Page 238

Page 238

schinner Schlatter THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG $·g8

in 1500. Appointed by Pope Julius II., in 1509, as legate in Switzerland, he was successful in bringing about an alliance between the pope and the Union against France; but losing the favor of the Swiss and not being allowed to return to his bishopric, he was compelled to resort to Rome, and was made a cardinal in 1511. In 1514 he went as a legate to England to enlist Henry VIII. to join in the league against Francis I. At the battle of Marignano (1515), in which the French disastrously defeated the allies, Schirmer led the Swiss in person. Francis I. recognized in him one of his strongest enemies in diplomacy and battle. Again, driven out upon attempting to return to his country and bishopric in 1518, he led a force of allies against the French in 1521, and drove them out of Milan. Zwingli in his account of the campaign of 1512 makes mention of the great impression the cardinal made on the soldiers (Werke, ed. Egli and Finsler i. 23-37). When the Reformation broke out in Switzerland, he seemed to be in perfect harmony with the movement. He offered Luther a place of refuge and support in 1519, and continued for a long time to befriend Zwingli; but later he turned against the Reformation. When Johannes Faber (q.v.) met him in Rome in 1521, he agreed with him that the Reformation should be suppressed by force.

131BLIOGRAPHY: P. S. Furrer, Geachiehte des Wallis Ill., pp. 242 sqq., Sitten, 1850; W. Gisi, Der Antheal der Eidpe-

noasen an der europdiwhen Politik . . 1618-161 B, Sehaff- hausen, 1868; Pastor, Popes, vols. vi.-vii.; KL, x., 1790- 1792. SCHISM: A term generally applied to the divi sion that, either wholly or partly, suspends the out ward unity of the Church; also, in Roman Catholic canon law, the offense of producing or attempting to produce such a division, and further, the deliber ate withdrawal from the bond of the Church by a refusal of obedience to its authorities

Mature on the ground that their powers are and not legitimate. But mere insubordina-

Classifica- tion to particular rulings or commands tion. of the authorities and simple resistance do not constitute schism. Where secession ensues from denying individual confessional doctrines of the Church, that is, where the offense of schism is concurrent with heresy, it is termed "heretical schism." On the other hand, in the case of separation, when, for instance, the papacy is acknowledged per se but the actual pope is declared not legally elected, the schism is named "pure schism." A further distinction is drawn between "particular" and "universal" schism, according as unity with the whole Church is ruptured directly, as by secession from the pope; or only indirectly, by separation from another ecclesiastical superior, particularly from the bishop. According to Roman Catholic canon law, schism constitutes an ecclesiastical offense chargeable before the spiritual tribunal, and is threatened with summary excommunication, forfeiture of office, suspension from holy orders, disqualification for church positions, infamy, and confiscation of property.

The most serious divisions in the Christian, as later in the Roman Church, were caused by differ-

ences in the apprehension of Christian doctrine. To this category belong those divisions which arose in the fourth century and after, coincidently with the closer definition and elaboration of Christian dogmas;

further and preeminently, the final Earlier separation between the Western and

Examples. Eastern Churches in 1054; the rup ture of the Protestants with the Roman Church in the sixteenth century; and the with drawal of the so-called Old Catholics from the Church of Rome, in consequence of the Vatican Council. Another class of church divisions was provoked through a double occupancy of the Roman episco pal see. During the period of the Roman Empire, when the emperors possessed the right of confirma tion at the elections of the pope, a discordant elec tion had no decisive influence over the Church at large, and was without essential significance to its unity. Likewise in the tenth century, and in the first half of the eleventh, such was the determining in fluence that the German emperors exercised on the papal election, and such the position which they generally occupied toward the Church, that par ticular attempts of the Roman factions to elevate their creatures as popes, or to maintain them in the papacy, were ineffectual, and could lead to no note worthy divisions. But a change set in from the middle of the eleventh century, when the reform party which began to rule the policy of the Curia sought to wrest this influence from the imperial power and to subject that power to the sovereign dispensation of the papacy. The central status in the Church which the papacy had acquired through the patronage of the emperors moved the latter, in order to possess the advantage of papal prestige in the battle now in progress, repeatedly to set up anti-popes. Thus in opposition to Alexander II., in 1061, Henry IV. put forward Cadalus (Honorius II.); in 1080, Wibert (Clement III.), against Greg ory VIL; and Henry V. opposed Gelasius II.,'in 1118, with Mauritius Burdinus (Gregory VIII.). The division of the Church necessarily consequent upon the strife between the two supreme heads of Western Christendom became embodied in the high est instance of the ecclesiastical organism. Again, the discordant elections in 1130 (Innocent II. and Anacletus II.), and in 1159 (Alexander III. and Victor IV.), were occasioned, notwithstanding the Concordat of Worms (1122), by the persistent breach between the papacy and the empire, with its concomitant division of the cardinals and the Curia into an imperial and a papal faction, and disrupted the unity of the Western Church for a considerable time; especially the latter election, forasmuch as the partizans of Frederick I., after the death of Victor IV., opposed Alexander III., with Paschal III., 1164, and Calixtus III., 1168-78. From the time of the papacy's positive victory over the empire such divisions no longer occurred; for the attempt of Louis the Bavarian to offset John XXII. with an anti-pope in the person of the Minorite Pietro Rainulducci, as Nicholas V., 1328 1330, miscarried.

Only once after this period did a papal schism occur in the Roman Church, and it agitated and shattered the Church as no other. Because of its