The great medieval council: it used the word transubstantiation, and required every Catholic to confess and receive communion once a year.
- Where
- The Lateran Basilica, Rome — Rome, Italy
- Convoked by
- Pope Innocent III, who summoned it more than two years ahead, on 19 April 1213
- Pope
- Innocent III, at the height of the medieval papacy; he died within a year of the closing
- Sat
- Opened 11 November 1215; further sessions on 20 and 30 November
- Sessions
- Three sessions in the Lateran basilica — the largest and best-prepared council of the Middle Ages
- Bishops present
- 404 bishops, with a great number of abbots, canons and envoys of the secular powers. No Greeks came, except the Maronite patriarch and a legate of Alexandria
What it faced
Innocent III called this council to do everything at once: reform the clergy, answer the Cathars and Waldensians, recover the Holy Land, and repair what the Fourth Crusade had broken when it sacked Constantinople in 1204 instead of sailing for Egypt.
The doctrinal problem was the Cathar denial that matter can be holy. If the visible world is the work of an evil power, the Incarnation is impossible and the sacraments are absurd — the Eucharist above all. The council answered with the most precise statement the Church had yet made about what happens at the altar.
The pastoral problem was that most Catholics confessed rarely or never, and received communion perhaps once in a lifetime. Constitution 21 changed the ordinary practice of the Western Church more than any other medieval decree.
What it defined
- ✠That in the sacrament of the altar the bread and wine are changed in substance — transsubstantiatis — into the body and blood of Christ by God’s power. The first use of the word by a council.
- ✠That every Catholic who has reached the age of discretion must confess at least once a year and receive communion at least at Easter.
- ✠That the seal of confession is absolute: a priest who betrays it is deposed and confined to a monastery for life.
- ✠The condemnation of the Cathars and other heresies, and the legal machinery for prosecuting them.
- ✠That clergy may take no part in judicial ordeals or in sentences of blood.
- ✠Seventy constitutions in all, on marriage law, tithes, elections, benefices, relics and indulgences.
In its own words
“His body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread and wine having been changed in substance, by God’s power, into his body and blood, so that in order to achieve this mystery of unity we receive from God what he received from us.”
“All the faithful of either sex, after they have reached the age of discernment, should individually confess all their sins in a faithful manner to their own priest at least once a year… Let them reverently receive the sacrament of the eucharist at least at Easter.”
Its constitutions
Seventy in all. They are law rather than doctrine, and most have long since changed — but several shaped Europe for centuries.
- Const. 3Condemns heresy and requires secular rulers to act against it, on pain of excommunication and the loss of their vassals.
- Const. 18Forbids clergy to pronounce or carry out sentences of blood, or to take part in trials by ordeal — which effectively ended the ordeal in Europe.
- Const. 21Annual confession and Easter communion; and the seal of confession made absolute.
- Const. 51Requires banns to be published before a marriage, against clandestine unions.
- Const. 62Regulates relics and indulgences, forbidding the sale of relics and limiting what a bishop may grant.
- Const. 68Requires Jews and Saracens to be distinguishable by their dress — a canon the Church has since repudiated in the plainest terms.
- ✕It did not invent the Real Presence. The belief is attested in the earliest Christian writing outside the New Testament — Ignatius of Antioch around 107, Justin Martyr around 155. What the council supplied was a word for speaking of it without contradiction.
- ✕It did not make yearly confession a ceiling. Constitution 21 sets a floor, and presupposes that confession was already available and already frequent among the devout.
- ✕It did not establish the Inquisition. The papal inquisition is set up by Gregory IX in the 1230s, though the third constitution here supplied much of its legal groundwork.
What people think it did
The Church invented transubstantiation in 1215, so the Real Presence is a medieval novelty imposed on a Church that had read the Eucharist symbolically.
What happened: The word is medieval; the belief is not. Ignatius of Antioch, writing around 107 on his way to be killed, says of certain heretics that they ‘abstain from the Eucharist because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ’. Justin Martyr, around 155, says the food is ‘not common bread and common drink’. The council reached for the language of substance and accident to say precisely what had always been believed, against a heresy that denied matter could carry grace at all.
The badge required of Jews was an unremarkable medieval measure with no great consequence.
What happened: It was neither unremarkable nor without consequence. The constitution’s stated reason was to prevent inadvertent intermarriage; its effect was to mark out a people for segregation and violence over seven centuries. No honest account of this council can list transubstantiation and annual confession and then pass over constitution 68 in silence.
What followed
Constitution 21 shaped Catholic life for eight hundred years. The obligation of annual confession and Easter communion — the Easter duty — is still in the Code of Canon Law, and the fact that Catholics go to confession in any regular way at all begins here.
Constitution 18 killed the ordeal. Trial by hot iron and cold water had depended on a priest to bless it; without one it collapsed across Europe within a generation, and in England the jury took its place.
Constitution 68, requiring distinguishing dress for Jews and Muslims, is among the most consequentially cruel decisions any council took. It supplied the precedent that later civil authorities used for the badge, and in the twentieth century for worse. The Church repudiated the whole tradition of contempt at Vatican II in Nostra Aetate, and John Paul II asked pardon for it in the Jubilee of 2000. This page names it rather than passing over it.
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.