The Papacy as a Force in History

“No political event or circumstance can be evaluated without the knowledge of the Vatican’s part in it,” writes Guy Emery Shipler, “and no significant world political situation exists in which the Vatican does not play an important, explicit or implicit, part.” Here we have the outcome of a long journey down the centuries; this essay can do no more than point to some of the significant landmarks, while avoiding those given individual treatment elsewhere in this issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

By the beginning of the second century, Christianity had adherents among Rome’s elite class. Fifty years later, Rome was established as the metropolis of the whole Church. It gave the lead in struggles with the state, it protected Christians in different parts of the Empire, it vindicated orthodoxy against heretics, many of whom had friends at court. Appeals to Rome were made against the Donatist and Pelagian claims in the fourth and fifth centuries; further, it could boast the tombs of Peter and Paul, which became a center of pilgrimage for the pious. Slowly there grew up the tradition of Rome’s primacy. After twice saving the city of Rome from barbarian invasion, Leo the Great (d. 461) consolidated the image of the papacy as champion of Christendom by resisting the subtle heterodoxy of Eastern theologians, and by wise cooperation with—and equally wise stout resistance to—the secular authority. Thus was set the stage for that moral domination and independence, and for the eventual process of centralization consistently espoused by Hildebrand six centuries later.

With the conversion of the barbarians, new problems and new opportunities confronted the Church. Since generally only churchmen could read and write, much of the civil government remained in their hands, and other secular duties devolved upon them. The Church acquired great possessions and became a potent secular force. Life was suddenly complex, and there emerged the nucleus of that canon law which became in time not only the juridical basis of the Christian west, but also a symbol of the Latin Church’s preeminent status in Christendom (a primacy never fully acknowledged by the Eastern church). Despite wars raging round the Eternal City, despite the intimidation and even the arrest of popes, and the advance of Islam in devastating power, metropolitans by the ninth century were not recognized until papal approval had been obtained, often on payment of a large tribute, ostensibly “to counteract the aspirations of autonomy-seeking metropolitans.”

During the pontificate of Leo III (d. 816), a problem as old as Constantine reappeared when Charlemagne proposed to investigate charges of adultery and perjury made against Leo. The pope could not admit a higher jurisdiction (though he informally volunteered his innocence), and by a masterly stroke reversed the situation by crowning Charlemagne as Roman emperor. The implication was obvious: the pope could sanction and consecrate an emperor.

Danger threatened the unity of Christendom with the division of the Empire after Charlemagne’s death, but the Church was blessed with a line of able popes who, even in the early tenth century when anarchy and violence swirled around Rome, contrived to strengthen the papal influence. But worldliness crept in, lay influence prevailed where it had no right, and ecclesiastical benefices went to the highest bidder.

Just when the Church badly needed a boost, and at a juncture when the papacy was on bad terms with the crowned heads of Europe, the Eastern emperor in 1095 appealed to Urban II for reinforcements to recover Asia Minor from the Seljuks. The enterprising Urban in a great speech launched the first Crusade, calling for a united Christian front against the infidel (complete penance guaranteed). The Crusades lasted for two centuries. Popes preached them, financed them, sent legates to lead them, and through them directed the foreign policy of Europe. But the Crusades also corrupted the papacy, and taught it the expediency of using this magic gimmick of the Holy War for its own secular aggrandizement. Nevertheless the action instigated by Urban had far-reaching consequences on the life of Europe. The steady stream of soldiers and pilgrims to the Holy Land demanded lines of communication, and led to a long chain of municipal development from Venice to Bruges and to the establishment of the great towns of the Middle Ages. It furthered the exploration of the Asian hinterland, and gave a great impetus to the writing of travel and history books.

The Investiture Controversy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries highlighted the deep-rooted problem of imperial claims to invest an abbot or bishop with the ring and staff of his office, and to receive homage before consecration. Usually associated with the memorable scene at Canossa when the excommunicated Henry IV submitted to the autocratic Hildebrand, the issue was fought out in other countries, notably in England where Anselm of Canterbury defended the Church’s spiritual rights against the king. Earlier popes had proclaimed their power to be above that of kings and emperors, but Hildebrand pushed this view more systematically than any of his predecessors.

