Foundations of the Anglican Church XII

Let’s talk about the rivalry between the Sees of Canterbury and York that I mentioned in the previous post as the contested claims of the two Archbishops will drag the papacy more and more into the internal affairs of the English Church.  

A Celebration of the Holy
Eucharist in York Minster

You may remember from earlier entries that the See of Canterbury was established when Pope Gregory I sent Augustine as a missionary to the peoples of Kent, a southern English kingdom at the request of King Aethelberht in 597.   Gregory was sent as an Archbishop who would not only establish himself at Canterbury, but establish suffragen sees as well.  Augustine did establish suffragen sees at Rochester and London.  The issue of London is a bit tricky because there had been a Christian bishop there back in the days when Britain was a Roman colony.  Whether Augustine revived a lapsed See (which is the more commonly held idea) or simply appointed his disciple Mellitus bishop of a surviving Romano-British See, London became suffragen to Canterbury.  Later other Sees were established such as Dorchester (later moved to Winchester), Selsey (later moved to Chichester), Hereford, Leicester, Lindsey (later Lincoln), Dunwich (later moved to Norwich), Sherborne (later moved to Salisbury), and Worcester.  (These were in the Anglo-Saxon period; a considerable number of other Sees were added later, particularly in the Reforms of HenryVIII and then again in the Victorian era.  Canterbury was the Metropolitan See (an Archbishop’s See with supervisory rights and duties over the suffragens) for the South of England.
Now here is where it gets tricky.  York was a much older See than Canterbury, though it was not an Archbishopric until the eighth century.  Bishops of York were present at the Councils of Arles (314) and Nicea (325).  York is in the north of England where the faith was maintained and strengthened during the Anglo-Saxon invaders by Celtic missionaries from Ireland and Scotland.  Here again there is a dispute.  Did the See of York survive the Anglo-Saxon years or was it revived when Paulinus, a disciple of Augustine of Canterbury, became its bishop in 626?  Paulinus had accompanied Aethelburg, the sister of King Eadbald of Kent, who was sent north to marry King Edwin of Northumbria.  Paulinus was given the mission of converting the Northumbrians to Christianity and he established himself as Bishop at York. Again—there had been a Christian community and bishop in York in Roman days, but by the time of Paulinus and the seventh century, the majority of the population were Anglo-Saxon-Jutes who had migrated from what is today Denmark and northern Germany and were still pagan.  Paulinus had come to convert them.  As Bishop of York he filled an ancient See but there is a dispute as to whether he succeeded to that ancient See or re-founded it.  The question is important because if York had been in continuous existence from Roman days it could claim to be the oldest English See and thus the (arch)bishop could claim to be primate.  If it was refounded, then Canterbury had seniority and better claim to the title of primate of England. 
You may also remember from earlier entries that northern British Christianity differed from Roman and Continental Christianity on many points of ritual and Church calendar.  The melding of the northern and southern English Churches was not an easy task and was only accomplished by the Synod of Whitby in 664.  In fact, while the northern and southern Churches came to agreement on the date of Easter and several other contentious points, there would remain long after Whitby two distinct English Christian traditions, each a little suspicious of the other.  The fact that the northern Churches had their own rites—that of York and of Durham—and the South followed, for the most part, the Sarum rite (with Hereford  and Lincoln maintaining their own rites), one might ask to what extent the English Church ever did meld.  As the northern Church always looked to York for leadership and the southern Church looked to Canterbury, a rivalry grew up between these Sees. York was raised to an Archdiocese in 735 by Pope Gregory III but had only one suffragen See—Durham.  Carlisle would be added to the province in 1133 and Sodor and Man in 1154.  (Again, considerable new dioceses were created for the province of York by Henry VIII and again in the Victorian and early 20^th century periods.)  York was always resentful of Canterbury, a much larger and more influential jurisdiction and when Lanfranc of Canterbury demanded that Thomas of Bayeaux submit to the authority of Canterbury before, he, Lanfranc, would consecrated Thomas as Archbishop of York in 1071, not only did Thomas refuse but the clergy of York demanded that no such submission be made. 
Thomas and the York party claimed that Pope Gregory had given Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, jurisdiction only over the southern kingdom of Kent and not over the entire British Church.  Moreover, York’s claim to being the older See—going back to Roman times—made it senior to Canterbury and if anyone were to have the honor of primacy it would be York.  There was, in fact, no mention of Canterbury being the primatial see in the letters of Gregory the Great, but William the Conqueror, for political reasons, supported Lanfranc’s claim to primacy.
The issue surfaced again when Lanfranc died and Anselm succeeded him.  Anselm demanded to be installed not simply as Metropolitan of Canterbury but as Primate of England.  Thomas of Bayeaux, Archbishop of York, resisted the claim.  They appealed to the Pope.  This, of course, give the Pope another toehold in the English Church but both Anselm and Thomas were more anxious to keep the King—William II Rufus—out of Church issues than to keep out the Pope.  Pope Pascal granted the primacy to Anselm, but only granted it to him personally and not to his successors at Canterbury. 
The dispute broke out again after the deaths of Thomas and Anselm when Thurstan—elected in 1114 to take Thomas’ place as Archbishop of York, refused to swear obedience to Anselm’s successor Ralph d’Escures.  Thurstan was about to appeal to the Pope when Henry I stepped in and forbad an appeal to Rome.  This was an attempt by the king to check growing papal power in England and makes these issues be resolved within the realm to preserve what shreds of autonomy were left to the English Church.  Henry called a council of English bishops to resolve the matter.  Pascal II, however, seized the initiative and wrote Thurstan commanding Ralph to consecrate him (Thurstan) without any such oath of obedience.  Interestingly, even though the letter supported Thurstan’s claims of independence from Canterbury, Thurstan concealed the letter and instead resigned his claims to the See.  Here Thurstan too seems to have wanted to check growing papal interference in the English Church. 
Although Thurstan had resigned his claims to the See, the King, his fellow bishops, and the chapter of his own Cathedral continued to recognize him as the rightful (though unconsecrated) Archbishop.  Thurstand and Ralph both attended the Council of Reims in 1119 where Pope Callixtus II personally consecrated Thurstan.  Henry saw this as  papal interference in the English Church and was so angry he exiled Thurstan, not permitting him to return to England.  Callixtus, for his part, issued a papal bull, Caritatis Bonum, making it clear that York was not subject to Canterbury.  That did not put an end to the question however.   
When Ralph d’Escures died and was succeded by William of Corbeil, Thurstan should—as ranking English bishop—have consecrated him but William refused to have Thurstan as consecrator unless Thurstan acknowledged William as primate.  (One can only wonder what Jesus would have thought about all this arguing over who is the greatest.  It seems that these were not the first prelates to get into this catfight).  In the end William was consecrated by three of his suffragens as Thurstan was not about to concede any rights or honors to his rival.  William went to Rome with claims to the primacy but in 1126 Pope Honorius II decided that the documents William presented were forgeries and York’s independence was upheld.  More in the next posting.

