Thursday testimony

1418: The church, since it is made up of human beings, sometimes does bad and foolish things. Sometimes it tries but fails to correct itself. Consider the situation of Europe in 1414: there was not one pope, but three, each claiming to be the legitimate one (a situation known as the Great Schism). Sigismund, ruler of Germany, decided to end this embarrassing situation by calling a council of church officials from all over Europe, and the council assembled in Constance in southern Germany in November of 1414. One pope, John XXIII, agreed to step aside if the other two would—but another, Benedict XIII, refused, so the council deposed him. Meanwhile, John XXIII fled the council and declared it had no authority without him, but the council decreed its authority was from God and did not need a pope to approve its decrees. It deposed John, then the third pope, Gregory XII, abdicated willingly. A new pope, Martin V, was elected.

The council established the rule that councils of the church were to be called regularly to deal with issues—a worthy rule that was, alas, not adhered to. The council did two things that reform-minded Christians were horrified by: condemned and burned the reformer John Huss of Bohemia, and condemned, several years after his death, the English reformer John Wycliffe. In other words, a large council called to reform the church ended up accomplishing little except condemning two sincere reformers as heretics. The only worthy accomplishments of the Council of Constance which wrapped up on April 22, 1418, were ending the Great Schism and putting one man, a fairly decent one, on the pope’s throne. A century later, reform would come—not from a council but from Martin Luther and his followers breaking away from a corrupt church. The message of the Council of Constance was that the church was not going to correct its own abuses.