Plenary Council - France

France

As ecclesiastical jurisdiction is necessary for the person who presides over a plenary or national synod, this name has been refused to the assemblies of the bishops of France, which met without papal authorization in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These comitia cleri Gallicani were not really plenary councils. The more noted among them were those held at Paris in 1681 and 1682. Convocations of ecclesiastics (Assemblées du Clergé) were frequent in France before the Revolution of 1789. They consisted of certain bishops deputed by the various ecclesiastical provinces of the kingdom, and of priests elected by their equals from the same provinces, to deliberate on the temporal affairs of the French churches, and more particularly on the assistance, generally monetary, to be accorded to the Government.

After the establishment of the empire, Napoleon I held a great convention of bishops at Paris, and is said to have been much incensed because Pius VII did not designate it a national council. Similarly, mere congresses of bishops, even of a whole nation, who meet to discuss common ecclesiastical affairs, without adhering to synodal forms, are not to be called national or plenary Councils, because no one having the proper jurisdiction has formally summoned them to a canonical synod. Such episcopal conventions have been praised by the Holy See, because they showed unity among the bishops, and zeal for asserting the rights of the Church and the progress of the Catholic cause in their midst, in accordance with the sacred canons, but, as the requisite legal forms and proper hierarchical authority are wanting, these congresses of bishops do not constitute a plenary council, no matter how full the representation of episcopal dignitaries may be.