Foundations of the Anglican Church VII

Stigand, Archbishop of

Canterbury, 1052-1070

When I lived in Rome I regularly, as in every day, passed the Hospital of Santo Spirito in Sassia—a still active hospital (though trust me, you don’t want to end up there) that dates in its origins all the way back to the early eighth century.  It was established by King Ine of Mercia, a Saxon kingdom in what is today the English Midlands.  Ine abdicated in 726 and made a pilgrimage to Rome where he spent his final years.  He established the hospital—originally a hospice for English pilgrims—between Old Saint Peter’s on the Vatican and the Tiber.  The area was called Sassia—Saxony—for the number of English Saxons who lived there.  That tells us something—that there was a residential colony of English living around the Basilica of the Apostle Peter.  The English have always had a love for spending time in Italy, of course—and who, given the English climate, can blame them?  But they were not just living in Italy or even in Rome proper, but at the gates of the Petrine Basilica.  Today Saint Peter’s is, while not exactly the center of Rome, very much the pivot point of the city.  But in the seventh and eighth centuries, the Vatican was quite removed from the remainder of the city which not only lay across the Tiber but was concentrated a bit downriver, more where the Forum, the Palatine, the Circus Maximus, and what is today the “Ghetto” are.    The English settlement at the Vatican demonstrates the pious attachment of the English to Saint Peter. 
It was also among the Anglo-Saxon peoples that, several centuries later, the annual tribute of a penny per hearth began to be paid to Saint Peter and became known as Peter’s Pence.  This too demonstrates the ties of the English to the See of Peter.  Nevertheless, we should be careful of thinking that papal jurisdiction in its contemporary form was somehow exercised over the English Church.    When Augustine died, his place as Archbishop of Canterbury was taken by another monk who had come with him from Rome—Saint Laurence.  Indeed the next three Archbishops of Canterbury—Saints Mellitus, Justus, and Honorius were all part of that mission sent by Pope Gregory.  This should not be surprising as the monastic community they established at Canterbury elected the new Archbishop; Archbishops were not appointed from Rome.  Nevertheless, once elected, each new Archbishop sent his request to the Pope for the pallium—the woolen scarf adorned with five crosses that is a sign that the new Archbishop was in Communion with the Pope.  It was only in 655—fifty years after Pope Gregory had sent Augustine’s mission to Kent—that a native Englishman, Deusdedit, succeeded to the See of Canterbury.  (His original name was the somewhat more Saxon Frithuwine (variants Frithona or Frithonas.)    He was succeeded by another Saxon, Wighard, who though elected died unconsecrated.  Wighard had decided to go to Rome personally to request the pallium but died there.  His death in Rome provided Pope Vitalian with the opportunity to name a new Archbishop and send him back to England and the Pope chose the Greek Theodore of Tarsus.  When Theodore died, the monks of Canterbury reclaimed their right of election and chose Berhtwald as the new Archbishop.  After that the succession remained Anglo Saxon until William the Conqueror deposed Archbishop Stigand shortly after the Norman Conquest.  The nomination of Italian and French Archbishops would forge closer and more dependent ties between the See of Rome and the See of Canterbury. 
In this Anglo Saxon period then we can view the relationship between Rome and Canterbury as a suffragen See in communion with its Patriarch.  The jurisdiction of the Pope over the English Church was a primacy of honor strengthened by the devotion of the English People to the Apostle Peter rather than the direct jurisdiction that is exercised today by the See of Rome over the Catholic Church in England.  Archbishops of both Canterbury and York periodically convoked synods or convocations of the Churches in their ecclesiastical provinces and either directly or through these convocations made the necessary administrative decisions for the English Church.  But this was no different than how the Church was administered throughout most of Europe.  Poor communication networks made close supervision by a centralized papacy next to impossible.  Furthermore, the popes of the late ninth and tenth centuries, the popes of the so called pornacracy (see entries for June 18, August 5, 2011 and February 14, 2013), had little interest beyond their attempts to control Rome itself and, in any case, had little nor no moral credibility even in Rome, much less beyond.   It would be going far beyond the truth to say that the Ecclesia Anglicana was independent of papal authority in the Anglo Saxon period.  Indeed I would not even ascribe to the Anglo-Saxon centuries the autonomy that it enjoyed in the days of British Christianity of the second through sixth centuries.  But it certainly was a self-governing Church until the time of the Norman Conquest—and to some extent, even afterward as we shall see in later entries.

