The first council held in the West: it ratified the Concordat of Worms and closed the investiture struggle between emperor and pope.
- Where
- The Lateran Basilica, Rome — Rome, Italy
- Convoked by
- Pope Callistus II, by letters sent on 25 June 1122
- Pope
- Callistus II, presiding in person — the first ecumenical council held under a pope in his own city
- Sat
- Opened 18 March 1123; closed before 6 April
- Sessions
- Held in the Lateran basilica, the pope’s own cathedral as bishop of Rome
- Bishops present
- At least 300 bishops, abbots and religious, all Western; no Eastern delegates are known to have come
What it faced
For fifty years the papacy and the empire had fought over a question that sounds procedural and was not: who hands a new bishop his ring and staff? If the emperor does, bishops are imperial officials who happen to say Mass, and the Church is a department of state. If the Church does, a bishop’s authority comes from Christ through the Church, and the emperor gets a vassal but not a priest.
Gregory VII had made it a war. Henry IV stood in the snow at Canossa in 1077 and later drove Gregory into the exile where he died, saying he had loved justice and hated iniquity and therefore died in exile. Three more decades followed.
The Concordat of Worms of September 1122 split the difference. The emperor renounced investiture with ring and staff and conceded free canonical election; the Church conceded that German elections could take place in his presence and that he could invest the new bishop with his lands by the touch of a sceptre. This council met to ratify it.
What it defined
- ✠Confirmation of the Concordat of Worms, closing the investiture struggle.
- ✠That ordination or promotion obtained for money is void.
- ✠That clerics in major orders may not live with women, and that their attempted marriages are forbidden.
- ✠That lay persons have no power to dispose of the business of the Church.
- ✠A crusade indulgence for those who take the cross for Jerusalem or for Spain.
In its own words
“To those who set out for Jerusalem and offer effective help towards the defence of the christian people… we grant the remission of their sins.”
Its canons
The disciplinary rules it made — law, not doctrine, and most of them long since changed.
- Canon 1No ordination or promotion for money; those so ordained lose what they bought.
- Canon 3Only the canonically elected may be consecrated bishop.
- Canon 7Priests, deacons and subdeacons may not live with women other than close kin.
- Canon 8Lay persons have no power over ecclesiastical business; it belongs to the bishop.
- Canon 10Remission of sins for crusaders, with papal protection of their families and goods while away.
- Canon 14Pilgrims and merchants are protected from robbery and from illegal tolls.
- Canon 21Clerics in major orders and monks are forbidden to marry or to keep concubines.
- ✕It did not invent clerical celibacy. Continence for clergy in major orders was already old Western law; these canons enforce a rule widely ignored. The decisive change — that such a marriage is not merely unlawful but invalid — comes at the next council, in 1139.
- ✕It did not defeat the empire. The Concordat was a compromise and both sides claimed it as a victory.
- ✕It was not a council of the whole Church in fact, since the East was absent. It is the ninth in the Western list.
What people think it did
Lateran I imposed celibacy on a clergy that had always been free to marry, and broke up existing families.
What happened: The obligation of continence for bishops, priests and deacons in the West is attested from the fourth century; the Council of Elvira, around 305, already legislates it. What the twelfth-century councils did was enforce a rule long on the books and widely ignored, in a Church that had watched benefices turn into family property. Whether that was wise is a fair argument. That it was new is not accurate.
What followed
The investiture settlement held, and with it the principle that the Church appoints her own officers. That principle is the reason there is such a thing as an independent Church in Europe at all, and the argument recurs in every modern concordat and in the fight over episcopal appointments in China today.
Four more councils would meet in this basilica across the next four centuries. The Lateran is, by a wide margin, the most-used conciliar hall in Christian history.
Follow it further
Sources
Every date, figure and quotation on this page was checked against the conciliar text or a published translation before it was written, and independently re-checked by three separate passes over dates, quotations and theology. Where the sources disagree — attendance figures above all — the page gives the range rather than choosing.