pope’s committees beforehand—to reform both clergy and laity. It defined
Christianity—embracing some doctrines while rejecting others—and turned against
Jews and Muslims with new vigor.
For laymen and -women perhaps the most important canons concerned the
sacraments. The Fourth Lateran Council required Christians to take Communion—
i.e., receive the Eucharist—at Mass and to confess their sins to a priest at least once
a year. Marriage was declared a sacrament, and bishops were assigned jurisdiction
over marital disputes. Forbidding secret marriages, the council expected priests to
uncover evidence that might impede a marriage. There were many impediments:
people were not allowed to marry their cousins, nor anyone related to them by
godparentage, nor anyone related to them through a former marriage. Children
conceived within clandestine or forbidden marriages were to be considered
illegitimate; they could not inherit property from their parents, nor could they become
priests.
Like the code of chivalry, the rules of the Fourth Lateran Council about marriage
worked better on parchment than in life. Well-to-do London fathers included their
bastard children in their wills. On English manors, sons conceived out of wedlock
regularly took over their parents’ land. The prohibition against secret marriages was
only partially successful. Even churchmen had to admit that the consent of both
parties made a marriage valid.
The most important sacrament was the Mass, the ritual in which the bread and
wine of the Eucharist was transformed into the flesh and blood of Christ. In the
twelfth century a newly rigorous formulation of this transformation declared that
Christ’s body and blood were truly present in the bread and wine on the altar. The
Fourth Lateran Council not only adopted this as church doctrine but also explained it
by using a technical term coined by twelfth-century scholars. The bread and wine
were “transubstantiated”: although the Eucharist continued to look like bread and
wine, after the consecration during the Mass the bread became the actual body and
the wine the real blood of Christ. The council’s emphasis on this potent event
strengthened the role of the priest, for only he could celebrate this mystery (the
transformation of ordinary bread and wine into the flesh of Christ) through which
God’s grace was transmitted to the faithful.
THE EMBRACED AND THE REJECTED
As the Fourth Lateran Council provided rules for good Christians, it turned against all