Foundations of the Anglican Church V

Arms of the See
of Canterburby,
showing the pallium

Avery Dulles, the Jesuit theologian who was honored later in his life by being made a Cardinal by Pope John Paul II in recognition of his contribution to Catholic thought wrote that the first thousand years of the papacy were characterized by witness; the second thousand by power; the third thousand will be characterized by service.  I think the style of Pope Francis tells us that this third millennium has begun.  But let’s look back to that first thousand years of “witness.” 
The greater number of the Popes of the fifth through the mid-ninth centuries were very anxious to spread the gospel to lands that had yet to be evangelized.  Missionaries went out from Rome into what is now Ireland, France, Germany, and Switzerland.  From there a second generation of missionaries would spread to Scotland, northern Britain, what are today the Netherlands, Austria, and Scandinavia.  The Thessalonian brothers, Cyril and Methodius, represent a joint effort of the Sees of Constantinople and Rome to spread the gospel into the Slavic lands that are today The Czech Republic and Slovakia, as well as Hungary.  Missionaries would eventually bring the faith as practiced by Rome to Poland and Prussia.    These missionary efforts originating from Rome would weave the western Church into a patriarchate led by the Bishop of Rome, even as the Eastern Slavs would follow Constantinople, the Syriac and Palestinian peoples, Antioch, and the Egyptian and Ethiopian peoples Alexandria.  Along with a fifth Patriarchate designed from the honors due its antiquity and place in the scriptures, Jerusalem, these five patriarchal sees would comprise the pentarchy. 
The Irish Church, though it eventually fell under the sway of the Roman Patriarchate, seems to have had its origins in a more oriental Christianity.  Despite the stories of Saint Patrick, the faith seems to have been originally brought to Ireland by monks, perhaps from Egypt, going to the finis terrae (the end of the earth).  Ireland was, after all, the westernmost part of the then known world.  Patrick seems to have belonged to a second or even third generation of missionary effort sent to secure this Irish Church in the orbit of Roman influence.  One cannot say that he was particularly successful.  The Irish Church had some very distinctly different customs than the Roman Church when it came to the date for Easter and styles of monastic life.  Its isolation from the Roman world—remember Ireland had never been part of the old Empire—confirmed it in its idiosyncrasies.   Consequently the Christianity brought to Scotland and northern Britain by Irish missionary monks in the fifth and sixth centuries stamped the British Church with customs that differed from Rome.
But while Northern Britain took its Christianity from sources other than Rome, the Roman See was about  missionary work and while the Irish worked in northern Britain, it was to Rome that King Aethelbert turned for missionaries to bring the Christian faith to his subjects in the southern kingdom of Kent.  Aethelbert was married to Bertha, the daughter of King Charibert, the Merovingian King of the Franks.  The Franks practiced Roman Christianity and so it was only to be expected that Aethelbert and his Frankish Queen would turn to Rome for missionaries.  Pope Gregory I sent forty monks from his own abbey of Saint Andrew on the Aventine under the leadership of their prior, Augustine, to help in the Christianization of the Kentish people.  Arriving at the capital, Canterbury (Kent-burgh) in 597 the missionaries had considerable success because of the royal patronage. In 601 Pope Gregory sent the pallium—the sign of an Archbishop’s dignity—to Augustine and the palium even today comprises part of the armorial bearings of the Archbishop of Canterbury. 
In 603 Augustine summoned the bishops from the north of Britain to meet him.  The bishops were used to their autonomy and reluctant to give up the unique rites and practices of the Church which they had learned from the Irish Missionaries.  They were ambivalent about the meeting and the devised a strategy.  If when they entered the meeting, Augustine rose to meet them as a brother they would submit to his authority.  If he remained seated like a Lord with his subjects, they would reject his authority.  Augustine, unfortunately, remained seated and his authority went unacknowledged in the North of England for some decades more.  And it was not only Augustine’s authority that went unacknowledged, but the authority of the Pope who sent him.  The English Church, while technically in communion with the Church of Rome, insisted on its independence.  The Kentish Church and its daughter sees of Winchester and Rochester acknowledged the Roman primacy but it would take time of the Ecclesia Anglicana to surrender its independence. The process of the Ecclesia Anglicana coming under the Roman umbrella would take some centuries.    

