Papal Resignations!

Conclave that elected

Martin V 1417 at the

Council of Constance

  Well, I guess we have to interrupt our series on the origins of the Church of England to look at this currently developing topic of Papal Resignations.  Let me tell you, I was caught by surprise.  It has  been 598 years since a pope has resigned and while Benedict seems to love rooting through Vatican closets for old things to wear I had never thought he would go so far back to find such an interesting precedent for some drama.  So what I want to do in this blog and the next is talk about earlier papal resignations and then maybe in the following entry or two, tell you what I think is going on that motivated Benedict to take this step which is, like God himself, fascinans et tremendum. (That is Latin for fascinating and awesome)  
The last pope to resign office was Gregory XII in 1415 but that resignation was under a very different set of circumstances than Pope Benedict’s announcement yesterday.  Pope Gregory had promised the Cardinals of the 1406 conclave that elected him that he would resign, although once in power, he reconsidered and had to be somewhat forced to follow through.   You see, it was at the time of the great schism when you had a man in Avignon claiming to be the Pope and a man at Rome claiming to be the Pope.  Christendom was divided in allegiance.  Gregory was elected to fill the vacancy left by the death of Innocent VII, the Roman claimant.  The Cardinals who elected him—only fifteen in the conclave—made him promise that should the Avignon claimant, Benedict XIII, be persuaded to resign, Gregory too would resign.  Then a single candidate could be elected to replace the two of them, healing the schism.  It was a safe bet for Gregory that Benedict would have no intention of resigning and Gregory seems, despite the promise, to have had no intention either. 
Gregory and Benedict got into this sort of pas de deux of each trying to out maneuver each other into resigning and leaving the field to the survivor.  Each claimant had his own set of cardinals whom he had named,  but a majority of the cardinals belonging to each were disgusted at both popes by their lack of resolve to end the crisis and began to negotiate with one another behind the popes’ backs as to how to resolve the issue and bring the Church back to unity.  The Cardinals called a Council for Pisa at which they intended to depose both popes and elect a new one.  And in 1409 the Council of Pisa in fact declared both pope’s deposed and elected Alexander V.  The only problem was that neither Gregory nor Benedict accepted the Council’s verdict and so now you had three popes!!!
Sigismund, the King of Hungry and of Germany and soon to be Holy Roman Emperor pressed for another Council to resolve this dilemma.  Alexander V meanwhile had died and his successor, John XXIII—at Sigismund’s instance—called a Council for Constance in Switzerland.  It met in November 1414.   29 Cardinals, 183 bishops and archbishops, 134 abbots, and 100 theologians met.  And yes, the theologians were not simply advisors but full participants in the Council.  Sigismund himself presided over the Council.
At this point, Gregory’s conscience took over and he agreed to a plan to preserve the Church.  He appointed two legates to represent him at the Council, Carlo Malatesta—a powerful layman and military leader—and Giovanni Dominici, the Dominican Cardinal-Archbishop of Ragusa.  The legates, acting in the name of Pope Gregory, officially recognized the Council and then offered Gregory’s resignation.  The Council in turn recognized Gregory as the legitimate claimant to the papacy, accepted his resignation, deposed the other two claimants (including John XXIII who had convoked the Council) and elected Odonne Colonna (remembered Odie O. Cologne from King Leonardo and His Short Subjects?  No, probably not.  I know that I had though he was part of Rocky and Bullwinkle until I looked it up on that Sedes Sapientiae, Wikipedia. But I digress)  Colonna took the regnal name Martin V.    However—and very curiously—the Council did not elect Martin until after the death of the Gregory, two years after his resignation.   This means that there were not two popes, or a pope and a retired pope, at the same time, but rather the Apostolic See was left vacant for those two years with the sitting Council running the Church.  This too is important to note as today Councils are suspended during a papal interregnum with the claim that a Council gets its authority from the Pope and when there is no pope, a Council lacks authority.  That was not the case with Constance.  Constance broke popes (Gregory,  Benedict, and John XXIII) and Constance made popes—Martin V.  It was the height of Conciliar power. Moreover, just to demonstrate the power of the Council, the conclave that elected Martin consisted not only of Cardinals but of delegates from the Council.  On this precedent, centuries later when Pope John XXIII died between the first and second sessions of the Second Vatican Council, it was suggested that the Council Fathers, or a delegation of them, might participate in the papal election but that was not done.  In fact, Paul VI—after his election—had to re-convoke the Council as its authority was deemed to have lapsed with the death of John XXIII.  Papal power had vastly expanded in the centuries between Constance and Vatican II. 

