### Fourth Lateran Council
IV C. L. — It is the twelfth ecumenical council, convoked by Innocent III in April 1213, and opened in the basilica of St. John Lateran on 11 November 1215; two other public sessions followed on 20 and 30 November. A large attendance included more than 400 bishops and 800 abbots and priors, representatives of the emperor of Germany and the Latin emperor of Constantinople, the kings of France, England, Hungary, Jerusalem, Cyprus, Aragon, and many Lombard communes, at the express invitation of the Pope; there were few Latin bishops from the East and none from the Greek Church. The acts of the Council’s work have not survived; only its seventy *Capitula* remain.
A careful comparison of these with the directives and ideas of Innocent III during the previous seventeen years of his pontificate shows that they were largely his personal work, even though in some points he yielded to the requests of the bishops. For the first time, the canons were promulgated in the name of the Pope. The Council’s purpose, as expressed by Innocent in his solemn opening address, was the organization of a new Crusade and the reform of the Church. The first canons are doctrinal: a profession of faith against the errors of the Cathars and Waldensians, the condemnation of Joachim of Fiore’s book against Peter Lombard on the Trinity, and legislation against heretics. Numerous canons address the moral reform of the clergy, ecclesiastical discipline, and the administration of the sacraments, reflecting the concerns Innocent III had shown in these matters.
Canon 10 recommends that bishops establish in cathedrals and conventual churches stable preachers; the success of this measure led to the establishment in every diocese of a master of grammar and a theologian to instruct priests; canon 27 prescribes that bishops instruct candidates for the priesthood. Other canons regulate episcopal elections, the assignment of benefices, the procedure of ecclesiastical trials, the administration of churches, and tithes. Canons 12–13 concern religious orders, prescribing provincial chapters every three years and prohibiting the establishment of new orders; this canon responds to the bishops’ desire to limit the contemporary trend toward new forms of religious life and does not aim at the institutions of St. Francis and St. Dominic, which were approved shortly afterward.
The religious and moral life of the people received impetus and discipline from the Fourth Lateran Council: canon 21 established the obligation for the faithful of both sexes, upon reaching the age of reason, to make an annual confession and to receive communion at least at Easter (until then, communion three times a year had been customary); other canons regulate marriage, restricting impediments of affinity and consanguinity and prohibiting clandestine marriages; one canon recommends that physicians attend to the spiritual health of their patients; canon 41 establishes that no prescription, whether canonical or civil, has validity unless accompanied by good faith; canon 67 forbids usury, which is blamed on the Jews, against whom the Council issued restrictive measures. Of interest is canon 9, which, though concerning Eastern countries, stipulates that when in the same city or diocese there are faithful of different language or rite, bishops must provide suitable priests for divine offices and the administration of the sacraments in the respective languages or rites.
The vast legislation of the Fourth Lateran Council was the most important before the Council of Trent and had the merit of adapting the Church of the thirteenth century to the needs of the time; it strengthened the authority of the Holy See without increasing its centralization. In addition to the seventy canons, the Council issued a decree to prepare for the new Crusade scheduled for 1217: Innocent III devoted the greatest care to this, with the awareness that the Crusade was a task of the Church, in which the entire Christian world was to participate; a general peace of four years was decreed for all countries, and the clergy, who did not take part in the expedition, were subjected to a triennial twentieth tax on all their property. The Council also addressed political and jurisdictional issues; the most important was the dispute over the property of Count Raymond VI of Toulouse following the Albigensian Crusade.
