The Council of Constance

By 1414 the Latin church had three men claiming the papacy, each with cardinals, each recognised by different kingdoms, and no procedure for choosing between them, since the only authority competent to judge a pope was held to be a pope. The Council of Constance, summoned with the backing of the emperor Sigismund, cut the knot by asserting that a general council held its authority immediately from Christ and that everyone, including a pope, must obey it in matters of faith, the ending of the schism and reform.

That decree, Haec Sancta, is the most argued-over document in the history of Catholic canon law. On one reading it is a dogmatic definition of conciliar authority passed by a council whose own legitimacy the church accepts. On another it is an emergency measure with no doctrinal force, taken when no pope could be identified. Later popes repudiated it, the Fifth Lateran Council contradicted it, and the question is not settled among Catholic historians and canonists today.

The council did what it set out to do. Gregory XII resigned, on terms that let him convoke the council formally first and so preserve his line's claim; John XXIII was deposed after fleeing; Benedict XIII was deposed and ignored the deposition to the end. Martin V was elected in 1417, and a further decree, Frequens, provided that councils should meet at regular intervals, a provision that fell into disuse within decades.

Jan Hus, the Bohemian preacher who had taken up Wycliffe's criticisms of clerical wealth and authority, travelled to Constance under a safe conduct from the emperor Sigismund to defend his teaching. He was arrested within weeks, held in poor conditions, tried, given the choice of recanting propositions he denied holding, and burned at the stake in July 1415. His ashes were thrown into the Rhine so that nothing should remain to be venerated. Jerome of Prague followed him to the fire the next year.

The council also condemned the writings of John Wycliffe, dead thirty years, and ordered his remains exhumed and burned, which was eventually carried out. Its treatment of the safe conduct was defended at the time on the ground that no promise made to a suspected heretic could bind against the church's duty, an argument that damaged the credibility of imperial safe conducts for a long time afterwards.

The consequence was war. Bohemia rose, the Hussite armies defeated repeated crusades sent against them, and the eventual settlement conceded the communion cup to the laity in that kingdom, the very practice at issue. Hus became and has remained a Czech national figure, honoured by the reformers of the sixteenth century as a forerunner, and the Catholic Church has since expressed regret for his death without reversing the judgment on his teaching.