Digital Continent Digital Continent Easter 2017 | Page 31

The Fourth Lateran Council, 1215
If Christianity…has not been thrown aside as a worthless Creed into some
isolated corner of the world; if it has not, like the sects of India, been reduced to a
mere theory; if its European vitality has outlived the voluptuous effeminacy of the
East, it is due to the watchful severity of the Roman pontiffs, to their unceasing
care to maintain the principle of authority in the Church. 79
Pope Innocent III worked tirelessly for the good of God’s Church. While the Albigensian
crusade raged on in the south of France, Innocent III called the “spiritual and temporal rulers of
the Catholic world” to gather together for an ecumenical council to take place at the Lateran
Basilica in Rome. Ecumenical councils of the Catholic Church are called by the Pope, the Vicar
of Christ, generally when there is a need to define a teaching or article of the faith; often in
response to what is taking place in the secular world or within the Church. Those in attendance
affirm orthodox teachings in light of heterodoxy being perpetuated in the world. 80 This, the
twelfth ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church with “three patriarchs, four hundred
and twelve bishops, more than eight hundred abbots and priors…[and] the ambassadors of the
majority of the Christian sovereigns” in attendance held three separate sessions, November 11,
20 and 30 in 1215 and is known as the Fourth Council of the Lateran. 81
79
Clement Rabb, O.F.M., The Twenty Ecumenical Councils of the Catholic Church, (MD: The Newman Press, 1959),
88.
80
Joseph Clayton, Pope Innocent III and His Times, (WI: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1941),171.
81
M.H. Vicaire, Saint Dominic and His Times, Trans. by Kathleen Pond, (WI: Alt Publishing Company, 1964), 191.