Council of Bourges

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Council of Bourges was a

Romanus Bonaventura
, it was attended by 112 archbishops and bishops, more than 500 abbots, many deans and archdeacons, and over 100 representatives of cathedral chapters.

Order of business

The council was called during the

Roman Catholic Church viewed as the most threateningly successful heresy Christianity had faced since Arianism in the fourth and fifth centuries. The first order of business was to adjudicate the claims to the County of Toulouse of Amaury de Montfort against the prominent Count Raymond VII
. Unsurprisingly, the Catholic Amaury was judged the rightful Count and, like his father, Raymond was excommunicated.

The assembled churchmen authorized a tax on their annual incomes, the "Albigensian tenth", to support the Crusade. Permanent reforms intended to fund the papacy in perpetuity, floundered.[2]

Outcome and legacy

Through skillful maneuvering on the part of the legate the tax was passed, and a public opportunity was taken advantage of, to humiliate the

Parliament; and soon the kings of England and France, following the precedent established by the lawyers and by cathedral chapters in provincial councils, began to express the Roman principle of due process in court, 'Quod omnes tangit' etc., as an integral part of the rationale of the representation of individual and corporate rights before the king and his court and council in assembly."[3]

Less than successful, however, was the attempt of

papal curia. A letter extending this request to England was unanimously rejected in May 1226, at a mixed council of laity and clergy convened at Canterbury jointly by the King and the Archbishop
.

Bishops also successfully defended their rights over abbeys within their jurisdiction from the papal claim that abbots were responsible directly to the pope.

The Council's modern historian, Richard Kay, asserts several lasting effects of the Council. Among the most prominent was the earliest expression of the political tenet that would come to be identified as "

Conciliar movement in the fifteenth century, has succeeded in the European secular sphere from the seventeenth century onwards. The papacy was left to fund itself with stop-gap measures, which included the sale of indulgences
, which would play a divisive role in the future.

Notes

  1. Simon de Brie
    , and in 1280.
  2. ^ Richard Kay, The Council of Bourges, 1225: A Documentary History, in series "Church, Faith and Culture in the Medieval West" (Aldershort, Hampshire/Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate) 2002.
  3. ^ Gaines Post, "Roman Law and Early Representation in Spain and Italy, 1150-1250" Speculum 18.2 (April 1943:211-232), p. 232, noting the precedent set at Bourges, 1225.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Council_of_Bourges&oldid=1165789815"