Ended the Anacletan schism and made major orders a diriment impediment to marriage — clerical celibacy as Western law.
- Where
- The Lateran Basilica, Rome — Rome, Italy
- Convoked by
- Pope Innocent II, after the death of the antipope Anacletus II
- Pope
- Innocent II
- Sat
- Opened 2 April 1139; closed before 17 April
- Sessions
- Three sessions in the Lateran basilica
- Bishops present
- About 500 fathers, including the Latin patriarch of Antioch
What it faced
In 1130 the cardinals split and elected two popes on the same day. Innocent II held France, England, Germany and — decisively — Bernard of Clairvaux, whose word carried further in Europe than most crowns. Anacletus II held Rome itself and the Normans of Sicily. The schism lasted eight years and ended not by argument but by Anacletus’s death in 1138.
The council met to clear the wreckage: annul the antipope’s acts, restore order, and resume the reform the schism had interrupted. Its most consequential act looks almost incidental — a canon on clerical marriage that changed Western law permanently.
What it defined
- ✠That the ordinations and acts of the antipope Anacletus II are void.
- ✠That men in major orders who attempt marriage do not contract a marriage at all — holy orders became a diriment impediment, not merely a prohibition.
- ✠That usury is condemned and unrepentant usurers cut off from the Church.
- ✠That tournaments are forbidden, and those who die in them denied Christian burial.
- ✠That the crossbow and the bow may not be used against Christians.
In its own words
“…we do not deem there to be a marriage which, it is agreed, has been contracted against ecclesiastical law.”
“We prohibit under anathema that murderous art of crossbowmen and archers, which is hateful to God, to be employed against Christians and Catholics from now on.”
Its canons
The disciplinary rules it made — law, not doctrine, and most of them long since changed.
- Canon 6Subdeacons and those in higher orders who take wives or concubines lose office and benefice.
- Canon 7Such unions are declared not to be marriages — the origin of holy orders as a diriment impediment in Latin law.
- Canon 10Lay possession of tithes is sacrilege.
- Canon 12The Truce of God: no fighting from Wednesday sunset to Monday sunrise, nor in Advent, Lent or Eastertide.
- Canon 13Condemns ‘the ferocious greed of usurers’, who are cut off and denied Christian burial if unrepentant.
- Canon 14Tournaments forbidden; those killed in them denied Church burial, though not the last rites.
- Canon 29Forbids the crossbow and the bow against Christians — one of the earliest attempts to outlaw a weapon.
- ✕It did not declare clerical marriage sinful in itself, nor dissolve the marriages of Eastern clergy. The canon is a disciplinary rule of the Latin Church about who may validly marry. The Eastern Catholic churches have always ordained married men and still do.
- ✕It did not abolish the crossbow. Canon 29 was ignored almost at once, and Richard the Lionheart, who used crossbowmen freely, died of a crossbow bolt sixty years later.
- ✕It did not settle usury, which the Church would go on refining for six more centuries — and which she still condemns, under the name of predatory lending.
What people think it did
The Church banned the crossbow because it let a peasant kill a knight — so it was protecting the aristocracy, not the innocent.
What happened: The canon forbids the weapon ‘against Christians and Catholics’ and says nothing about rank. It sits among canons protecting peasants, merchants and pilgrims from violence, and beside the Truce of God — a body of law aimed at restraining knightly warfare, not at shielding knights from its consequences.
What followed
Canon 7 is why a Latin-rite priest who attempts marriage today is not merely acting unlawfully but is not married. The rule has stood nearly nine hundred years. It is a discipline and not a dogma, which is exactly why the Church can dispense from it — for former Anglican and Lutheran clergy, and for the whole Eastern Catholic tradition.
The Truce of God and the ban on tournaments belong to a long medieval effort to set limits on how Christians make war on one another. They largely failed, and they are the ancestors of the laws of armed conflict.
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.