Summa summae S. Thomae, Tomus III

[It is agreed by all that councils, especially general ones, are most useful to the Church, and Paul III declares this in the bull of the indiction of the Council of Trent, saying: « Calling to mind that our forebears, endowed with admirable wisdom and soundness, often in the gravest perils of the Christian commonwealth employed as the best and most opportune remedy ecumenical councils and general gatherings of bishops, we also have set our mind on holding a general council. » The controversy here, therefore, concerns only absolute necessity: 1° against the heretics who, that they might elude the condemnation imminent to them or pronounced against them by the Roman Pontiff, as happened in the cause of Jansenism, did not hesitate to appeal to a general council; 2° against those who, among Catholics, contended that general councils must be frequented of necessity, because the Pope alone, without the concurrence of bishops, cannot sufficiently provide for the good governance of the Church. Whence

I say 1°: General councils are not simply necessary.

It is proved. 1° That is not simply necessary to the Church which does not pertain essentially to its government. Yet general councils do not pertain essentially to the government of the Church. Therefore they are not simply necessary. — The major is evident. — Proof. of the minor: Christ conferred on Peter and his successors all power and authority necessary for governing the Church, when he said to Peter, John, XXI, 15 and 17: Feed my sheep. And Matt., XVI, 18 and 19: Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church... And to thee I will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven, etc. Yet by these and similar words Peter was constituted supreme rector of the Church, and there was conferred on him the fullness of power for governing the Church monarchically in the place and name of Christ. Therefore, since Peter could, and the Pope can, do whatever things are required for governing the Christian people, general councils do not pertain essentially to the government of the Church.

2° That is not simply necessary to the Church without which the greatest evils can be extinguished and have been extinguished. Yet the greatest evils can be extinguished and have been extinguished without general councils. Therefore general councils are not simply necessary. — Proof. of the minor: Before the Council of Nicaea, that is, for three hundred years and more, various hereses arose and schisms were born, hatched by Montanus and Novatian. Now these are the greatest evils with which the Church can be afflicted. Yet these evils were extinguished by the sole authority of the Roman Pontiffs and of bishops executing their decisions. Therefore. Whence Augustine, to the Pelagians complaining that they had been condemned by simple bishops « without the gathering of a synod, » answers, book IV contra duas epist. Pelag. ad Bonif., chap. 12, n. 34: « Was the gathering of a synod needed, that open ruin might be condemned? As if no heresy was ever condemned except by the gathering of a synod — whereas such are found very rarely indeed, for the condemnation of which this necessity existed; and far more, incomparably more numerous are those which, where they existed, merited to be disapproved and condemned there, and thence were able to become known as to be avoided through the other lands. But the pride of these men so exalts itself against God... that for their sake a synod of East and West must be gathered... Whereas rather, by vigilance and pastoral diligence, after competent and sufficient judgment made concerning them, wherever those wolves appear they are to be crushed, either that they may be healed and changed, or that they may be avoided for the salvation and integrity of others, the Shepherd of shepherds assisting, who seeks the lost sheep even among the little ones, etc. » Hence also the Faculty of Paris, the Jansenists appealing to a future council from the dogmatic constitutions of the Roman Pontiff, issued this declaration on February 9, 1663: « It is not absolutely necessary that a general council exist for uprooting whatever schisms and whatever heresies, e.g., the Pelagian and Jansenist, which are established to have been sufficiently extinguished without a general council, which is necessary only in certain cases. »

It is confirmed by historical facts. If seven general councils were celebrated for extinguishing seven heresies, more than one hundred heresies have been extinguished by the Apostolic See alone, particular councils cooperating; and if one schism was removed by the general Council of Constance, schisms above twenty-five were cut away without a general council. Therefore.

I say 2°: A general council is sometimes morally necessary.

Proof. A general council is morally necessary if, without such a council, it be morally impossible that Catholic truth be placed perfectly in safety and the unity of the Church be wholly repaired. Yet this can happen. Therefore.

Proof. of the minor from facts. 1° As regards Catholic doctrine, when the Arian pestilence had invaded nearly the whole Orient, it seemed that the gathering of the Council of Nicaea was the fitter means, because the more solemn, for extinguishing the heresy. So it was done; and with subsequent heresies it was so necessary to expel them, that Christian princes themselves importuned the Holy See for the gathering of a council, of which thing we have an illustrious example in the convocation and celebration of the Council of Trent. In our own age, when errors of every kind everywhere invaded the minds of many and cast into peril not only revealed truths but reason itself; when moreover it never seemed more necessary that the infallible magisterium of the Roman Pontiff be placed beyond every doubt, because the favorers both of gallicanism and of liberalism either denied it or made light of it: five hundred bishops gathered at Rome in the year 1867 « were filled with the highest joy, as Pius IX himself solemnly attested, when from his sacred mouth they understood that amid so many crises of the present time he was of this counsel, that he would summon, as the remedy in the gravest perils of the Christian cause, an ecumenical council — the greatest, as said his illustrious predecessor Paul III. » 2° As regards the unity of the Church, indeed all general councils labored for its repair when shaken by heresies; but no other medium seemed available for undertaking and bringing this work to a happy issue, when in the fifteenth century the Church was torn apart by a dire and long schism, than to summon a general council, that a certain Pope might be elected: which begun at Pisa was completed at Constance.

