The Fourth Lateran Council

Innocent III held a general council in the Lateran basilica at Rome in November 1215. Roger of Wendover counts 412 bishops and more than 800 abbots and priors, and says the decrees were read out to the full council (Roger of Wendover, Flowers of History pp. 343–344).

The first of the seventy-one constitutions is a creed. It confesses one God in three persons, creator of all things, and one universal church, outside which no one at all is saved. In the sacrament of the altar, it says, the body and blood of Christ are truly contained under the forms of bread and wine, the bread and wine having been “transubstantiated” (transsubstantiatis) into them by God’s power; only a rightly ordained priest can perform this sacrament (Fourth Lateran Council, constitution 1) (Decretals of Gregory IX X 1.1.1).

Constitution 3 excommunicates every heresy opposed to this faith. The condemned are to be handed to the secular authorities for “due punishment”, and their goods confiscated. A person merely suspected must prove his innocence or be excommunicated, and after a year is condemned as a heretic. Rulers are to swear to drive out the heretics the church points out. A lord who neglects this is excommunicated, and after a further year the pope may release his vassals from fealty and offer his land to Catholics. Those who take the cross against heretics receive the crusaders’ indulgence. Each bishop is to visit suspect parishes yearly and make men swear to name heretics to him (Fourth Lateran Council, constitution 3).

Constitution 21 requires all the faithful of either sex, once at the age of discernment, to confess their sins to their own priest at least once a year and to receive the eucharist at least at Easter, or be barred from church and from Christian burial. A priest who reveals a confession is to be deposed and confined to a monastery for life (Fourth Lateran Council, constitution 21).

Constitution 68 says that where dress does not distinguish Jews and Saracens from Christians, Christians have by mistake had relations with Jewish or Saracen women, and Jews or Saracens with Christian women. To stop this “damnable mixing” it decrees that Jews and Saracens of both sexes, in every Christian province and at all times, are to be marked off from other people in public by their dress. They are not to appear in public at all on the days before Easter when Christians mourn the Passion, and princes are to punish any who then insult Christ (Fourth Lateran Council, constitution 68).

The creed and the constitution on heretics passed into the Decretals of Gregory IX (Decretals of Gregory IX X 1.1.1) (Decretals of Gregory IX X 5.7.13). The Council of Trent cited “the great Council of Lateran” for yearly confession (Council of Trent Session 14, canon 8 on penance) and called the change in the eucharist transubstantiation (Council of Trent Session 13, chapter 4 and canon 2). The Church of England’s Articles reject transubstantiation as repugnant to Scripture (Thirty-Nine Articles article 28); the Orthodox Synod of Jerusalem of 1672 used the word, adding that it does not explain how the change happens (Confession of Dositheus decree 17).