The Fourth Lateran Council
The Lateran Basilica, Rome · November 1215 · convened by Innocent III · the high-water mark of the medieval papacy.
No medieval council was larger or did more. More than four hundred bishops and some eight hundred abbots and priors gathered under Innocent III, the most powerful pope of the Middle Ages, and in three sessions approved seventy-one constitutions that shaped Western church life until the Reformation.
The first constitution, a confession of faith directed against the Cathars, used the word transubstantiation in a conciliar decree for the first time: the bread and wine are changed in substance into the body and blood of Christ. The twenty-first, Omnis utriusque sexus, bound every Christian of either sex, once of age, to confess all his sins to his own priest at least once a year and to receive communion at Easter.
Principal Acts
- Defined the doctrine of transubstantiation.
- Required annual confession to a priest and Easter communion of all the faithful.
- Set procedures for bishops to search out and punish heretics, the groundwork of the Inquisition.
- Condemned the Cathars, and forbade preaching without church authority, a measure aimed at the Waldensians.
- Forbade the founding of new religious orders.
- Recognized Frederick II as emperor-elect against Otto IV.
- Required Jews and Muslims to wear distinctive dress.
- Proclaimed the Fifth Crusade.
Why It Matters
Two of the Reformers’ great battles were fought over ground fixed here. The definition of transubstantiation made the mass a matter of dogma, and men and women were burned in the sixteenth century for denying it. And the obligation of annual confession placed every conscience under the sacrament of penance, the very burden Luther found intolerable in the monastery until he learned that the righteousness of God is a gift received by faith.
A caution on the common summaries. Lists of this council’s acts often say it established the Inquisition, confirmed the Franciscans, and denounced Magna Carta. Each needs qualifying. The council prescribed episcopal inquiry into heresy; the papal Inquisition proper was organized under Gregory IX from the 1230s. Innocent III had approved Francis’s way of life orally around 1209, and the council’s ban on new orders left that approval standing; the Franciscan Rule was formally confirmed in 1223. Magna Carta was annulled by Innocent’s bull of August 24, 1215, months before the council met.
Numbering. Rome reckons this the twelfth ecumenical council. Protestants do not count it ecumenical.
The Medieval Councils
- 1123Lateran I
- 1139Lateran II
- 1179Lateran III
- 1215Lateran IV
- 1245Lyons I
- 1274Lyons II
- 1311Vienne
- 1409Pisa
- 1414Constance
- 1431Basel–Ferrara–Florence
- 1512Lateran V
- 1545Trent
Related on This Site
Sources
- Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. (London: Sheed & Ward; Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), vol. 1. Latin and English text of the constitutions.
- Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 5, The Middle Ages, A.D. 1049–1294 (CCEL).
