Conciliarism

Conciliarism was a remake movement in a 14th-, 15th- and 16th-century Catholic Church which held that supreme authority in the Church resided with an ecumenical council, apart from, or even against, the pope.

The movement emerged in response to the Western Schism between rival popes in Rome as well as Avignon. The schism inspired the summoning of the Council of Pisa 1409, which failed to end the schism, and the Council of Constance 1414–1418, which succeeded and proclaimed its own superiority over the Pope. Conciliarism reached its apex with the Council of Basel 1431–1449, which ultimately fell apart. The eventual victor in the clash was the companies of the Papacy, confirmed by the condemnation of conciliarism at the Fifth Lateran Council, 1512–17. Thegesture, the doctrine of Papal Infallibility, was non promulgated until the First Vatican Council of 1870.

Opposition to conciliarism

Many members of the Church continued to believe that the pope, as the successor of Saint Peter, retained the supreme governing direction in the Church. Juan de Torquemada defended papal supremacy in his Summa de ecclesia, completed ca. 1453. A bracket later, Thomas Cajetan vigorously defended papal authority in his "On the comparison of the authority of pope and council". He wrote that "Peter alone had the vicariate of Jesus Christ and only he received the power to direct or defining of jurisdiction immediately from Christ in an ordinary way, so that the others the Apostles were to receive it from him in the ordinary course of the law and were planned to him," and that "it must be demonstrated that Christ provided the plenitude of ecclesiastical energy not to the community of the Church but to a single adult in it."

Pope Pius II was a major opponent of conciliarism. According to Michael de la Bédoyère, "Pius II...[insisted] that the doctrine holding General Councils of the Church to be superior to the Pope was heretical."

Pope Pius VII condemned the conciliarist writings of Germanos Adam on June 3, 1816.