Valid? - Certainly.
Recognized? - Why not?
Dealing with contingencies of its time? - Always.
Relevant for all eternity?...
No, not every Ecumenical Council has to be considered relevant for all time just because it was a valid and recognized council. The Council of Vienne, the 15th Ecumenical Council, reaches its 700th anniversary this year. In fact, one of the most important of its main decrees, the bull Ad providam, was promulgated by the Council exactly 700 years ago today - the Council would be concluded on May 6, and most matters, both good or bad, justified under its name would actually take place after it. The Council itself dealt mostly with the moribund Knights Templar (the concern of the time) with complete silence regarding the true scandal of the day (the overwhelming secular influence of the French Sovereign in internal Church affairs, including the very one submitted to the Council, as the age of Unam Sanctam was being replaced by the age of Avignon).
The last Council was also valid, it is also recognized by all Catholics. It was marked from its very beginning by an obsession with the supposed concerns of its time (a time that was about to change drastically, just as the future disasters of the 14th Century in Europe would change the true concerns of the Church), as well as by deafening and scandalous silence regarding the greatest problem of the age, the overwhelming secular influence of a corrosive, brutal, and bloodthirsty global ideology.
May the current exile at a spiritual Avignon end soon, through the intercession of Saint Catherine:
But you do not see what evil and what great misfortunes come from your obstinacy, and clinging fast to your resolution! Oh me, oh me! loose yourselves from the bond of pride, and bind you to the humble Lamb; and do not scorn or oppose His Vicar. No more thus! For the love of Christ crucified! Hold not His Blood cheap! That which has not been done in past time, do it now. Do not feel bitter or scornful should it seem to you that the Holy Father demanded what appeared very hard and impossible to do. Nevertheless he will not wish anything but what is possible to you. But he does as a true father, who beats his son when he does wrong. He reproves him very severely, to make him humble, and cognizant of his fault; and the true son does not grow angry with his father, for he sees that whatever he does is done for love of him; therefore the more the father drives him off, the more he returns to him, ever asking for mercy. So I tell you, on behalf of Christ crucified, that the more times you should be spurned by our father Christ on earth, so many times you are to flee to him. Let him do as he will, for he is right.
Behold that now he is coming to his bride, that is to hold the seat of St. Peter and St. Paul. Do run to him at once, with true humility of heart and amendment of your sins, following the holy principle with which you began. So doing, you shall have peace, spiritual and bodily. And if you do in any other way, our ancestors never had so many woes as we shall have, for we shall call down the wrath of God upon us, and shall not share in the Blood of the Lamb.
I say no more. Be as urgent as you can, now that the Holy Father is to be at Rome. (St. Catherine of Siena, Letter to Bonaccorso di Lapo Giovanni, written in Avignon, 1376)