Later, the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, ignoring the lesson of Constantine and Charlemagne, dabbled in ecclesiastical business, but in 1177 he submitted to the pope, meanwhile venturing a reservation (“Non tibi sed Petro!” to which Alexander II firmly replied, “Et mihi et Petro!”—surely one of the humorous moments of medieval history). It was this pope also who, after Thomas Becket’s murder at Canterbury, brought Henry II of England to the penance of the scourge.

Trial And Reaction

The controversy between Philip the Fair of France and Boniface VIII at the end of the thirteenth century was the inevitable collision of an internationally privileged clerical order and a national monarchy in an age of growing nationalism. The pope stated in extreme terms his claims to universal authority; the king claimed the right of levying dues on ecclesiastical possessions within his domain. Philip’s victory, achieved with the support of French theologians, was the first practical step toward the secular state in Europe. Philip had no such trouble with Clement V, who took up residence at Avignon in 1309 and who openly served French and English political interests. The popes remained in Avignon until 1377, their court a center of moral decadence (though Petrarch’s celebrated picture of it is almost certainly overdrawn).

The attempt at the Council of Constance (1414–18) to make the papacy responsible to a General Council ended in failure, partly because the reformers had differing ideas and a marked lack of spiritual purpose, but even more because no occupant of the see of Peter could accept the implications of the Conciliar Theory. The council set the clock back 200 years, for in the mind of the new pope, Martin V, and his successors, reform was synonymous with the idea of papal subordination, and so provoked their relentless hostility.

This was not the only sphere in which the Church of Rome’s attitude has been thoroughly reactionary. In 1616 Paul V condemned the teaching of Copernicus as advanced by Galileo; more than two centuries elapsed before this was officially revoked. Moreover, only in comparatively recent times has Rome shown anything like a genuine social policy. In England, for example, Cardinal Manning (d. 1892) admitted that all the great social and philanthropic reforms had originated outside his church, and “the names of Catholics … are to be found as opponents to almost every social movement or reform of the day.” The Church had to wait until Leo XIII’s time (1878–1903) for an official and systematic Christian social ethic (this was along notably anti-socialist lines).

As late as 1864, in dealing with the “errors of the age,” Pius IX declared it erroneous to suppose that the papacy must necessarily come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern culture.

The resilience and durability of the Church of Rome were never better displayed than in the age of the so-called Enlightenment and of the French Revolution, an age when it was temporarily eclipsed, when the whole spirit of the times was against it, and when man worked out his own destruction with the inevitable disillusioning result. But not the least of the arrows in Rome’s quiver is an infinite patience; gradually the pendulum swung back. People started looking for security—and found it in a rejuvenated Ultramontanism. Submit to the papacy! Back to Rome—and even influential non-Catholics such as Newman and Manning forsook Anglicanism and obeyed the call. Meanwhile the Romantic Movement had portrayed the Middle Ages as the great era of European unity which the Reformation had shattered. Thus was the way paved for the dogma of papal infallibility in 1870, and its acceptance assured in the face of strong opposition from within and despite the assured wrath of Bismarck and others who realized and feared the power of a strong Catholicism.

Last century W. E. Gladstone alleged: “Catholicism is hostile to intellectual liberty and incompatible with the principle and trend of modern civilization; it arouses unwarrantable pretensions to govern, and threatens the rights of the family; it tends to undermine the soul’s love of truth; it alienates cultured minds in whatever country it is professed, and wherever it reigns, saps the morality and strength of the state.” No British Prime Minister would dare say the same today, not because Rome has changed, but because of the growth since then in Rome’s influence and numbers (estimated now at 530 million), even in lands once solidly Calvinist. Yet, paradoxically, it has remained essentially a European-American church, chiefly because of its absolutist claims and its steady resistance to syncretistic infiltrations.

In 1493 Pope Alexander VI divided the world by a line, and granted all lands to west and east to Spain and Portugal respectively. Apart from the fact that this symbolic claim to universal dominion has never been officially retracted (nor has the death penalty for heresy, another medieval accretion), no one would dispute that this “bit of the Middle Ages dumped down in the modern world” is a formidable force in every sphere of life. One of its chief tenets is the primacy of the spiritual power in the human order. Back of all the tendentious apologetic and arid legalism, the commercialized rites and the confusing of loyalty to God with loyalty to Rome, this is a right emphasis. It would be encouraging indeed to be assured that this is simply another way of saying, “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”

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