THE CHURCH IN COUNCIL

Dogma, Drama & Dudgeon

A GENERAL council," says the Most Rev. Thomas Roberts, retired Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bombay, "is a football match at which all the players are bishops." It is an apt likeness, for church councils of the past* were often tense and bitter.

The first eight councils were largely concerned with defining church doctrine. In the process of stamping out heresies, the fathers extracted from the message of Scripture the essential dogmas of the Trinity. Condemning the thought of an Alexandrian priest named Arius, First Nicaea ruled that Christ was divine--"the only begotten of the Father, of the same substance with the Father." Ephesus anathematized the Nestorians, because they refused to acknowledge Mary as Theotokos, the Mother of God. Chalcedon condemned the Monophysites, for denying that Christ united a divine and a human nature in one person. The councils may have brought out the best in Christian teaching--but they sometimes brought out the worst in the men who attended them: at Ephesus, rival groups of bishops excommunicated one another.

The councils of the Middle Ages, beginning with First Lateran in 1123, dealt primarily with the discipline of the Western church. Fourth Lateran, convened by Pope Innocent III in 1215, was attended (according to tradition) by St. Francis and St. Dominic, condemned clerical loose-living, and approved rules for the Inquisition. Two of the medieval councils--Lyon (1274) and Florence (1439-45)--tried to patch up the breach between Eastern and Western Christianity that had existed since 1054. A delegation of Greek bishops at Florence recognized Pope Eugenius IV as head of the church. But Orthodox monks and parish priests were opposed to reunion, and the delegates renounced the agreement. "May our hands, which signed the unjust decree, be cut off," they declared.

Councils of the Renaissance delayed, but could not prevent, the division of Christendom that came with the Reformation. The Council of Constance ended the Great Schism of the West, a disastrous 40-year era in which the church had three rival claimants for the papacy. This council, like the forthcoming Vatican Council, was convened by a Pope John XXIII; since historians now agree that he had not been validly elected, the present Pope was free to use the same numerals. The Council of Trent (1545-63) was a belated effort to reform the corrupt Catholic practices--notably, the traffic in indulgences--that Luther and Zwingli had criticized. A few Protestant theologians actually appeared at Trent in the winter of 1551, but, as Luther himself remarked: "The remedy comes too late; it will not achieve its purpose." The fathers of Trent went on alone, passed 131 canons, sparked a Counter Reformation that brought life back to Catholicism.

Vatican I had nearly as vast an agenda as Trent; yet in four argument-ridden sessions in 1869 and 1870, the 774 bishops succeeded only in formulating two decrees: papal infallibility and a statement on the nature of faith. More than one-fifth of the bishops did not want papal infallibility defined, and 55 of them walked out of the council rather than vote on the decree (all ultimately accepted it). A storm raged over Rome on the day the doctrine was approved; each favorable vote was echoed from outside St. Peter's Basilica by an awesome clap of thunder.

Ironically, the Pope who convened Vatican I, Pius IX, had hopes that other churches would attend the council. But Protestant leaders publicly rejected his summons to the council, and the Patriarch of Constantinople returned the invitation unopened.

*In Roman Catholic reckoning, 20 councils deserve the name ecumenical--meaning councils representing the entire church in union with Rome. But Anglicans and many Protestants regard only the first four councils--Nicaea (325), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451)--as ecumenical; Orthodox churches accept the ecumenicity of three more--the Second of Nicaea (787), the Second (553) and Third (680) of Constantinople. All the others, non-Catholics insist, are simple regional councils of the Latin church.

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