Tradition

Conciliarism

Overview

Conciliarism was a movement in the 14th-, 15th- and 16th-century Catholic Church which held that supreme authority in the Church resided with an ecumenical council, apart from, despite, or even if opposed by, the pope.

The movement emerged in response to the Western Schism between rival popes in Rome and Avignon. It was proposed that both popes abdicate in order to allow a new election that implemented a proposal where government supporters of the popes withdraw allegiance and thus prepare the way for a new election. The schism led to the summoning of the Council of Pisa (1409), which failed to end the schism, and the Council of Constance (1414–1418), which had more success, but which also proclaimed its own superiority over the Pope. Conciliarism reached its apex with the Council of Basel (1431–1449). The eventual victor in the warring movements was the pope and the institution of the papacy: the pope's power and teaching authority was confirmed by the condemnation of conciliarism at the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517). The apex of the theory of papal authority, on the other hand, was probably reached with the adoption of the doctrine of papal infallibility, promulgated (ironically) by the First Vatican Council (1870).

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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Other regulations, of a similar tendency, were established in other parts of Europe. But the power of the pope, in the collation of the great benefices of the church, seems, before the reformation, to have been nowhere so effectually and so universally restrained as in France and England. The concordat afterwards, in the sixteenth century, gave to the kings of France the absolute right of presenting to all the…
Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
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And this custom, coming, I suppose, from apostolical tradition (like many other things which are held to have been handed down under their actual sanction, because they are preserved throughout the whole Church, though they are not found either in their letters, or in the Councils of their successors),--this most wholesome custom, I say, according to the holy Cyprian, began to be what is called amended by his…
of Hippo Augustine, Writings in Connection with the Donatist Controversy
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if a King at the Popes admonition, doe not purge his Kingdome of Haeresies, and being excommunicate for the same, doe not give satisfaction within a year, his Subjects are absolved of the bond of their obedience." Where, by Haeresies are understood all opinions which the Church of Rome hath forbidden to be maintained. And by this means, as often as there is any repugnancy between the Politicall designes of the Pope…
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
States what Conciliarism is.
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Conciliarism

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