Back to Anglican History: Foundations IV

The installation of Justin Welby as the

105 Archbishop of Canterbury, March

21, 1213

I was happily working away on the history of the Anglican Church/ Communion when Pope Benedict dropped the bombshell of his resignation—the first papal resignation in more than five centuries—and of course immediately switched topics.  I still have a lot I want to write on the subject of papal transitions and issues concerning Pope Francis, but I also want to refocus on the subject of the Anglican Communion and its history as I believe that is important for us as a case study about papal authority.  It will be particularly important for us to note the schism that developed between the Papacy and the Church of England in the third decade of the sixteenth century and to see that schism in its context.  I think the subsequent development from schism to genuine Protestantism of the English Church will also be interesting as will be the recovery of a Catholic identity in the nineteenth century.  
But let me first recap our story.  You can go back to the entries of February 8, 9, and 10^th for the details of the story, but we had barely begun.  To summarize, Christianity came to Britain with the Romans no later than the second century of the Christian era and probably even at the end of the first.  The Roman towns and settlements undoubtedly had small Christian settlements.  Three British bishops were present at the Council of Arles in 314.  The British Church was also represented at the Councils of Sardica (modern day Sofia in Bulgaria) in 347 and the Council of Rimini in 359.  Christianity was well established in England by the accession of Constantine to the Imperial title in 312—and indeed, Constantine had strong ties to Britain—his father, Constantius had served in the military administration there as one of the imperial tetrarchs, or co-emperors and died at Eboracum, modern York.  When the Empire began to implode at the beginning of the fifth century, however, Rome began bringing its legions home to defend the capital and the withdrawal of Roman troops left Britain vulnerable to invasion.   Romans were  no sooner off scene than Germanic peoples, Angles, Saxons and Jutes, began to migrate and settle, pushing the native British Population further and further back into the west.  As the these Germanic settlers were not Christians but pagans, the mass of the Christian population was relocated to what is today Wales in the west and Cornwall in the south-west.   Nevertheless, small Christian communities endured in what had been the Roman towns.
The invaders themselves gradually were Christianized—in great part through the efforts of Irish monk missionaries who started schools and centers of learning in the Scotland and the various Saxon kingdoms.  Faith had come to Ireland not from Patrick and Rome as is commonly thought, but with monastic settlements that seem to have come from Egypt and Syria.  The Irish Church had some very distinct characteristics that differentiated it from the western style Catholicism associated with the Roman Church. 
The Irish and English Churches of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries were in no way subject to Papal or Roman authority.  Rome, at the time, made no claims to any sort of universal jurisdiction.   Let me repeat what I had written in one of those earlier blogs
Of course the English Church—that is the Anglican Church for Ecclesia Anglicana means simply that, the English Church—was in communion with the Roman Church but it was in no way absorbed into it. While it held the Roman Church and its Bishop (the Pope) in honor, it had its own distinct rites and ceremonies, it chose its own bishops, it held its own synods and councils and it formulated its own canons. At the time of Bede, it was its own Church in full and free communion with universal Christendom represented by the five great Patriarchial Sees of Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem. As a Western Church it had its strongest ties to the See of Rome, the Western Patriarchate but like the other Churches maintained its autonomy.
That relationship will begin to change with the coming of missionaries from Rome under the monk-bishop Augustine of Canterbury.  That is for our next blog.