Requirements for Becoming and Remaining a Pastor: an Impression From the Late Medieval Synodal Statutes of the Diocese of Cambrai, 1308-1500

Abstract

of these sources and their significance for the history of pastoral care (section 1). After having situated the ecclesiastical and religious life of the southern Low Countries in its context of Western Christianity (section 2), the conditions to become and remain a pastor will be discussed (section 3). Not the specific tasks of pastoral care, which to a large extent involved the administration of the Sacraments, will be questioned, but the profile that every pastor had to fulfil in order not to be suspended or excommunicated will be questioned. This restriction implicates a focus on what in the statute books normally falls under the headings 'ordination' (De ordinibus) and 'priestly con duct' (De vita et honestate clericorum). The survey of the requirements mentioned in these two headings allows us to trace and interpret the changes that took place in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. More precisely, what have the successive bishops done, by means of the synodal statutes, to maintain the requirements in order to improve the quality of pas toral care (section 4)? Eventually, some conclusions will be made and a comparison with the situation in the middle of the sixteenth cen tury (section 5).