The Foundatios of the Anglican Church XXV

Henry VII Tudor

Well, our story of the Church of England is coming to its crunch—the break with Rome.  We have seen that there has been an uniquely English Church since at least the second century with the early Christian communities in York, Chester, London, and other Roman towns.  These local churches were in communion with the Church at Rome but, given the geographic distance, were quite independent of it.   While they maintained the same beliefs as Christian communities throughout the Empire, they selected their own bishops, developed their own liturgy, and maintained their own practices. At this point of history, the Church at Rome and its bishop served as a focus of unity and orthodoxy among Christians around the known world but did not in any way supervise the vast network of Christian communities stretching from India in the east to Britain in the west.  This English Church only marginally survived the Anglo-Saxon invasions and did so with an infusion of leadership and vitality from the Irish Church which also has an ancient and very distinct (from the Continental Churches, most especially from the Roman Church) history.  This is not to say that the English or Irish Churches were not in communion with Continental Churches but it is to remember that they had their own peculiar customs and rites as well as a hierarchy that was not influenced (much less appointed) by Rome.
We also saw that with Augustine’s mission, sent by Gregory the Great, a second strain of Christianity, one that was influenced by Rome, was introduced into Britain and that it took a while for the these two strains to join together and that in their joining together the English Church retained its ancient rites of Sarum, York, Hereford, and Lincoln as well as a variety of distinctly English customs and usages.  And while the devotion of the Anglo Saxon kings and faithful to Saint Peter strengthened the bonds of England with the papacy, the policy of later kings such as Henry II, John, Edward I, Edward III and Richard II, was to enact legislation limiting papal power in England.  Note, “limiting” not “eliminating.”   The royal policy was to protect the rights of the King in England against intrusions whereby appeals were made over the King to Papal authority both in secular and ecclesial matters.  The Kings saw themselves as governors of the Church as well as of the State, but remember in the Middle Ages, Church and State were inextricably joined in the reality of the nationhood. 
One of the crucial areas where papal and royal authority came into conflict was over the naming of bishops.  While bishops were “elected” by their Cathedral Chapters, both the Crown and the Papacy demanded a voice in the election.  Nominations to a See were usually carefully negotiated so that both King and Pope were satisfied.  However, with the 1393 Statute of Praemunire (there was a 1353 Statute of the same name and a 1306 Statute of Provisors that provided a foundation for these later acts) it was explicitly claimed to be the right of the King alone to “present” candidates for ecclesiastical preferment.  Moreover, the same act declared that "… if any purchase or pursue, or cause to be purchased or pursued in the court of Rome, or elsewhere, any such translations, processes, and sentences of excommunications, bulls, instruments or any other things whatsoever ... he and his notaries, abettors and counsellors" shall be put out of the king's protection, and their lands escheat.” It was forbidden by these various statutes as well for any Englishman to pay any tax or fees to powers outside the realm.   While such was the law, Rome expected its due and in fact the Crown looked the other way while English churchmen applied for their appointments to be confirmed by Rome and while they, the English churchmen, paid the appropriate (or at times, inappropriate) fees to the Roman Curia.   So what we in fact have is a dual allegiance of the Church to both Crown and Papacy and, while the law claimed, or attempted to claim, one thing, in fact the relations of the English Church and Rome were quite cordial and correct.
There was political trouble in England, however.  In 1399 Henry Bolingbroke seized and deposed his cousin, Richard II and claimed the throne for himself.  Richard was a weak and vacillating man at a time when England needed a strong king and Bolingbroke was strong; nevertheless, Bolingbroke—now Henry IV—did not have as strong a claim to the throne as did Edward Mortimer and England entered a period of political instability and civil war.  Henry IV’s grandson, Henry VI, himself was overthrown by Edward Duke of York, a descendent of Edward III.  This was the period known as the Wars of the Roses—the conflicts between the House of York (the white rose) and the House of Lancaster (the red rose).  The Wars of the Roses came to an end when in 1485 Henry Tudor (a Lancastrian) defeated Richard III (of York) who himself had seized the throne by murdering his nephew, Edward V, a boy of twelve. 
To cement the peace, Henry (a Lancastrian) married Elizabeth of York, the daughter of Edward IV.  (A curious side note:  The portrait of Elizabeth of York is the model for the four queens of playing cards: Spades, Clubs, Diamonds, and Hearts.)   

The point of all this is that England, after 1485, was in a newly found and yet unstable peace.  HenryVII Tudor was on the throne but there were other claimants whose rights, by strict rules of primogeniture, were stronger.  Civil War was always a possibility.  England was still a feudal state with a strong nobility and should leading men of that nobility desert King Henry for another claimant such as Edward Plantagenet, the Earl of Warwick or the brothers Edmund and John de la Pole, Dukes of Suffolk, Henry could have been in deep trouble.  In fact, well into the reign of Henry’s son, Henry VIII, the House of Tudor had to worry about maintaining their hold on the Crown.  Political stability was the chief policy of all the Tudors.  And it was the need for political stability in England that would eat away at the bonds of union between the Church of England and the Catholic Communion.  