From this it follows that, however necessary a general council may seem in certain and transitory circumstances, as an extraordinary medium of providing for the good of the Church, this necessity can occur only rarely, and outside the case in which a certain Pope is not acknowledged by the whole Church, it pertains to the Roman Pontiff, as will soon appear, to judge and pronounce concerning it.

Some, however, especially among the favorers of gallicanism, having gone further, did not hesitate to assert that the Pope cannot sufficiently provide for the good of the Church, even ordinarily, both in publishing decrees of faith and in enacting disciplinary laws, unless all these things be determined in a general council and afterwards committed by the Pontiff to execution; as if he himself and he alone were not endowed with supreme doctrinal and legislative power and authority. Thence they concluded that the decree should be renewed and observed by which the Council of Constance, session XXXIX, concerning general councils, sanctioned that general councils « henceforth are to be celebrated perpetually from decade to decade, » which, they said, obtained the force of obliging law through the approval of Martin V, who, session XLIV, « desiring and willing to satisfy the decree of this general council, » indicted the next council in the city of Pavia, where, Martin having died, it was celebrated by Eugene IV. Only by this way, they affirmed, could the power of the Roman Pontiff be perfectly reconciled with the rights and divine authority of the bishops.¹

Among the many arguments by which this system can be refuted, let it suffice to propose the following.

1° As was said, a general council, by its nature, is an extraordinary medium of healing the gravest evils by which the Church could be shaken, and these evils can occur neither frequently nor at equally distant times. Therefore recourse must be had to a general council only extraordinarily. Therefore periodicity and decenniality accord not with the nature of a general council.

2° Those who contended that a general council must often be frequented asserted this because, in their opinion, 1° since supreme authority belongs not to the Pope alone but to the body of pastors, that is, collectively to the Pope and the bishops, so that no act pertaining to the government of the Church becomes absolute and definitive except from the concurrence of these two elements,² unless the Pope submit his decrees to the ratification of the bishops in council, he inflicts detriment on their authority; 2° because papal definitions, in the matter of faith and morals, would not be irreformable unless with the consent of the Church intervening, that is, of the bishops, as the Declaration of the Clergy of Gaul of the year 1682 maintains, and this consent would be rendered solemnly, more expediently and more certainly in a general council.

— To these I answer: 1° The power of the Supreme Pontiff is ordinary in the whole Church, and supreme, as has been proved above. Therefore his decrees are of themselves absolute and definitive. Therefore they do not need the ratification of the bishops. Therefore, when he exercises this supreme power, nowise does he harm the authority of the bishops who, from the institution of Christ, are truly the pastors of their churches, under dependence on the supreme Pastor of the whole Church. Therefore, far from the authority of the bishops being pressed down by the Pope, detracting is done from the authority of the Pope by this assertion. 2° This doctrine, which never was common in the Church since it was pierced through by the solemn definition of the Vatican Council, must be held formally heretical, as has been proved above.

3° As regards the Constantinopolitan decree on celebrating a general council each decade, it must be said, 1° that it could have seemed opportune to the council thus to decree, so that, if perhaps the schism which it was trying to extinguish should persevere, there would be ready the supreme medium of providing for the peril of the Church, and this disposition answered a transitory necessity. 2° When this decree was enacted, session XXXIX, the assembly of bishops was not a perfect council, because gathered outside the authority of the Pontiff, with a certain Pope not yet elected, it lacked its true and necessary head; and besides the election of the Pope, which it was not licit to defer, such a council had not the right of enacting laws pertaining to the ordinary administration of the Church. 3° Indeed Martin V, elected in session XI, determined in session XLIV that the next council was to be celebrated in the city of Pavia, « that he might satisfy the decree of this general council, » and thus it was prudent to act, lest a rupture between the new Pontiff and the council throw everything again into peril; truly he could not abdicate from his supreme power, by force of which the convocation of a general council pertains to the Pope alone, whenever and as often as it seems to him necessary and opportune. 4° In the XLVth and last session, the Pontiff being asked to confirm the acts of the council — by which petition the council acknowledged that nothing was absolute and definitive before that confirmation — answered with his own mouth that « he wished to hold and inviolably observe all and singular things decreed conciliarly by the council in the matter of faith, and not otherwise, nor in any other manner; » which he afterwards ordered to be repeated through the advocate of the council. Moreover, the decree on the periodicity and decenniality of the general council was not included in the matter of faith, which principally regarded the condemnation of the heresies of John Wycliffe, John Hus, and Jerome of Prague. Therefore that decree was not formally confirmed by the Pontiff. It must be added that even if this confirmation had intervened, the execution of such a law was to be left to the future judgment of the Pope, who, as was demonstrated in the preceding dissertation, is above the council, both while its celebration endures and after it is completed. Moreover, in fact the periodicity of councils was not afterwards observed, and it is incredible that the Popes neglected for four centuries and more a true law strictly binding them and necessary for the good governance of the Church.]