What Will Francis' Place In History Be?

There are three popes whom history has designated as “The Great.”  Troublingly, two of them, Gregory I and Gregory VII, have the same name, giving us two Gregories the Great.  The Third is Leo the Great. 

As I have mentioned before in this blog, Avery Dulles in his 1985 book, The Catholicity of the Church, speaks of the three millennia of the papacy.  The first millennia was marked by an evangelical spread of the gospel; the second was marked by the rise of papal temporal power, and the third, Dulles anticipated, will be marked by the papacy putting itself—and the Church—at the service of human society. 

Leo I (400-461, reigned 440-461) is considered by many non-Catholic historians to be the first pope because he consolidated and extended papal doctrinal authority to a level not before reached.  In his reign Rome was acknowledged to be the first of the five patriarchal sees.  At the Council of Chalcedon (451) when his famous Tome was read to the bishops outlining the precise terms of how the Divine and Human Natures were united in the One Person of Jesus Christ, the assembled bishops cried out “Peter has spoken through Leo.”   With the support of the Emperor Valentinian Leo asserted papal authority over the Church of Gaul (modern day France) and would do the same for the Church in North Africa.  This was not for Leo, as it would be for his successors eight centuries later, a matter of power but a matter of consolidating doctrine for the preaching of the Gospel.  There was no attempt as yet by the popes to centralize papal power over local Churches. Administrative decisions were still exercised by local bishops who were, in turn, elected by their clergy and faithful.  Leo’s aim was to clarify the evangelizing message by preserving a single orthodox faith against the threat of Arianism which was being spread by the Germanic tribes sweeping down from north of the Rhine and the Danube.  He wanted to have a clear and universal doctrine that proclaimed Christ to be of the same Divine Nature as the Father and the same Human Nature as the Son.  Many of the Germanic tribes running down through North Italy and Gaul into Spain and North Africa were Arians and spreading a gospel that made Jesus inferior in Divinity to the Father.  Leo’s Chalcedonian faith would prevail in the Western Church and the Chalcedonian faith spread from Rome to Gaul. It would also eventually triumph over Arianism among the Visigoths of Spain, the Vandals of North Africa, and the Ostrogoths and Lombards in Northern Italy.   The Christological faith held by the Catholic Church throughout its subsequent history is the faith that Leo defined. 

Gregory I (540-604, pope 590-604) was also very interested in the evangelizing mission of the Church and in 595 sent the monk Augustine from Rome with a band of 40 monks on an evangelizing mission to the Saxon kingdom of Kent in today’s South-eastern England.  While England had been Christianized in Roman times, the 5th and 6th century invasions of the Germanic Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians from across the North Sea had all but obliterated Christendom in most of England.  Irish missionaries kept Christianity alive in the far north and in the west, but it was Gregory’s missionaries who would reintroduce the ancient faith to England and its recent immigrants.  From England then Anglo Saxon missionaries would go out to what is today Holland, Germany, and Scandinavia. 

Leo I and Gregory I very much epitomized the spirit of that first millennium of spreading the Gospel throughout the world known to them.  Gregory VII, in his battles with the Salian Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, would capture the spirit of the second millennium—power.  Gregory was anxious to establish the temporal power of the papacy in Italy to gain a political sovereignty for the papacy so that it would not devolve into the sort of pawn of Imperial politics in the West that the Constantinople Patriarchate (and later the Moscow Patriarchate) would in the East.  While Gregory died in exile defeated by the Emperor, his insistence on the independence of the Church and its supremacy over the political power of the Emperor survived, permitting the papacy to outlast the fall of the Holy Roman Empire and become a major influence in world politics even when the papacy itself lost its temporal sovereignty in 1870 with the absorption of the papal states into the Kingdom of Italy. 

These popes, Leo I, Gregory I, and Gregory VII each captured the zeitgeist of their particular age and expressed the mission of the papacy for their epoch.  Other popes in the first millennium had a driving zeal for evangelizing.  Other popes in the second millennium were anxious to extend the Church’s power into the political world.  But Leo and the two Gregories were somehow symbolic of the Church’s defining mission in the two millennia, even archetypical of what the Church needed at its helm in their respective periods. 

So now we enter into the third millennium—the one in which the papacy—and by extension, the Church—will supposedly give itself over to its servant mission.  Will Francis someday be known as “The Great?”  He has charted the new course with the same clarity as Leo, the same dedication as Gregory I, and the same stubborn opposition in the face of his enemies as Gregory VII.  Only time will tell if he gets the appellation “Great.”  It is never awarded during a pope’s lifetime; it takes decades and even centuries for its effects to be judged.  What is remarkable is that we could not have foreseen, even in the heady years of Vatican II, the sort of papacy and the sort of Church which Francis would herald.  What are Francis’s accomplishments to date that might win him the title?

1.    he has changed the style of the papacy from the monarchial style of the Renaissance and Early Modern Period to the style of a pastor who is in touch with the reality of his parishioners. 

2.    He has changed the face of the Church from a moral judge to a reconciling community of forgiven believers

3.    He has moved the teaching of the Church from ivory tower abstractions to concrete imperatives of our long-held moral principles 

4.    He has engaged the secular world on its own turf and applied the values of the Gospel to everyday life. 

5.    He has demanded of the institutional structures of the Church an integrity, a transparency, and a modernization that gives the Church a long-lost credibility in the contemporary world. 

We will see the long-term effects of this papacy. Please God they will continue after Francis has vacated the Chair of Peter and please God they will take root not only in the policies of his successors but in the hearts of the faithful so that this will be an era of Reform such as the Church faced in the 12/13^th centuries and again in the Catholic Reformation of the 16^th century.   

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.