Catholic Ecumenical Councils
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Catholic Ecumenical Councils
According to the Catholic Church, a Church Council is ecumenical ("world-wide"), if it is "a solemn congregation of the Catholic bishops of the world at the invitation of the Pope to decide on matters of the Church with him". In addition to ecumenical Councils, there are “particular Councils”. Current Canon Law recognizes two kinds of particular Councils: plenary councils involve the bishops of an episcopal conference (usually a single country) and provincial councils the bishops of an ecclesiastical province. The Catholic Church recognizes as ecumenical 21 councils occurring over a period of some 1900 years. The ecumenical nature of some Councils was disputed for some time, but was eventually accepted, for example the First Lateran Council and the Council of Basel. A 1539 book on ecumenical councils by Cardinal Dominicus Jacobazzi excluded them, as did other scholars. The first few centuries did not know large-scale councils; they were feasible only after the Church ...
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Council Trent
The Council of Trent ( la, Concilium Tridentinum), held between 1545 and 1563 in Trento, Trent (or Trento), now in northern Italian Peninsula, Italy, was the 19th ecumenical council of the Catholic Church. Prompted by the Protestant Reformation, it has been described as the embodiment of the Counter-Reformation."Trent, Council of" in Cross, F. L. (ed.) ''The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church'', Oxford University Press, 2005 (). The Council issued condemnations of what it defined to be Heresy, heresies committed by proponents of Protestantism, and also issued key statements and clarifications of the Church's doctrine and teachings, including scripture, the biblical canon, sacred tradition, original sin, Justification (theology), justification, salvation, the Sacraments of the Catholic Church, sacraments, the Mass (liturgy), Mass, and the Veneration, veneration of saints.Wetterau, Bruce. ''World History''. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1994. The Council met for twenty- ...
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Arianism
Arianism ( grc-x-koine, Ἀρειανισμός, ) is a Christological doctrine first attributed to Arius (), a Christian presbyter from Alexandria, Egypt. Arian theology holds that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, who was begotten by God the Father with the difference that the Son of God did not always exist but was begotten within time by God the Father, therefore Jesus was not coeternal with God the Father. Arius's trinitarian theology, later given an extreme form by Aetius and his disciple Eunomius and called anomoean ("dissimilar"), asserts a total dissimilarity between the Son and the Father. Arianism holds that the Son is distinct from the Father and therefore subordinate to him. The term ''Arian'' is derived from the name Arius; it was not what the followers of Arius's teachings called themselves, but rather a term used by outsiders. The nature of Arius's teachings and his supporters were opposed to the theological doctrines held by Homoousian Christians, regard ...
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Pope Agatho
Pope Agatho (died January 681) served as the bishop of Rome from 27 June 678 until his death. He heard the appeal of Wilfrid of York, who had been displaced from his see by the division of the archdiocese ordered by Theodore of Canterbury. During Agatho's tenure, the Sixth Ecumenical Council was convened to deal with monothelitism. He is venerated as a saint by both the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. Early life Little is known of Agatho before his papacy but he may have been among the many Sicilian clergy in Rome at that time, due to the Caliphate's attacks on Sicily in the mid-7th century. He served several years as treasurer of the church of Rome. He succeeded Donus in the pontificate.Butler, Alban. "St. Agatho, Pope", ''The Lives of the Saints'', Vol. I, 1866
Butler spe ...
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Monothelitism
Monothelitism, or monotheletism (from el, μονοθελητισμός, monothelētismós, doctrine of one will), is a theological doctrine in Christianity, that holds Christ as having only one will. The doctrine is thus contrary to dyothelitism, a Christological doctrine that holds Christ as having two wills (divine and human). Historically, ''monothelitism'' was closely related to monoenergism, a theological doctrine that holds Jesus Christ as having only one energy. Both doctrines were at the center of Christological disputes during the 7th century. Theological notions related to the ''oneness'' of Christ's will emerged as a result of some earlier Christological controversies, that were related to monophysitism as formulated by Eutyches (d. 456), and miaphysitism as formulated by non-Chalcedonian followers of Cyril of Alexandria (d. 444). Since the notion of Christ's ''one nature'' implied the ''oneness'' of his will, ecclesiastical and political elites of the Eastern Roman ...
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Pope Vigilius
Pope Vigilius (died 7 June 555) was the bishop of Rome from 29 March 537 to his death. He is considered the first pope of the Byzantine papacy. Born into Roman aristocracy, Vigilius served as a deacon and papal ''apocrisiarius'' in Constantinople. He allied with Empress Theodora, who sought his help to establish Monophysitism, and was made pope after the deposition of Silverius. After he refused to sign Emperor Justinian I's edict condemning the Three Chapters, Vigilius was arrested in 545 and taken to Constantinople. He died in Sicily while returning to Rome. Early life Vigilius belonged to an aristocratic family from Rome; his father, John, is identified as a consul in the ''Liber pontificalis'', having received that title from the emperor in Constantinople. According to Procopius, his brother Reparatus was one of the senators taken hostage by Witigis, but managed to escape before the Ostrogothic king ordered their slaughter in 537. Vigilius entered the service of the Chur ...
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Monophysitism
Monophysitism ( or ) or monophysism () is a Christological term derived from the Greek (, "alone, solitary") and (, a word that has many meanings but in this context means "nature"). It is defined as "a doctrine that in the person of the incarnated Word (that is, in Jesus Christ) there was only one nature—the divine". Background The First Council of Nicaea (325) declared that Christ was divine (homoousios, consubstantial, of one being or essence, with the Father) and human (was incarnate and became man). In the fifth century a heated controversy arose between the sees and theological schools of Antioch and Alexandria about how divinity and humanity existed in Christ, the former stressing the humanity, the latter the divinity of Christ. Cyril of Alexandria succeeded in having Nestorius, a prominent exponent of the Antiochian school, condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431, and insisted on the formula "one ''physis'' of the incarnate Word", claiming that any formula that ...
