Constitutional bishopric
Office of Revolutionary France
During the French Revolution, a constitutional bishop was a Catholic bishop elected from among the clergy who had sworn to uphold the Civil Constitution of the Clergy between 1791 and 1801.
History
Constitutional bishoprics were defined by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, a code presented to the National Assembly in July 1790. The pre-revolutionary Catholic Church in France was separate from the government, yet influenced secular policy. This new legal construct incorporated the clergy into secular and made them subject to the national government by re-making them as elected positions.
The Civil Constitution of the Clergy passed by a landslide in the National Assembly on 12 July 1790. Louis XVI affirmed the vote of the National Assembly on 24 August, but the new civil code provoked controversy among the clergy. The National Assembly forced the French clergy into a dilemma by requiring an oath for the new civil code, in effect concurring with a radical reorganization of the Catholic Church as subject to the secular state. Since only a minority of the clergy professed the oath, this created a schism between officially sanctioned "constitutional priests" and non-sanctioned "refractory priests." Pope Pius VI introduced a foreign aspect to the controversy by denouncing the Civil Constitution in 1791.
Constitutional bishops were often priests with less or more moderate Gallican and partisan ideas, of a less or moderate nature. They were elected locally by the same body of electors that elected the députés of the future Legislative Assembly.
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This entry incorporates text from “Constitutional bishopric” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.