Ecclesia Semper Reformans--Back to the theme of Reform

A freso in the Basilica of San Martino in Rome

of Saint John Lateran Basilica as it appeared in

the Middle Ages.  In the eleventh century three

Councils met in this Church. 

I mentioned in my last entry about the need for Church leadership who can “think outside the box” to meet the crises in which the Catholic Church—and I think organized religion in general—finds itself in today’s secularizing and increasingly hostile society.  “Outside the box” thinking is a natural segue into our next Reformation—that of Innocent III, probably the most creative and innovative in the Church’s two millennia. 
     We left off our saga of the Ecclesia semper reformans  semper reformanda (The Church, always reforming, always in need of reform) with Gregory VII.  Gregory died in defeat, an exile from Rome where his nemesis, the Emperor Henry IV, had declared Gregory deposed and had installed  Guibert of Ravenna as (anti)Pope Clement III.  History,  however, doesn’t give the laurels to the winner of a battle but only to the winner of the war and Gregory’s cause of making the papacy independent of (and to some extent superior to) the Empire would prevail.  Had Gregory not succeeded, posthumously of course, the Catholic Church would have been no different than the Orthodox Churches of Constantinople and Russia—a pawn of their respective imperial crowns.   This victory of the papacy over empire has implications far beyond Catholicism.  An imperial Church would never have tolerated a Luther and perhaps even Calvin and Zwingli may not have been able to escape the clutch of the crown.  Who knows?  The What-ifs are great fun to play but since any one variable opens up dozens of alternative doors for history to have gone through, one really cannot trace a new path for humankind should any one factor have been different.  Anyway, let’s move on towards Innocent. It will take us long enough as it is to get there because while there is a natural progression from the Gregorian Reform to the Reforms of Innocent III, there is a good deal of historical development to span.
       One of the effects of the Gregorian Reform was a renewed interest in canon law—actually almost an obsession with canon law.  There was at the time no unified code of canon law (that would come only in 1917 and again in 1983).  A canonist had to know the decrees of a wide spectrum of councils and synods ranging from the great Ecumenical Councils to numerous local synods that spanned a thousand years of European history.  The same canonist would also have to know countless papal decrees, unwritten traditions from Rome and elsewhere, and have familiarity with the Church Father’s whose teachings bore great authority.  As all these sources were often in contradiction with one another, they had to be balanced out and weighted with regard to the relative authority they bore.  Canon law was not unlike the rabbinic arguing over the Talmudic tradition in medieval Judaism and like rabbinic authority among orthodox Judaism, canon law came to have more and more bearing on the daily lives of everyday Catholics in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.  
      The twelfth century saw a procession of canon-lawyer popes and ecumenical councils.  Callistus III convoked the First Lateran Council in 1123 to solidify the gains of the Gregorian Reform, particularly in regards to the independence of the Church from Imperial and Royal control in the naming and investing of prelates.  In 1139 Pope Innocent II convoked the Second Lateran Council. Over a thousand churchmen—bishops, abbots, theologians—clerical and lay—attended.  It called on the clergy to dress simply and modestly and it reinforced the requirements of celibacy.  Forty years later in 1179 Pope Alexander III summoned the third Lateran Council which reaffirmed the exclusive right of the College of Cardinals to elect the pope and introduced a wide variety of reforms.  (We will have to do a separate entry just on Lateran III  because its legislation is so extensive and so important).  Lateran III also tried to deal with some current dissent in the Church that was rooted in the widespread financial excesses and moral failures of clergy and religious.  There were devout laity who were genuinely shocked and distressed by the condition of the Church and many bishops lacked the moral credibility for effective leadership.    It was a dangerous situation and we will talk about it in our next posting. 