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Michele Maccarrone
### Fifth Lateran Council (1512–17)
V C. L. (1512–17) — To deprive the Conciliabulum of Pisa, organized by King Louis XII of France with the support of schismatic cardinals, of all force, Pope Julius II convoked a general council at the Lateran with the bull *Sacrosanctae Romanae Ecclesiae* on 18 July 1511. This fifth Lateran Council represents the last attempt at papal reform of the Church before the Protestant schism. At its opening on 10 May 1512, attended by 15 cardinals and 79 bishops, Giles of Viterbo, the general of the Augustinians, delivered that celebrated discourse on the necessity of Church reform, which culminated in the statement: *“It is right that man be changed by sacred things, not sacred things by men.”*
The sessions from the second (17 May 1512) to the fifth (16 February 1513), held still under the pontificate of Julius II, were devoted first of all to the condemnation of the Conciliabulum of Pisa and the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges. Only after the election of Leo X, in the sixth session (25 April 1513), was it decided to form three commissions: one for a general peace among Christian princes, another for the reform of the Church, and the third for the preservation of the faith and the extirpation of schism. As for the reform deliberations, awaited with great hope by Christendom, Emperor Ferdinand the Catholic had already, in the winter of 1511–12, had the bishops and theologians prepare a series of proposals and furnished the Spanish ambassadors to the Council with related instructions. In this way, he sought not only to safeguard the national interests of Spain in ecclesiastical matters but also to demand a general reform of the Church and, in particular, strict observance of the *Ius commune*, as well as that due regard be given in the conferral of benefices by the Roman Curia to the spiritual needs of souls; he further requested the periodic convocation of general councils (every ten or fifteen years). However, neither this Spanish reform program nor the broader memorandum drafted for Leo X by the two Camaldolese monks Pietro Quirini and Paolo Giustiniani (published in G. B. Mittarelli-A. Costadoni, *Annales Camaldulenses*, IX, Venice 1773, pp. 612–719) was ever presented to the Council.
The five subcommittees into which the commission for Church reform divided itself on 26 October 1513 concerned themselves mainly with a reform of curial taxes, which was promulgated in the bull *Pastorali officii* of 13 December 1513; in the eighth session (19 December 1513), penalties were then established against violators of this ordinance, and moreover the doctrine of Pietro Pomponazzi and his disciples—that the human soul is mortal (*animam intellectualem mortalem esse aut unicam in cunctis hominibus*)—was condemned.
The great reform bull, which was then accepted in the ninth session, addressed among other things the reform of cardinals, the informative processes for electing bishops, religious instruction in schools, the accumulation of benefices, and the usurpation of ecclesiastical goods by laypeople; it also prohibited the granting of convents in commendam, with an exception made for cardinals.
These reform decrees were completed in the tenth session (4 May 1513) with decrees on the Mounts of Piety and on the application of preventive censorship through the bishops; and in the eleventh session (19 Dec. 1516) with a decree on preaching, which had been preceded by fierce struggles arising from despair. A portion of the bishops of the Council had taken a firm and resolute stance against the privileges of the mendicant orders and had complained that exempt religious preached, heard confessions, and administered the sacraments without the license of the ordinaries. They therefore demanded the restoration of episcopal jurisdiction over the exempt and, in particular, the right of visitation and correction. The mendicant orders, on the other hand, defended their privileges through the Master General of the Dominicans (Tommaso de Vio) and the Augustinians (Egidio of Viterbo) with such vigor that the exemptions of secular clergy were indeed restricted and limited, but those of the exempt male orders remained substantially intact. The bishops were granted only the right to visit convents where religious engaged in the cura animarum, to approve preachers and confessors of exempt orders; but this did not constitute any real restriction.
Parallel to these acts of reform, the reconciliation of the conflict between the Pope and the King of France, which had been the cause of the Council’s convocation, took place. Louis XII abandoned the Pisan council and on 26 Oct. 1513 recognized the Fifth Lateran Council, promising to send French prelates. The schismatic cardinals, especially Carvajal and Sanseverino, submitted. However, French participation in the Council did not materialize, nor did any come from Germany, where Emperor Maximilian I had already recognized the Council by the end of 1512. The final step toward reconciling France with the Holy See was not taken within the Council but outside it, through the French Concordat concluded with Leo X by King Francis I on 18 Aug. 1516 and approved by the Council in the eleventh session (19 Dec. 1516). In the twelfth session, the Council was closed.
Although the Fifth Lateran Council issued a series of salutary reform decrees, it did not bring about that ecclesiastical reform which was ardently awaited by all and deeply necessary. Certainly, it was not without some favorable effects, for example, in the reform of religious orders and in the examination of candidates for holy orders. But most of these good and salutary decrees proved ineffective because there was no serious will to put them into practice. Thus was fulfilled what the Bishop of Burgos had predicted: “If the execution of the decrees is not secured, we waste time and money.” Only half a century later did the decrees of Trent truly renew the face of the Church, because the popes committed themselves to their strict observance.