Third Lateran Council

Third Lateran Council

Peter Waldo at the Third Lateran Council Peter Waldo at the Third Lateran Council
Convoked by	Pope Alexander III
Sessions	5, 14, and 19 March 1179
Location	Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran, Rome
Attendance	About 300 bishops, with abbots and other prelates
Principal acts	Twenty-seven disciplinary canons
Catholic status	Ecumenical council; principally disciplinary acts

Third Lateran Council was the eleventh ecumenical council in Catholic enumeration. Pope Alexander III presided in Rome in March 1179 after the long schism supported by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa; the council secured papal elections against renewed division and enacted twenty-seven canons on episcopal government, clerical formation, schools, benefices, justice, peace, and grave disorders in the life of the medieval Church.

Disciplinary status: Church discipline

Historical setting

Alexander III's pontificate had been shadowed from its beginning by the disputed election of 1159. A majority of the cardinals chose Cardinal Rolando Bandinelli, who became Alexander, while a smaller imperial party elected Cardinal Octavian, Victor IV. Frederick Barbarossa supported Victor and, after Victor's death, other antipopes in succession. The dispute was not an abstract quarrel about procedure: rival obediences divided dioceses, generated competing ordinations and appointments, and tied the Church's communion to the wider struggle over imperial influence in Italy.

Alexander spent years outside Rome and relied on bishops, religious houses, communes, and rulers who remained in communion with him. Frederick's fortunes changed after the Lombard League defeated him at Legnano in 1176. The Peace of Venice in 1177 restored peace between pope and emperor, recognized Alexander, and ended the effective imperial sponsorship of the schism. The settlement made a general council possible, but it also revealed how badly election law and ecclesiastical discipline needed repair after nearly two decades of rival claims.

The council must therefore be read as an act of restoration. It did not define a new article of the Creed. It gathered the Latin episcopate under the recognized Roman Pontiff, regularized consequences of the schism, strengthened institutions by which the Church chose pastors and educated clergy, and addressed abuses made acute by wealth, violence, and fragmented political authority. Its ecumenical standing in Catholic reception does not turn every practical penalty into immutable doctrine.

Convocation, representation, and proceedings

Alexander announced the council in 1178, and about three hundred bishops assembled at the Lateran the following March, together with abbots and other ecclesiastical superiors. The surviving chronology identifies three sessions on 5, 14, and 19 March. Participants came from the Latin West and from eastern Christian territories linked to the crusader states. Medieval attendance lists are incomplete, so a precise modern roll cannot be reconstructed from a single source, but the gathering was broad enough to act for the Catholic episcopate of its day.

The twenty-seven canons survive in more than one textual tradition. Their order and wording need critical comparison rather than dependence on a late printed collection alone. The council's work was promulgated under Alexander's authority and rapidly entered canonical collections. That reception explains its durable institutional influence, especially on papal elections and schools, while also requiring readers to distinguish the original canon, later interpretation, and present law.

Election of the Roman Pontiff

Canon 1 required a candidate for the papacy to receive two-thirds of the votes of the cardinals. If a minority presumed to set up another claimant without that majority, the claimant and his principal adherents incurred severe penalties. The rule directly answered the election of 1159, when custom had not supplied a sufficiently clear threshold for resolving a divided college. By demanding a supermajority, the council sought a choice broad enough to resist faction and to prevent an emperor or Roman family from turning a narrow split into a lasting schism.

Lateran III did not suddenly invent the cardinalate or give cardinals an electoral role they had never possessed. The decree In nomine Domini of 1059 had already assigned a decisive part to cardinal bishops and then to the other cardinals. The achievement of 1179 was to specify the two-thirds threshold for the college in response to an identified failure. Subsequent conclave law retained the supermajority principle while changing many details of eligibility, seclusion, ballots, and the treatment of deadlock.

The current law of papal election is not simply canon 1 copied unchanged. Modern apostolic constitutions regulate the conclave, and the reigning pope possesses authority over that discipline. The historical canon nevertheless marks a decisive stage: the Church responded to scandal not by declaring rival claimants equally valid, but by giving the competent electors a juridical standard ordered toward a single visible successor of Peter. Its authority was disciplinary, real, and reformable.

