Ecumenical Councils Continue and Are Confirmed by the Pope

An ecumenical council, in the Catholic Church's own definition, is a gathering of bishops from the whole church whose decisions bind on faith and morals once the bishop of Rome has summoned it, presided over it in person or by legate, or confirmed its acts afterward. On that criterion the church counts twenty-one such councils, beginning with Nicaea in 325 and running, after a gap of nearly a century since the last council both East and West accepted, to the Second Vatican Council, which met from 1962 to 1965. The count is disputed rather than universal: Eastern Orthodoxy recognizes only the first seven, those held before the eleventh century schism split the two communions, and treats papal confirmation as no part of what makes a council ecumenical in the first place, since the seven were confirmed by consensus among the ancient patriarchates rather than by Rome alone. Because Catholic teaching ties the criterion to the ongoing papal office rather than to a closed ancient list, the series has never been formally closed the way the Orthodox list has. A future council remains possible in principle, summoned or confirmed by whoever then holds the office, which is the structural reason the Catholic count keeps rising while the Orthodox count has held at seven for over a thousand years.

The councils held since the schism did real doctrinal work rather than merely adding numbers to the list. The Council of Trent, meeting across several sessions from 1545 to 1563 in direct response to the Protestant Reformation, gave the church its settled teaching on purgatory and fixed the number and nature of the seven sacraments against Protestant reduction of them to two.

The First Vatican Council, cut short by the outbreak of war in 1870 before it could finish its full agenda, defined papal infallibility, the teaching that the pope speaks without error when he solemnly defines a matter of faith or morals for the whole church, a definition that itself became a fresh point of division from every other Christian communion.

The Second Vatican Council took up a different kind of question a century later, not a doctrine under active dispute but the church's own relationship to the modern world, producing sixteen documents covering collegiality among bishops, religious liberty, the liturgy in the vernacular and relations with other Christians and other religions. None of the material these later councils defined is recognized as binding by the Eastern churches, which is exactly the divide the confirmation criterion marks: from the Catholic side these are true councils of the whole church; from the Orthodox side they are councils of one communion among several, however large that communion has since become.