The Western Schism

The schism began with a disputed election. In 1378, with a Roman crowd outside demanding an Italian pope after seventy years of French popes at Avignon, the cardinals elected Urban VI. His conduct in office alarmed them quickly, and within months the same cardinals declared the election void as made under duress and elected Clement VII, who withdrew to Avignon. Both men had been chosen by the same electors in the same year.

Europe divided along the lines of existing alliance. France, Castile, Aragon, Scotland and Naples followed Avignon; England, the Empire, Hungary, Poland and much of Italy followed Rome. Each obedience had its own curia, its own appointments and its own taxation, and religious orders split down the middle. Saints of unquestioned holiness are found on both sides, which is itself instructive: Catherine of Siena supported Rome and Vincent Ferrer supported Avignon, and no one at the time could tell from sanctity which line was valid.

An attempt to solve it made it worse. A council at Pisa in 1409 deposed both claimants and elected a third, and neither of the deposed accepted the sentence, so there were three. The knot was finally cut at Constance, which secured one resignation, deposed the other two and elected Martin V in 1417, ending the schism after thirty-nine years.

No lasting separate church came out of these forty years, and for that reason the Western Schism gets less attention than the division with the East. Its effects on the Latin church were nonetheless deep and long.

It damaged the papal office in a way argument alone could not have done. For two generations, obedience to a pope was visibly a matter of which king one lived under, and the claim that submission to the Roman pontiff was necessary for salvation was hard to sustain when devout people could not establish who that pontiff was. Both sides excommunicated the other's adherents, which meant most of Latin Christendom was excommunicate by somebody.

It made the conciliar movement plausible. If only a pope can judge a pope, and no one can say who the pope is, then either the situation is insoluble or some other authority in the church can act. Constance acted on the second answer, and the decree Haec Sancta stated it as a principle. Later popes rejected the principle while owing their own legitimacy to the council that applied it, a difficulty Catholic canonists have never entirely resolved.

And it left a habit of reform demands that the papacy answered slowly. The council's own decree providing for regular future councils lapsed within decades, and the grievances aired at Constance were still being aired a century later, when the answer was no longer a council.