small Council History, 6th edition, Herder 1978, p. 77
- ↑ a b c Hubert Jedin, Little Council History, 6th edition, Herder 1978, p. 78.
- ↑ Ludwig Ott, Handbuch der Dogmatik, 11th edition, Bonn 2005, p. 156
- ↑ a b c Hubert Jedin, Small Council History, 6th edition, Herder 1978, p. 79.