From electoral threshold to conclave discipline

The two-thirds threshold and the conclave are related but not identical institutions. Lateran III fixed the majority needed for election; Lyon II later prescribed enclosure to prevent delay and external pressure. Modern law combines both principles and regulates secrecy, communications, scrutiny, acceptance, and announcement. Keeping the stages separate avoids crediting the 1179 council with procedures it never enacted while still recognizing that its supermajority rule became the durable mathematical center of papal elections.

Bishops, ordination, and ecclesiastical office

Several canons sought to keep sacred office from becoming a possession detached from pastoral responsibility. Canon 3 set minimum ages and required legitimate birth and suitable character for bishops and other major offices according to the law then in force. Canon 8 directed cathedral chapters to elect a bishop during a vacancy and protected the administration of church property. Canons 13 through 17 restricted accumulation of benefices, plurality of incompatible offices, illicit patronage, and delay in filling churches.

These enactments were neither a complete theology of Holy Orders nor a claim that every medieval qualification came from divine law. They applied enduring principles—fitness for office, freedom of ecclesiastical provision, residence, accountability, and care of souls—through twelfth-century institutions. Current canon law expresses those principles differently. Minimum ages, procedures for episcopal appointment, impediments, and the rights of chapters can change while the sacramental nature of episcopal ordination and the Church's duty to appoint worthy pastors remain.

Canon 5 protected a cleric whom a bishop ordained without assigning adequate support. Because ordination created lasting responsibilities, the ordaining bishop was to maintain him until a suitable ecclesiastical provision was found. The measure attacked the production of unattached clerics who might survive by trading spiritual services. It joined sacramental seriousness to economic realism: a man should not be admitted to orders casually and then left without the material conditions required for stable ministry.

Canon 4 limited the size and cost of episcopal visitation retinues. A pastoral visit meant to correct abuses could itself burden a poor parish if an archbishop, bishop, archdeacon, or dean arrived with an extravagant household. The canon's numerical limits belong to its period, but its governing principle remains recognizable: ecclesiastical authority exists for service and may not finance display by imposing unreasonable costs on communities it visits.

Clergy, sacraments, and common life

The council renewed clerical continence and penalized clergy who publicly maintained sexual relationships. It also opposed luxury and other conduct incompatible with office. Medieval enforcement could be uneven and particular penalties later changed, yet the council's concern was not contempt for marriage. Latin clerics freely assumed a form of celibate life ordered to undivided service, and public violation harmed the faithful, dependents, inheritance arrangements, and the credibility of sacramental ministry.

Canon 7 forbade demanding money for burial, marriage, and other sacraments or ecclesiastical rites. Customary offerings could support the clergy, but spiritual goods were not commodities. The rule belongs to the Church's sustained opposition to simony and to trafficking in grace. Present law likewise distinguishes voluntary offerings and lawfully established fees from a price placed on a sacrament, and pastors may not deprive the poor of spiritual assistance because they cannot pay.

Canons governing monks and canons regular required common life, observance, and restraint in private property. Others barred clergy from acting as advocates in secular litigation or accepting offices that drew them away from ministry. These provisions do not imply that a cleric may never possess civil rights or that the Church has one immutable economic form. They targeted divided allegiance and the use of ordination as a route into wealth, household independence, or political brokerage.

Cathedral schools and preaching

Canon 18 ordered every cathedral church to provide a competent master who would teach clerics and poor students without charge, supported by a benefice sufficient for his livelihood. The decree did not create learning in the Church from nothing; monastic, cathedral, and urban schools already flourished. It made access to instruction an episcopal responsibility and treated the education of poor candidates as a common ecclesial good rather than a privilege reserved to wealthy families.

The canon became an important antecedent of the schools and universities that expanded in the following century. Lateran IV would renew and extend the obligation. Its purpose was pastoral as well as intellectual: clergy needed grammar, Scripture, chant, canon law, and the ability to preach and administer sacraments intelligently. Catholic confidence in faith and reason is not a modern concession to secular culture; the council's school law shows the institutional Church investing in disciplined study as a condition of responsible ministry.

The council did not condemn the Waldensians by name or issue a general judgment against every lay desire to preach. Contemporary accounts connect representatives of the Poor of Lyon with the period, but canon 27 names Cathars and related groups, not Waldensians. The distinction matters. Unauthorized preaching, disputed translations, voluntary poverty, and doctrinal error were separable questions, and later conflicts should not be retroactively placed into a canon whose actual wording must govern the claim.

