Angelus News | October 6, 2023 | Vol. 8 No. 20

experimented with regularly scheduled
synods. What they found is that
meeting too often in councils led to a
politicizing of the Church, including
ongoing lobbying, in which metropolitan
bishops could manipulate the
voting by creating more dioceses in
their areas, so that they could create
more bishops, so that their area would
have more voting power.
Later, in the East, even the famous
St. Basil the Great gave in to the
temptation to make his brother and
friend bishops just so they could support
him and his projects. In actual
practice, synods of the early Church
could be as uneventful as a routine
office or parish meeting, or they could
be full of drama, complete with shouting
matches and fistfights.
As time went on, new crises resulted
in new synods. In the second century,
a controversy over how to calculate
the date for Easter resulted in synods
in Rome and in other cities. In the
third century, a controversy over the
sacrament of reconciliation resulted
in synods in Rome and Carthage. In
the fourth century, the question of
clergy celibacy (among other things)
resulted in a synod in Elvira, Spain,
but because the Church was illegal
and persecuted, travel was difficult.
And being regional synods, their decisions
were technically only binding
on that region (although the synods
of Rome would come to have more
weight, since the bishop of Rome, the
pope, ratified their decisions).
When the emperor Constantine
legalized Christianity, he also gave
Christian bishops the right to use the
Roman transit system, which was until
this time reserved for government
officials (those government officials
would soon complain that there were
so many Christian bishops traveling to
synods that they found it hard to get a
seat in the wagon!).
The first synod attended by the
emperor was the Synod of Arles in
A.D. 314. But this, too, was a regional
synod, and it quickly became clear to
everyone that what was really needed
to face the current crises (not least
would be the heresy of Arianism), was
a worldwide council — one where
every bishop in the world was invited,
and the decisions would be binding
on the whole Church. This was the
Council of Nicaea, in the year A.D.
325. It would come to be called the
first “ecumenical” (or worldwide)
council.
Incidentally, Nicaea was the last time
(for a long time) that laypeople were
invited. They became a distraction, in
part by treating the living saints like
“The Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon,” by Vasily
Surikov, 1848-1916, Russian. | WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
rock stars (hermits came in from the
desert for the council, people who
had been tortured in the last round
of persecutions showed up with their
scars, and the famous St. Nicholas was
there). After 325, councils would be
limited to bishops and their assistants.
The Council of Nicaea clarified the
doctrine of the Trinity in opposition
to the Arian heresy, and wrote the
first draft of the Nicene Creed. The
Second Ecumenical Council, the
Council of Constantinople in A.D.
381, added to the creed, especially in
the paragraph about the Holy Spirit.
This gave us (essentially) the Nicene
Creed that we recite in Mass every
week.
In the early centuries of the Church,
sometimes a council was convened by
an emperor, but not without the sanction
of the pope, who would generally
determine who chaired the council.
Sometimes the pope couldn’t attend,
but he was always represented by a
delegation from Rome. When the
Rome delegation read Pope St. Leo’s
statement at the Council of Chalcedon
in A.D. 451, it was reported that
the assembled bishops cheered, “Leo
speaks for Peter!” That may be a bit of
an exaggeration, but the point is that
the voice of the pope carried great
weight at a council, even when he was
not physically there.
In fact, one of the times that people
tried to convene a council without the
sanction of the pope, and where the
pope’s statement was rejected — this
council was determined to be invalid,
and is now referred to as “The Robber
Synod” (A.D. 449).
So although the words “synod” and
“council” are basically synonymous,
we can make a distinction between
regional synods or councils and a
general (or ecumenical) council,
which is universal — that is, every
bishop in the worldwide Church is
invited, and the canons (resolutions)
will be binding on the whole Church.
In actual practice, the pope has a kind
of de facto line-item veto, even of the
canons of the ecumenical councils.
For example, popes rejected individual
canons from the Councils of
Constantinople and Chalcedon.
Historically, the impact of any
council — especially an ecumenical
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