Roots of the Reformation V: Ecumenical Councils and Papal Monarchy

What happens when no one is sure who the Pope is?  What happens if there are two fellows—or even three—parading around in tiaras and extending the foot to be kissed—who is the real pope?  How can you tell?  How do you know?  What happens when you have One Pope in Delia, Kansas and another in Springdale, Washington?  How can you tell who the real pope is? O wait, the Pope in Springdale died.  OK, so we have a Pope in Delia Kansas, and one in Hertfordshire.  (That’s in England.)  Oh—and then there seems to be two more in Brussels.  And apparently thee is one each in Lucerne and Angoulême.  What’s a Catholic to do?  OK, we will leave aside those who have arranged their own conclaves in the back room of a store or whom Jesus personally ordained, consecrated, and crowned in a mystical vision and focus on just three popes:  one in Rome; one in Avignon; and one in Pisa.  That is the situation in which the Church found itself in the fifteenth century, specifically in 1414 when a (Ecumenical) Council opened in Konstanz, Switzerland.  The King of Hungary and Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund had summoned the bishops to end a schism which saw three men—all with somewhat sound claims (certainly sounder than the formerly mentioned visionaries and psychotics) to be the legitimate heir of Peter the Apostle.

You have a Roman claimant, Gregory XII, who traced his lineage back through Urban VI, who was elected pope upon the death of Gregory XI in 1378.  Gregory was the pope who moved the papacy back to Rome at the end of the Avignon papacy.  He was duly elected by the Cardinals—all the Cardinals, French and Italian—and his coronation was carried out with great detail so there would be no doubt of his legitimacy.   Sound like the Pope, doesn’t he?

Problem—five months  later the French Cardinals met at Fondi—a town between Rome and Naples—and elected one of their own, Robert of Geneva Pope, claiming that the election of Urban was invalid because they had been coerced by the Roman mob into choosing an Italian pope.  The charge was true and they had a point.  Of course, the fact that the King of France put the French Cardinals up to this colors the story a bit too.  But if the Cardinals were coerced by fear and the election were not to be a free election, would it be valid?  This is not an abstract question.  There are some fringe groups in the Church that claim that the 1958 and 1963 conclaves were prevented under threats from electing the late Cardinal Giuseppe Siri  (or that Siri was elected and prevented from taking the papal office by outside threats). 

How do you solve the problem of who is pope when you have two of them?  Who has the authority to decide? To break the stalemate?  The theology faculties of various universities including Paris (at the time, the leading theology faculty of Europe), leading theologians of the day (including Jean de Charlier de Gerson and Conrad of Gelnhausen), the town councils of cities across Europe, crowned heads, agreed—it would take an Ecumenical Council to cut the Gordian knot.  A delegation of Avignon-obedience cardinals met with a delegation of Roman-obedience cardinals and agreed upon a Council.  Their respective popes weren’t happy and each called his own rival Council: The Avignon Benedict XIII for Perpignan and the Roman Gregory XII for Aquilea.  Almost no one went to Aquilea or Perpignan, but 22 cardinals, 80 bishops, proxies for another hundred bishops, 87 Abbots, 41 priors or general superiors of religious orders, and 300 doctors of theology or doctors of canon law showed up in Pisa where they proceeded to declare both Gregory and Benedict deposed and elected Alexander V as pope.  The story is a little more complicated, but we will save it for another day.  Neither Gregory nor Benedict would abdicate, so now there were three popes.   

It ended up with Sigismund calling another Council—this one for Konstanz—and the results were somewhat similar except that this time the  Roman claimant, Gregory, sent proxies who convoked the council in his name and then submitted—again in his name—his abdication.  It was a clever, and I suspect sincere, move for it preserved the authority (and thus the legitimacy) of the Roman line even though it lost the papacy for Gregory himself.  In other words, by not refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Council but imposing his “convocation” of it over the Emperor’s original summons, it forced the Council into acknowledging the authority of the Pope—and in this case, the Roman Pope—to call a Council.  It thus disposed the Council to recognize the legitimacy of the Roman claim as neither the Avignon nor Pisan pope had given their authority to holding the assembly.  By abdicating Gregory did not allow the Council to depose a pope; and by abdicating while his rivals would not, he forced the Council to depose them which, again, asserted the legitimacy of the Roman line. 

It sounds like it all wrapped up neatly.  Unfortunately that is not quite true.  They always say that the winners write the history books, but they are wrong.  Whoever writes the history book is the winner.  The war is not won on the field, but in the telling of the story.  The Roman popes told the story pretty much as I have.  The pope convoked the Council.  The pope abdicated.  A new pope was elected.  But many of the Council participants told the story differently.  They had gathered in Council on the initiative of the Emperor at the request of the Church (not the pope, but the bishops, the theologians, the universities, the towns, and others who had petitioned the Emperor for a Council), and in Council they accepted the abdication of the Roman claimant and deposed the two refusniks (to use a term from the late twentieth century), and they elected a new pope.  Note—the cardinals did not elect the pope—the council did.  The conclave consisted of the cardinals present and thirty representatives of the Council. 

Konstanz ended and everybody went home but some went home with the opinion that a Council could depose and/or elect a pope.  In this case, the pope was not the highest authority in the Church.  Others went home with the idea that it takes a pope to convoke a Council and a pope can resign but only anti-popes, that is false claimants, can be deposed.   This argument would go on for a long time—and would cause confusion and division at the time of Luther and the Protestant Reformations.