The Ecumenical Council Called For by Pope Innocent III Begins: November 11, 1492
This text comes from our book, Hope for the Ages.
In April 1213, Pope Innocent III issued Vineam Domini Sabaoth, a summons to the spiritual and temporal lords of Christendom to meet in an ecumenical council of the Church at the Lateran in Rome. Set to open November 11, 1215, and to conclude at the end of the same month, the council’s goals were to address the needs of the Holy Land and to legislate for the reform of the Church. Moreover, said the pope, “let us assemble . . . to quiet discords and establish peace, suppress oppressions, and foster [civil] liberty.”
It was said of the council that assembled at the Lateran in November 1215 that “the whole world seemed to be there.” It was indeed an enormous assemblage, drawn from the length and breadth of Christendom. Of clergy, 412 archbishops and bishops and over 800 abbots attended. Not only did the Latin Patriarch of Constantinople come, but so did the Patriarch of Jerusalem, the patriarch of the small, eastern rite Maronite Church of Lebanon, the Monophysite Patriarch of Alexandria and a delegate of that city’s Melkite patriarch, with another sent by the Patriarch of Antioch. (The Greek Orthodox, in schism with Rome, sent no representatives.) Christendom’s crowned heads participated through envoys: Friedrich II, king of Sicily and emperor elect; his rival, Otto IV; the Latin emperor of Constantinople; and other European monarchs.
All but unnoticed in this great concourse of ecclesiastical and temporal lords was one man not so sumptuously dressed as they. Clad in a rough, white woolen habit and black cape, Dominic de Guzman had come to the council with his bishop, Fulk of Toulouse, to seek “confirmation of an order which would be called and would be in fact the order of Preachers,” in the words of his later biographer, Jordan of Saxony. An old story tells that, while in Rome, Dominic had dreamt of Our Lady and Christ. In the vision, Mary pointed to two men who, she said, will save the world. One of these, Dominic recognized as himself; the other, a poor beggar man whom he did not know. The next day, Dominic, praying in the church of St. John Lateran, saw a ragged beggar enter—the very same who had appeared in his dream. Approaching the beggar, Dominic exclaimed, “you are my companion and must walk with me. For if we hold together, no earthly power can withstand us.”
This poor beggar, dressed even more raggedly than Dominic, was the “little poor man of Assisi,” Francesco (Francis) Bernardone by name. He, too, had come to the council to seek confirmation of an order he had founded—the Fratres Minores (“Little Brothers”), who, like Dominic’s Preachers, were “courting Lady Poverty” to fulfil the demands of the “apostolic life.” Beyond this point of similarity, Francesco’s order differed in important ways from Dominic’s, as did the lives of the two founders. We have told much of Dominic’s story. Let us now follow the path that brought Frater Francesco Bernardone at last to seek a blessing for what had become his life’s work from the great Lateran Ecumenical Council, and its head, Pope Innocent III.
