Suppressed the Knights Templar under pressure from the French crown, and settled the Franciscan quarrel over poverty.
- Where
- Vienne in the Dauphiné — Vienne, France
- Convoked by
- Pope Clement V, by the bull Regnans in caelis of 12 August 1308
- Pope
- Clement V, the first of the Avignon popes, and never free of the French crown
- Sat
- Opened 16 October 1311; closed 6 May 1312
- Sessions
- Three solemn sessions at Vienne in the Dauphiné, then imperial territory just across the Rhône from French Lyons
- Bishops present
- Twenty cardinals, four patriarchs, about a hundred archbishops and bishops, with abbots and priors. Only 231 churchmen had been invited at all
What it faced
On Friday 13 October 1307, on the orders of Philip IV of France, every Templar in the kingdom was arrested in a single dawn operation. Under torture they confessed to denying Christ, spitting on the cross and worshipping an idol. Philip, who owed the order a great deal of money and coveted a great deal more, demanded that the pope suppress it.
Clement V hesitated for four years. In 1308 his own commission at Poitiers heard Templars in the pope's presence, and in 1314 the parchment now known as the Chinon document records that Clement had privately absolved the leaders of the order in 1308 after they repented of their confessions. He nonetheless summoned this council to decide.
When the council met, the fathers did the thing history has forgotten: they refused. More than four-fifths of the cardinals and elected representatives held that the order must be allowed to defend itself and could not be condemned without offence to God. Philip came to Vienne in person in March 1312, with an army in the neighbourhood, and negotiated privately with the pope for a fortnight without the council being consulted.
What it defined
- ✠The suppression of the Order of the Temple — by administrative provision, not by judicial sentence, and expressly not as a verdict of guilt.
- ✠That the rational or intellectual soul is of itself and essentially the form of the human body, and that to deny it is heresy.
- ✠Condemnation of certain errors on poverty and the spiritual life attributed to the Beguines and Beghards, and a settlement of the Franciscan quarrel over the poverty of Christ.
- ✠That chairs of Hebrew, Arabic and Chaldean be founded in the great universities, for the sake of mission.
In its own words
“…we suppress, with the approval of the sacred council, the order of Templars… by an inviolable and perpetual decree — not by definitive sentence, but by apostolic provision or ordinance.”
“…we define that anyone who presumes henceforth to assert, defend or hold stubbornly that the rational or intellectual soul is not the form of the human body of itself and essentially, is to be considered a heretic.”
Its decrees and bulls
The council acted through papal bulls as much as through decrees, which is part of what makes its Templar act so unusual.
- Vox in excelsoSuppresses the Templars by provision rather than sentence, because the evidence did not support a condemnation but the scandal made continuation impossible.
- Ad providamTransfers Templar property to the Knights Hospitaller (2 May 1312), except in Castile, Aragon, Portugal and Majorca.
- Decree 1Defines the rational soul as the form of the body — the Church endorsing an Aristotelian account of the human person against a dualism that split soul from body.
- Decree on languagesChairs of Hebrew, Arabic and Chaldean at Rome, Paris, Oxford, Bologna and Salamanca.
- ✕It did not find the Templars guilty. This is the single most important fact about the council and the one universally forgotten. Vox in excelso states in terms that the suppression is 'not by definitive sentence' — because, as the bull concedes, the case could not be proved.
- ✕It did not burn Jacques de Molay. The last Grand Master was burned in Paris in March 1314, two years after the council closed, by the secular authority of the King of France after he retracted his confession.
- ✕It did not give the Templars' wealth to the French crown — the property went to the Hospitallers, though Philip extracted heavy 'expenses' from it first.
What people think it did
The Church condemned the Templars as heretics and destroyed them for their secret rites.
What happened: The Church did not condemn them. The bull of suppression says explicitly that it is not a sentence, and the council's own majority wanted the order given a hearing. The confessions were extracted under torture and retracted when torture stopped. The Chinon parchment shows Clement V privately absolving the order's leaders in 1308. The Templars were destroyed by a king who wanted their money, using a papacy too weak to stop him.
What followed
In 2001 Barbara Frale found in the Vatican Secret Archives a document that had been misfiled since 1628: the Chinon parchment, recording that in August 1308 Clement V had absolved Jacques de Molay and the other Templar leaders and readmitted them to the sacraments. The Vatican published a facsimile edition in 2007. Whatever else it shows, it shows that the pope who suppressed the order did not believe the charges.
The decree that the soul is the form of the body is the quiet one that mattered most. It is the reason Catholic teaching insists that a human being is not a spirit trapped in meat but a single living thing, body and soul — and it stands behind everything the Church says about the resurrection of the body, and about the dignity of the sick and the dying.
Vienne is also where the medieval papacy's independence visibly ended. A council that wanted to acquit was overruled by a king standing outside the door, and the popes stayed in Avignon for another sixty-five years.
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.