Second Lateran Council (1139)

The death of Pope Honorius II (February, 1130) was followed by a 
schism. Petrus Leonis (Pierleoni), under the name of Anacletus II, 
for a long time held in check the legitimate pope, Innocent II, 
who was supported by St. Bernard and St. Norbert. In 1135 Innocent 
II celebrated a Council at Pisa, and his cause gained steadily 
until, in January, 1138, the death of Anacletus helped largely to 
solve the difficulty. Nevertheless, to efface the last vestiges of 
the schism, to condemn various errors and reform abuses among 
clergy and people Innocent, in the month of April, 1139, convoked, 
at the Lateran, the tenth ecumenical council. Nearly a thousand 
prelates, from most of the Christian nations, assisted. The pope 
opened the council with a discourse, and deposed from their 
offices those who had been ordained and instituted by the antipope 
and by his chief partisans, AEgidius of Tusculum and Gerard of 
Angouleme. As Roger, King of Sicily, a partisan of Anacletus who 
had been reconciled with Innocent, persisted in maintaining in 
Southern Italy his schismatical attitude, he was excommunicated. 
The council likewise condemned the errors of the Petrobrusians and 
the Henricians, the followers of two active and dangerous 
heretics, Peter of Bruys and Arnold of Brescia. The council 
promulgated against these heretics its twenty-third canon, a 
repetition of the third canon of the Council of Toulouse (1119) 
against the Manichaeans. Finally, the council drew up measures for 
the amendment of ecclesiastical morals and discipline that had 
grown lax during the schism. Twenty-eight canons pertinent to 
these matters reproduced in great part the decrees of the Council 
of Reims, in 1131, and the Council of Clermont, in 1130, whose 
enactments, frequently cited since then under the name of the 
Lateran Council, acquired thereby increase of authority.