Colloquy at Poissy

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The Colloquy at Poissy was a religious conference which took place in Poissy, France, in 1561.

At the conference, six French Cardinals and thirty-eight archbishops and bishops, with a host of minor prelates and doctors, spent a month in discussions with the Calvinists.

The conference was arranged by Catherine de' Medici, the Florentine Catholic queen-mother and regent during the minority of her son, Charles IX of France. Between this typical representative of the Medici and her contemporary, Elizabeth I of England, there was little to choose. With both religion was simply a matter of expediency and politics. The Calvinist faction in France, though less than half a million in number, was aggressive and insolent, under the guidance of several princes of the royal blood and members of the higher nobility.

The virulent Gallicanism and chronic disaffection towards the Holy See paralysed Catholic activity; and although a general council was in session under the legitimate presidency of the Roman pontiff, voices were heard even among the French bishops, advocating the convocation of a schismatical national synod. We may regard it as an extenuation of the guilt of Catharine and her advisers, that they refused to go the whole length of a schism and chose the alternative of a religious conference under the direction of the civil power.

The Pope, trying to prevent what under the circumstances had to be construed by Catholics as a public defiance of his ecclesiastical authority, dispatched the Cardinal of Ferrara, with James Laynez, the second General superior of the Jesuits, as his adviser, to dissuade the regent and the bishops. But the affair had gone too far; on 9 September the representatives of the rival religions began their pleadings before a woman and a boy eleven years old. The proceedings were opened by a speech of Chancellor L'Hôpital, who emphasized the right and duty of the monarch to provide for the needs of the Church. Even should a general council be in session, a colloquy between Frenchmen convened by the king was the better way of settling religious disputes; for a general council, being mostly composed of foreigners, was deemed incapable of understanding the wishes and the needs of France. Yet these French politicians who refused to submit articles of faith to the decision of a general council because the majority of the Fathers were not French, chose as authoritative expounders of the dogmas of the Catholic church the Genevan Calvinist Theodore Beza and the Italian Vermigli.

It was a deep humiliation for the proud Roman hierarchy of France to be compelled to listen to a long tirade by Beza against a cherished Catholic doctrine, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. They suppressed their feelings, out of respect for the king, until the hardy Reformer, in the heat of argument, uttered his conviction that the Body and Blood of Christ were as far distant from the bread and wine as the highest heaven is from the earth. This was too much for the bishops to bear, who cried out "He blasphemeth". It was too much for Catharine herself, and proved to her that the fundamental dogma of the Catholic Church was at stake. Beza's speech, revised and emended, was scattered broadcast among the people of France. We are told that the Cardinal of Lorraine confuted the heretic at the next session in a masterly address; but since he did not set it down in writing its value cannot be ascertained. The speech made at this colloquy by the Jesuit Laynez, who had the meritous courage to remind the queen that the proper place for ventilating subjects concerning the Faith was Trent, not Paris; that the Divinely appointed judge of the religious controversies was the supreme pontiff, not the Court of France. Catharine wept; but instead of following the Jesuit's counsel, she appointed a committee of five Calvinists and five lukewarm Catholics, who drafted a vague formula which could be interpreted in a Catholic or a Calvinistic sense, and was consequently condemned by both parties.

The spread of Protestantism and the application of its fundamental principle of private judgment naturally produced far-reaching differences in belief. To heal these and so bring about unity, various conferences were held in the following years: at Weimar (1560) between the Lutherans Striegel and Flacius, on free will; at Altenburg (1568-69) between the Jena theologians and those from Wittenberg, on free will and justification; at Montbéliard (1586) between Beza and the Tübingen theologians, on predestination. None of these resulted in harmony; they rather emphasized divergences in belief and intensified partisanship.

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