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Pope Leo I
Pope Leo I ( 400 – 10 November 461), also known as Leo the Great, was bishop of Rome from 29 September 440 until his death. Pope Benedict XVI said that Leo's papacy "was undoubtedly one of the most important in the Church's history." Leo was a Roman aristocrat, and was the first pope to have been called "the Great". He is perhaps best known for having met Attila the Hun in 452 and persuaded him to turn back from his invasion of Italy. He is also a Doctor of the Church, most remembered theologically for issuing the Tome of Leo, a document which was a major foundation to the debates of the Council of Chalcedon, the fourth ecumenical council. That meeting dealt primarily with Christology and elucidated the orthodox definition of Christ's being as the hypostatic union of two natures, divine and human, united in one person, "with neither confusion nor division". It was followed by a major schism associated with Monophysitism, Miaphysitism and Dyophysitism. He also contributed signi ...
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Nestorianism
Nestorianism is a term used in Christian theology and Church history to refer to several mutually related but doctrinarily distinct sets of teachings. The first meaning of the term is related to the original teachings of Christian theologian Nestorius (d. 450), who promoted specific doctrines in the fields of Christology and Mariology. The second meaning of the term is much wider, and relates to a set of later theological teachings, that were traditionally labeled as Nestorian, but differ from the teachings of Nestorius in origin, scope and terminology. The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' defines Nestorianism as "The doctrine of Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople (appointed in 428), by which Christ is asserted to have had distinct human and divine persons." Original Nestorianism is attested primarily by works of Nestorius, and also by other theological and historical sources that are related to his teachings in the fields of Mariology and Christology. His theology was influ ...
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Pope Celestine I
Pope Celestine I ( la, Caelestinus I) (c. 376 – 1 August 432) was the bishop of Rome from 10 September 422 to his death on 1 August 432. Celestine's tenure was largely spent combatting various ideologies deemed heretical. He supported the mission of the Gallic bishops that sent Germanus of Auxerre in 429, to Britain to address Pelagianism, and later commissioned Palladius as bishop to the Scots of Ireland and northern Britain. In 430, he held a synod in Rome which condemned the apparent views of Nestorius. Early life and family Celestine I was a Roman from the region of Campania. Nothing is known of his early history except that his father's name was Priscus. According to John Gilmary Shea, Celestine was a relative of the emperor Valentinian. He is said to have lived for a time at Milan with St. Ambrose. The first known record of him is in a document of Pope Innocent I from the year 416, where he is spoken of as "Celestine the Deacon".Murphy, John Francis Xavier (1908). " Pope ...
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Theotokos
''Theotokos'' (Greek: ) is a title of Mary, mother of Jesus, used especially in Eastern Christianity. The usual Latin translations are ''Dei Genitrix'' or ''Deipara'' (approximately "parent (fem.) of God"). Familiar English translations are "Mother of God" or "God-bearer" – but these both have different literal equivalents in Greek, Μήτηρ Θεοῦ and Θεοφόρος ("Who gave birth to one who was God", "Whose child was God", respectively). The title has been in use since the 3rd century, in the Syriac tradition (as ) in the Liturgy of Mari and Addai (3rd century)''Addai and Mari, Liturgy of''. Cross, F. L., ed. ''The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church''. Oxford University Press. 2005. and the Liturgy of St James (4th century). The Council of Ephesus in AD 431 decreed that Mary is the ''Theotokos'' because Her Son Jesus is both God and man: one divine person from two natures (divine and human) intimately and hypostatically united. The title of Mother o ...
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Blessed Virgin Mary (Roman Catholic)
The veneration of Mary, mother of Jesus, in the Catholic Church encompasses various Marian devotion, devotions which include prayer, pious acts, visual arts, poetry, and music devoted to her. Popes have encouraged it, while also taking steps to reform some manifestations of it.For example, on March 12, 1969, Pope Paul VI reduced and rearranged the number of Marian feast days in ''Sanctitas clarior''. Several of his predecessors did similarly. The Holy See has insisted on the importance of distinguishing "true from false devotion, and authentic doctrine from its deformations by excess or defect". There are significantly more titles, feasts, and venerative Marian practices among Roman Catholics than in other Western Christian traditions. The term ''hyperdulia'' indicates the special veneration due to Mary, greater than the ordinary ''Dulia (Latin), dulia'' for other saints, but utterly unlike the ''latria'' due only to God. Belief in the Incarnation (Christianity), incarnation of ...
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Pope Damasus I
Pope Damasus I (; c. 305 – 11 December 384) was the bishop of Rome from October 366 to his death. He presided over the Council of Rome of 382 that determined the canon or official list of sacred scripture. He spoke out against major heresies (including Apollinarianism and Macedonianism) and thus solidifying the faith of the Catholic Church, and encouraged production of the Vulgate Bible with his support for Jerome. He helped reconcile the relations between the Church of Rome and the Church of Antioch, and encouraged the veneration of martyrs. As well as various prose letters and other pieces Damasus was the author of Latin verse. Alan Cameron describes his epitaph for a young girl called Projecta (of great interest to scholars as the Projecta Casket in the British Museum may have been made for her) as "a tissue of tags and clichés shakily strung together and barely squeezed into the meter". Damasus has been described as "the first society Pope", and was possibly a member o ...
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