Ecclesiastical authorities objected to the Feast of Fools with increasing seriousness from the thirteenth century onward, and church councils and individual bishops issued repeated condemnations targeting the practice across the following centuries, concerned both by the parody's proximity to genuine liturgical sacrilege and by the disorder, including drinking and rowdy behaviour inside consecrated space, that regularly accompanied it. The pressure was gradual rather than a single decisive ban, and the feast persisted in various diminished or locally tolerated forms in a number of dioceses well after its formal condemnation elsewhere, before finally dying out almost everywhere by the sixteenth century under the combined weight of repeated ecclesiastical reform campaigns and the wider disciplinary tightening the church underwent in that period.
Historians of medieval festival culture group the Feast of Fools together with Carnival and the Jewish festival of Purim as instances of the same broad category, a sanctioned yearly inversion of normal order granted a fixed and limited calendar slot precisely so that it would not spill over into a genuine, ongoing challenge to authority.
The University of Paris's theology faculty issued one of the best known formal condemnations of the practice in 1445, describing specific abuses in detail as grounds for suppression, a document historians of the feast rely on heavily precisely because ecclesiastical critics, unlike sympathetic participants, tended to write the practice down in order to attack it.