General Council of the Church

In Catholic Western Europe, an ecumenical council called by the pope for the purpose of debating and deciding major issues of doctrine, resolving major problems and conflicts, and eliminating heresies and other perceived threats to the established church. A series of important General Councils were held in the 15th and 16th centuries.

At the turn of the 15th century there were two pressing needs for a General Council: to resolve the Great Schism (the period of rival popes with seats in Rome and Avignon) and to deal with the new threat of the Hussite heresy. At the same time, the problems of the papacy raised questions about the institution itself: conciliarism, advocating the supremacy of General Councils, challenged the pope's authority.

There was a tension, then, between the Catholic Church's need to appoint a single pope through a General Council and the inevitable concern of the elected pope to avoid further Councils and their conciliarist threat. The Council of Constance (1414–18) both ended the Great Schism and also decreed that General Councils should be held at regular intervals. Popes Martin V and Eugenius IV, under pressure from secular rulers keen to avoid the papacy regaining too much power, reluctantly abided by this decree, but the Council of Basel (1431–49) increasingly became a showdown between papalists and conciliarists, to the point that a return to schism was threatened. The strength of the papacy, however, was that it was an established bureaucratic institution: only a General Council with firm international support could hope to challenge the traditional power structure. And Basel increasingly lacked such support. After Basel, successive popes avoided calling a General Council in the second half of the 15th century.

In the early 16th century there was an abortive attempt to call a General Council in defiance of Pope Julius II – the ‘schismatic’ Council of Pisa (1511). The Pope's response was to convene his own Lateran Council in 1512. However, the success of the Lutheran and evangelical movements in the 1520s made the calling of a General Council a matter of urgency, despite being an unattractive prospect both to reformers (perhaps mindful of what had happened to the Hussite leader John Huss at Constance) and popes (mindful of conciliarism and the emperor's power). Eventually a Council was called, the Council of Trent (1545–63); although it did little to heal the heretical schism within Western Christendom, it did help define and reorganize the Catholic Church.