The Gregorian Reform: Pope Versus Emperor or why Gregory is so Great

Henry IV, Holy Roman
Emperor from 1056-1106

We looked at the imposition of celibacy and the elimination of simony as two of the tree main issues of the Gregorian Reformation; the third issue is called the Investiture Conflict.  Bishops and Abbots of major monasteries were not only religious officials; they were important political officers in the Empire, in France, in England and other Christian states.  As a result, the Emperor or the various kings had a grave concern in who might be bishop or abbot in the various jurisdictions.  In England the bishops and great abbots were ex officio part of the King’s Great Council. (This is before the evolution of Parliament where the bishops and major abbots would sit with the peers.) In the Empire some bishops had a vote in the election of the German King (who in fact was the Emperor).  In all nations, the bishops and abbots controlled vast amounts of lands that belonged to the Church and most had feudal duty to their respective sovereigns to produce knights and soldiers to assist the king in time of war.  Moreover, most sovereigns relied on the leading churchmen to fill key government posts—or rather, named key advisors to lucrative Church positions in order to provide them with income rather than pay them from the often strained royal purse.  And many sovereigns placed junior members of their families, or members of the families of political allies into Church positions to provide these often unemployable folk with a job.  This does not make for good Church administration.  Of course bishops and abbots were technically “elected” by their respective chapters, but an Emperor or King would make some generous gifts of lands and or royal privileges to secure the necessary votes for their candidates to win the prelacy in question.       Once the papacy had freed itself from Imperial control by structuring the papal election to be the sole prerogative of the Cardinal Bishops, Priests, and Deacons of Rome, the popes were anxious to wrest control of the bishoprics from the secular princes.  They knew this would be a long and arduous task  but they also understood the power of symbols and rituals to shape the way people perceive reality.  Gregory VII (pope from 1073-1085) issued a canon (a church law) in 1075 prohibiting secular princes from investing bishops and abbots with the insignia of their office. (Gregory VII is one of the two popes referred to as "Gregory the Great"--the other being Gregory I.)   Up to this time the custom had crept in that the sovereign, Emperor or King as the case may be, gave the new prelate his ring, his miter, and his pastoral staff.  It was a clear sign to all present—prelate, clergy, and people—that the bishop or abbot held his authority from the Sovereign.  By taking away this privilege, the pope was making it clear to all that the Church was independent of the political power.  We Americans do not understand symbols and vastly underrate the power they have on the human consciousness and so it all seems to us like a tempest in a teapot.   Of course, burn a flag and suddenly we get the idea. It is just a piece of cloth, after all, isn’t it?  No.   But to the Emperor, Henry IV, Gregory’s depriving him of the right to bestow the signs of office on prelates was a very clear challenge to his imperial authority.  In fact, Henry was anxious to reassert imperial power not only over the bishops, but over the papacy.  He was not pleased that this system of Cardinals electing the pope had deprived him of the power his father, Henry III, had when he appointed Clement II, Damasus II, and Leo IX (see blog entry for August 13^th).  Henry decided it was time for a showdown in the OK Corral, or in this case, the Forum Romanum.  Henry convoked a synod at Worms which declared Gregory deposed as pope.  To be fair to Henry, as stormy relations had developed over the Emperor’s declared rights to invest bishops (and in fact to name them to their sees) Gregory had threatened to declare the Emperor not only excommunicated but as an excommunicate deposed from Imperial office.  Now we come to the nub of the problem, it was not over investing bishops—that was just the neuralgic point—it was who was in chief in Christendom—pope or emperor.  Neither one was about to back down.  Well, unfortunately for Henry (and ultimately for Gregory, but for the good luck of the Church), the Emperor had to back down.  Henry was young (25) and inexperienced and he had some very rebellious nobles in Germany.  When they rose in revolt Henry realized he couldn’t fight his nobles at home and the pope abroad—and as the nobles were the most pressing threat, he had to make peace with the pope.  So off he went to Italy where he stood barefoot and in a hair-shirt for three days in the courtyard of the Countess Matilda’s castle at Canossa.   Matilda was an immensely power woman, Countess of Tuscany but with lands that bordered France and Germany as well.  She was (at this point) trusted by both Gregory and Henry—though her greater loyalty lay with Gregory as Henry would find out.  Gregory had sought refuge with her at her castle when he heard that Henry was coming down into Italy.  Gregory at first had not realized that Henry was coming as a penitent.  This was not a wrong judgment because Henry was, in fact, anything but penitent.   In the end, Gregory absolved Henry but alas, Henry was not sincere in his penitence.  As soon as he got back to Germany and whipped his nobles into shape and got his empire under control, he came back to Italy with an army and headed right to Rome.  Well, not right to Rome.  First he went after Matilda of Tuscany for her support of Gregory.  He managed to seize much of Tuscany and declare her deposed, but he never managed to defeat her and she and his allies would fight him, finally defeating him at Canossa in 1090.  But that takes us too far from our main story.  Henry arrived in Rome and declared Gregory deposed and arranged for the election of Clement III (whom history regards as an anti-pope).  Gregory ended up fleeing for his life and Robert Guiscard, the Norman conqueror of Naples took him in for refuge.  Gregory died at Salerno in 1085.  This was the beginning of a war relationship that would continue for just under two centuries between the papacy and the Salian and Hohenstaufen Emperors until the tragic death of Conradin in 1268. The Conradin story has always broken my heart.  You're going to have to look it up for yourself as it is not pertinent to our saga, but I would recommend Geoffrey Barraclough's version in The Origins of Modern Germany.
     Gregory lost the battle but the Church won the war.  Emperors still continued to meddle in the election of bishops and abbots, as did the other European sovereigns,  but the power of the Emperor over the Church was effectively broken—not shattered, but broken.  Winning the independence of the Church from the Empire was probably the most successful aspect of the Gregorian Reform—certainly more successful than imposing celibacy or eliminating the buying and selling of Church offices.  Perhaps in our next few postings we can look at some of the current issues of Church and politics and see what might need some reform today.