Conciliarism and the Crisis of Papal Authority

The Western Schism began in 1378, when, following the death of Pope Gregory XI, the cardinals first elected the Italian archbishop Bartolomeo Prignano as Pope Urban VI and then, dissatisfied with his conduct, declared that election invalid under duress and elected the French cardinal Robert of Geneva as the rival Pope Clement VII, who established his court at Avignon while Urban VI remained in Rome. For nearly four decades Western Christendom found itself divided between two, and after the failed Council of Pisa in 1409 briefly three, competing papal obediences, each claiming sole legitimacy and each excommunicating the adherents of the others, a scandal that discredited the very mechanism of papal election and forced theologians and canon lawyers to ask, with new urgency, where final authority in the Church actually resided if the papacy itself could not resolve its own succession.