life of voluntary poverty in response to the blatant excesses of monied wealth among
townsfolk.
All this ferment provoked anxiety in many quarters. A controversy broke out in the
12th century as to the very possibility of a religious office of preaching: was not the
“order of preachers” the episcopacy and those whom bishops delegated to carry out their
pastoral functions in parish churches? How was the increasingly widespread claim among
religious to an intrinsic preaching office, much less the swarming groups of lay
“apostles,” to be accommodated to the pastoral institutions of the western church?
The pontificate of Innocent III (r. 1198–1216) would create a framework transforming
the church’s pastoral care that won the adherence of the majority of religious and lay
preachers. In a first phase, Innocent created space for lay and religious preachers by his
efforts to reconcile groups of heretical preachers, the Humiliati (1201) and Walden-sians
(1208 and 1210). His work with St. Francis in Italy and with Bishop Foulques of
Toulouse and St. Dominic in southern France went far to establishing the two greatest
mendicant orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans. He narrowed the definition of
properly clerical preaching (praedicatio) by splitting off from it two activities formerly
bound to it: the telling of one’s faith to another (professio fidei) and the defense of
orthodoxy in debate with heretics (defensio fidei). In a second phase, Innocent
crystallized a new pastoral order in the constitutions of the Fourth Lateran Council
(1215). He gave universal force to the old Carolingian admonition that bishops recruit
preachers competent to preach throughout their diocese. In so doing, however, he
associated preaching with the sacrament of penance, for he added that bishops should
also recruit competent confessors. In addition, he underscored the importance of
confession by establishing a universal obligation to make annual confession to one’s
“proper priest,” further associating this confession with the obligation to receive
communion at Easter. The net effect of this legislation was to bind preaching to the
sacrament of penance and to institutionalize the spiritual impulses of the previous two
centuries by making the sacrament of penance with its prolegomenon, repentance, into an
obligatory and annual feature of adult Christian living. This new pastoral axis of
preaching-for-confession demanded far-ranging modifications to the church’s pastoral
institutions.
Preaching could no longer be seen as the preserve of an “order of preachers” identified
narrowly with the episcopacy and the homily at Mass celebrated in the cathedral church.
Preaching-for-confession assumed a more intimate interaction between preacher and
hearer, one more obviously possible at the parish level in the countryside. In the towns,
where parish structure was underdeveloped, parish churches needed the supplement of
religious oratories open to the faithful. The 13th century saw the formation of many new
parishes and the establishment of mendicant priories throughout the towns of Europe.
Preaching-for-confession demanded not only familiarity but also knowledge, a
theoretical understanding of what motivated human action. The 13th century saw a
considerable expansion of clerical opportunities to study and the proliferation of a vast
pastoral literature, much of which was designed to help parish and mendicant priests
prepare for their roles as preachers and confessors to the faithful. From the University of
Paris especially, there poured forth a torrent of treatises: manuals of confession, guides to
confessors, biblical distinctions, collections of model sermons, summae of preaching, arts
of preaching, biblical postillae, and the like.
The Encyclopedia 1423