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 GALLIOANISM

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GALLICANISM

the clergy, he appeals in the matter from Boniface VIII to a future general council — the implication being that the council is superior to the pope. The same ideas and others still more hostile to the Holy See reappear in the struggle of Fratricelles and Louis of Bavaria against John XXII ; they are expressed by the pens of VVilliam Occam, of Jofin of Jandun, and of Marsilius of Padua, professors in the University of Paris. Among other things, they deny the Divine origin of the papal primacy, and subject the exercise of it to the good pleasure of the temporal ruler. Fol- lowing the pope, the University of Paris condemned these views; but for all that they did not entirely dis- appear from the memory, or from the disputations, of the schools, for the principal work of MarsiUus, " De- fensor Pacis", was translated into French in 1375, probably by a professor of the University of Paris. The Great Schism reawakened them suddenly. The idea of a council naturally suggested itself as a means of terminating that melancholy rending asunder of Christendom. Upon that idea was soon grafted the "conciliary theory", which sets the council above the pope, making it the sole representative of the Church, the sole organ of infallibility. Timidly sketched by two professors of the University of Paris, Conrad of Gelnhausen and Henry of Langenstein, this theory was completed and noisily interpreted to the public by Pierre d'Ailly and Gerson. At the same time the clergy of France, disgusted with Benedict XIII, took upon itself to withdraw from his obedience. It was in the assembly which voted on this measure (1398) that for the first time there was any question of bringing back the Church of France to its ancient liberties and customs — of giving its prelates once more the right of conferring and disposing of benefices. The same idea comes into the foreground in the claims put for- ward in 1406 by another assembly of the French clergy; to win the votes of the assembly, certain orators cited the example of what was happening in England. M. Haller has concluded from this that these so-called Ancient Liberties were of English origin, that the Galilean Church really borrowed them from its neighbour, only imagining them to be a revival of its own past. This opinion does not seem well founded. The precedents cited by M. Haller go back to the parliament held at Carlisle in 1307, at which date the tendencies of reaction against papal reservations had already manifested themselves in the assemblies convoked by Philip the Fair in 1.302 and 1303. The most that we can admit is, that the same ideas received parallel development from both sides of the channel.

Together with the restoration of the "Ancient Liberties" the assembly of the clergy in 1406 intended to maintain the superiority of the council to the pope, and the fallibility of the latter. However widely they may have been accepted at the time, these were only individual opinions or opinions of a school, when the Council of Constance came to give them the sanction of its high authority. In its fourth and fifth sessions it declared that the council represented the Church, that every person, no matter of what dignity, even the pope, was bound to obey it in what concerned the ex- tirpation of the schism and the reform of the Church ; that even the pope, if he resisted obstinately, might be constrained by process of law to obey it in the above-mentioned points. This was the birth or, if we prefer to call it so, the legitimation of Gallicanisrn. so far we had encountered m the history of the Galil- ean Church recriminations of malcontent bishops, or a violent gesture of some prince discomforted m his avaricious designs ; but these were only fits of resent- ment or ill humor, accidents with no attendant conse- quences; this time the provisions made against exer- cise of the pontifical authority took to themselves a body and found a fulcrum. Gallicanisrn has im- planted itself in the minds of men as a national doctrine

and it only remains to apply it in practice. This is to be the work of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges. In that instrument the clergy of France inserted the articles of Constance repeated at Basle, and upon that warrant assumed authority to regulate the collation of benefices and the temporal administration of the Churches on the sole basis of the common law, under the king's patronage, and independently of the pope's action. From Eugene IV to Leo X the popes did not cease to protest against the Pragmatic Sanction, until it was replaced by the Concordat of 1516. But, if its provisions disappeared from the laws of France, the principles it embodied for a time none the less con- tinued to inspire the schools of theology and parlia- mentary jurLsprudence. Those principles even ap- peared at the Council of Trent, where the ambassadors, theologians, and bi.shops of France repeatedly cham- pioned them, notably when the questions for decision were as to whether episcopal jurisdiction comes immediately from God or through the pope, whether or not the council ought to ask confirmation of its decrees from the sovereign pontiff, etc. Then again, it was in the name of the Liberties of the Galilean Church that a part of the clergy and the Parlemen- taires opposed the publication of that same council; and the crown decided to detach from it and publish what seemed good, in the form of ordinances ema- nating from the royal authority.

Nevertheless, towards the end of the sixteenth century, the reaction against the Protestant denial of all authority to the pope and, above all, the triumph of the League had enfeebled Galilean convictions in the minds of the clergy, if not of the parliament. But the assassination of Henry IV, which was ex- ploited to move public opinion against Ultramontan- ism, and the activity of Edmond Richer, syndic of the Sorbonne, brought about, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, a strong revival of Gallicanisrn, which was thenceforward to continue gaining in strength from day to day. In 1663 the Sorbonne solemnly declared that it admitted no authority of the pope over the king's temporal dominion, nor his superiority to a general council, nor infallibility apart from the Church's consent. In 1682 matters were much worse. Louis XIV having decided to extend to all the Churches of his kingdom the regale, or right of receiving the revenue of vacant sees, and of conferring the sees themselves at his pleasure. Pope Innocent XI strongly opposed the king's designs. Irritated by this resistance, the king assembled the clergy of France and, on 19 March, 1682, the thirty-six prelates and thirty-four deputies of the second order who con- stituted that assembly adopted the four articles recited above and transmitted them to all the other bishops and archbishops of France. Three days later the king commanded the registration of the articles in all the schools and faculties of theology; no one could even be admitted to degrees in theology without having maintained this doctrine in one of his theses, and it was forbidden to write anything against them. The Sorbonne, however, yielded to the ordinance of registration only after a spirited resistance. Pope Innocent XI testified his displeasure by the Rescript of 11 April, 1682, in which he voided and annulled all that the assembly had done in regard to the regale, as well as all the consequences of that action; he also refused Bulls to all members of the assembly who were proposed for vacant bishoprics. In like manner his successor Alexander VIII, by a Constitution dated 4 August, 1690, quashed as detrimental to the Holy See the proceedings both in the matter of the regale and in that of the declaration on the ecclesiastical power and jurisdiction, which had been prejudicial to the clerical estate and order. The bishops designate to whom Bulls had been refused received them at length, in 1693, only after addressing to Pope Innocent XII a letter in which they disavowed everything that had