What is an ecumenical council?
Throughout the storied past of the Catholic Church, Christians were faced with serious questions concerning doctrinal teachings and disciplinary policies. Most of these questions were answered at the local level by the competent ecclesiastical authority (usually the diocesan bishop), but, sometimes, major issues were addressed at the universal level with a meeting of all Catholic bishops united in the vicar of Christ, the Roman pontiff. Bishops meeting to discuss serious issues in the church began in the apostolic age. The apostles gathered in Jerusalem in the mid first-century to discuss the pressing question of whether Gentile converts to the faith had to follow Jewish dietary laws and the law of circumcision. The church adopted this apostolic assembly model throughout history and such assemblies, when they involved the entire world’s bishops, were called “ecumenical councils.”
