(1) Under Calixtus II., in 1123. More than 300 bishops and 600 abbots were present. This was the Ninth General Council, and the first ever held in the West. The chief object was to end the strife on Investiture between Emperor Henry V. and the Holy See. The arrangement made at the Concordat of Worms was confirmed. Henry agreed to leave the choice and consecration of prelates free, to resign all claims to invest with ring and staff, and to restore Church goods, while the Pope allowed the elections to take place in the Emperor’s presence, gave him the right to decide in contested elections after taking counsel from the metropolitans and provincial bishops, and to confer the regalia with the sceptre.

(2) The Second Lateran Council (Tenth General Council), held in 1139 under Innocent II., and attended by about 1,000 prelates, excommunicated Roger of Sicily (champion of Anacletus II., the Antipope), suspended clerics promoted by Anacletus, and imposed silence on Arnold of Brescia, the great ecclesiastical demagogue of the day. Thirty canons were passed on simony, incontinence, clerical dress, breaking the “Peace of God,” and contests dangerous to life.

(3) The Third Lateran and Eleventh General Council was convoked in 1179, by Alexander III., was attended by more than 300 bishops, and numbered about a thousand members in all. It ordered that future Popes should be elected by a majority of two-thirds, and passed a sentence of ex-communication on anyone who accepted the Papacy on other conditions, as well as upon those who supported him. Disciplinary enactments were also made against simony, clerical incontinence, and intercourse with Saracens and Jews.

(4) Innocent III. opened the Fourth Lateran and Twelfth General Synod, the most imposing probably of all councils ever held, in 1215, for the recovery of the Holy Land and the reform of the Church. The representatives of Frederic II., of Henry, Emperor of Constantinople, of the Kings of England, France, Aragon, Hungary, Cyprus, Jerusalem, and of other princes, 412 bishops, 800 abbots, many representatives of absent bishops and chapters, were present. The seventy decrees of the council concern the most important points of discipline and doctrine. The Bishop of Constantinople was made the first of the Eastern patriarchs; the Greek rites, the jurisdiction of the other patriarchs, were fully acknowledged; while at the same time the Greek practice of rebaptizing children already baptized by Latins, and of washing altars to mark their defilement if they had been used by Latin priests, was reprobated, and the supremacy of Rome insisted on. Regulations were made and indulgences were offered for the coming crusade. The duty of annual confession “proprio sacerdoti” was enforced. Definitions were issued on the absolute unity of God. Abbot Joachim had maintained that the three divine Persons were one God only in the same sense as many human persons are all men or Christians one with each other and with Christ. In other words he substituted a specific or moral for that numerical unity in which, with the real distinction of the three Persons, the mystery of the Trinity consists. The council, on the contrary, defined that each of the three Persons is identical with the one divine substance. It also defined the Catholic doctrine on the sacraments, and in particular that the bread and wine in the Mass are “transubstantiated” into Christ’s body and blood.

(5) The Fifth Lateran Council (Eighteenth General) was opened by Julius II., in 1512, and closed by Leo X., in 1517. The Church was distracted at the time by the schismatic Council of Pisa. The Fifth Lateran was attended by 15 cardinals and 79 (afterwards 120) bishops, mostly Italian. 


William E. Addis and Thomas Arnold, A Catholic Dictionary (New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co., 1887), 504–505.