Peace, property, and economic justice

Canons 19 through 25 addressed the Church's life within a violent economy. The council resisted arbitrary taxation of churches, renewed the Truce of God, condemned tournaments that predictably produced death, protected merchants, pilgrims, farmers, animals, and agricultural labor from attack, and penalized Christians who armed enemies or aided piracy. It also condemned usury, understood in the canonical and economic categories of the time, and denied notorious usurers Christian burial unless they repented.

The protections for travelers and agricultural workers were more than clerical privilege. They attempted to carve out zones of peace in a society where private warfare could destroy crops, block roads, and make ordinary livelihood impossible. The efficacy of such canons depended on rulers and local enforcement, but their moral direction is plain: war and feud do not suspend justice toward noncombatants, and ecclesiastical censures were used to defend persons who possessed little military power.

Usury legislation also requires historical precision. Medieval law did not operate with the later monetary economy, inflation, investment markets, and distinctions between a loan for consumption and a partnership bearing commercial risk. The enduring moral judgment rejects exploitation and unjust gain from another's necessity; its application cannot be reduced either to the claim that every interest charge is intrinsically sinful or to the opposite claim that any rate freely contracted is just.

Pastoral provision for leper communities

Canon 23 permitted communities of persons with leprosy who could not share an ordinary parish church or cemetery to have their own church, priest, and burial ground, without using the provision to strip the mother church of legitimate rights. The arrangement still reflects medieval segregation and fear of disease, but it also recognized that exclusion from ordinary society could not mean exclusion from the sacraments, worship, or Christian burial. Pastoral care had to reach a stigmatized community in a stable institutional form.

Coercion and superseded medieval law

Canon 26 imposed discriminatory restrictions in relations among Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and canon 27 condemned Cathars, Patarenes, Publicani, and violent mercenary bands. It promised spiritual privileges to those who took up arms against them and authorized coercive measures characteristic of medieval church-state society. These provisions must be reported plainly. They were not harmless metaphors, and the human consequences of exclusion, confiscation, and religious violence cannot be hidden by describing every conciliar act as if it were dogma.

The Catholic Church does not receive those civil disabilities and coercive mechanisms as irreformable teaching. Dignitatis humanae teaches that the human person has a right to religious freedom from coercion within due limits of public order, while also affirming the duty to seek and adhere to religious truth. Nostra aetate rejects antisemitism and recalls the spiritual bond joining Christians to Abraham's stock. These teachings supply the authoritative framework in which medieval disciplinary provisions are judged today.

Historical contextualization is not exoneration. Cathar dualism contradicted Christian teaching about creation, Incarnation, and the sacraments; armed companies devastated populations; medieval rulers understood religious unity as integral to political peace. None of those facts makes every chosen remedy just or binding in another age. Catholic fidelity permits exact moral criticism because the Church distinguishes revealed doctrine from prudential government and acknowledges genuine development in the understanding of human dignity.

Reception and significance

Lateran III entered the Western canonical tradition quickly. Its papal-election settlement shaped every subsequent vacancy; its school provision anticipated a larger educational program; its benefice and visitation rules advanced reform; and its peace legislation demonstrates an effort to subject feudal violence and economic power to moral judgment. Results were uneven. Repeated enactment at later councils shows both the importance of the ideals and the inability of one assembly to transform local practice by decree alone.

Catholic reception locates the council within the communion of bishops with Alexander III, not in imperial recognition or later historical admiration. At the same time, reception is differentiated. The Church can honor the council as ecumenical, obey the law it legitimately enacted in its own time, retain principles subsequently incorporated into canon law, and recognize that obsolete penalties no longer bind. That is the ordinary Catholic way of reading councils whose acts combine pastoral wisdom, contingent institutions, and human limitation.

The council's deepest institutional lesson is that visible unity needs law in the service of communion. A two-thirds election threshold could not guarantee saintly popes; a cathedral-school mandate could not guarantee learned clergy; censures could not create peace without conversion. Yet clear procedures, educated ministers, accountable property, and protection for the vulnerable give grace room to work in a concrete society. Lateran III pursued those goods after a schism had exposed the cost of leaving them insecure.