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.   

When Religion Is Used As A Political Tool

Cathedral of the Assumption,

Moscow

Sunday’s New York Times had a very good article on how President Putin is manipulating the rites and rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church to encourage a revival of Russian Nationalism and to further the consolidation of his own power as Russian President, but there is really nothing new in this as the ancient tradition of Orthodoxy, first in the Byzantine Empire and later in the Russian Empire—and even through the years of bitter persecution in the Soviet era—is for the Church to put itself subserviently and totally at the disposal of the State. 
In the years when the Grand Duchy of Moscow transformed itself into an Imperial monarchy under the successive rulers Ivan the Great, Vasily III, and Ivan the Terrible, expanding its power from Moscow over the various defeated Mongol Khanates of central Asia and then expanding its power eastward into the Ukraine, the Tsars gradually asserted total control over the Church.  Christianity had first come to the Rus peoples in the Ukraine in the late 10^th century and spread eastwards into what we today call Russia.  The church was centered in Kiev but in the fourteenth century the Metropolitan Peter of Kiev and all the Rus, the primate or leading bishop of Russia, moved from the Ukraine to Moscow to put himself under the protection of the Grand Princes of Muscovy because of the constant warfare between the Poles and Lithuanians on the North and West and the Tatars of the East and South.  In 1589, Tsar Boris Gudonov persuaded Patriarch Jeremiah II of Constantinople to raise the Moscow See to a Patriarchal See.  Constantinople and its Emperor had fallen in 1453 and Moscow already had its eye on claiming succession to the old empire as “the third Rome,” (Constantinople claiming to have inherited the imperium from Rome when Constantine moved the capital there in the fourth century).    In 1700 Tsar Peter the Great suppressed the Patriarchate because he saw it as a threat to his Imperial power.  Whereas the Grand Dukes who had welcomed the transfer of Church leadership from Kiev to Moscow, and Boris Gudonov who first established the Patriarchate, had seen the patriarchal honors as strengthening their own political power, Peter the Great wanted the Church to understand that there was one Power in Russia, and it was the Tsar.  Moreover, in leaving Moscow behind and establishing his new capital at his city of Saint Petersburg on the Baltic, Peter did not want anyone so powerful as a Patriarch in the old capital lest Moscow and its citizens think that they could go off on their own, independent of the Tsar.  The Tsars still traveled down to Moscow and its Kremlin for their coronations but power now resided on the Baltic. 
The tradition of the subordination of the Patriarch to the Imperial Power was inherited from the Constantinople where the Patriarchs traditionally had little to say and were made and broken at Imperial will.  The concept was that the Emperor, not the Patriarch, was the Lord’s anointed and Vicar of Christ.   Icons depicted Christ dressed in imperial robes to bring home this point.  The Holy Roman Emperors in the West had tried to assert this same sort of control over the Church and it led to the Investiture controversy of the 11^th century, epitomized in the struggle between the Emperor Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII.  Popes and emperors would struggle over control throughout the 12^th century and into the 13^th and it was only with the collapse of the Hohenstaufen dynasty with the execution of Conradin of Swabia in 1268 that the Catholic Church was able to shake off the threat of Caeseropapism.  In fact there would be certain situations in the West where the Church would fall under the power of the Crown—the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella is one example that comes to mind—but the lack of an effective Empire in the West (the operative word being “effective”) was one factor in preserving the independence of the Church.  The Russian Church was not so blessed. 
One of the first acts of the Russian Orthodox Church after the fall of the Tsars in the February Revolution of 1917 was to reconstitute the Patriarchate that Peter the Great had abolished.  Metropolitan Tikhon of Moscow was elevated to the restored office.  Unfortunately for Saint Tikhon this was a disastrous time to lead the Church as the very month in which the Patriarchate was restored the Bolsheviks seized control of the government, and their anti-religious policies cause a persecution of believers in the new Soviet State.  Tikhon himself was charged with a variety of crimes, but because the new government was not yet secure and was afraid of the influence he might exercise among the Russian people (and his reputation abroad) he was not imprisoned but confined to the Donskoy monastery where he died in 1925.  Several years before his death he had been compelled to sign a statement that he “was not opposed to the Soviet Government.”  He had spoken out against the murder of the Imperial Family and tried to speak on behalf of the peasants during the famine of 1921 but was effectively blocked by the Soviet Regime from any real opposition to the government and its repressive policies.  Saint Tikhon may have been unable to make his voice heard over the Revolution, but he was a brave man who said and did what he could. 
The Soviet Government abolished the Patriarchate with Tikhon’s death in 1925.  Tikhon was succeeded, not as Patriarch but as “Metropolitan of Moscow” by Peter of Krutitsy.  (“Metropolitan” is the title Orthodox Christians use for what we call an Archbishop.)  To his credit he resisted Soviet control and was consequently first exiled, then imprisoned, then—on October 10 1937—martyred. 
Hieromartyr Saint Peter of Krutitsy was succeeded by a Metropolitan more amenable to the Stalin Regime, Metropolitan Sergius.  Sergius was somewhat complicit in the exile, imprisonment, and death of Peter of Krutitsy—not that he took any direct part but stepping in to take over when Peter was arrested he not only usurped Peter’s authority but made no protest at the hieromartyr’s fate.  The 1930s were a time when there was a great destruction of the art and treasures of the Church and a persecution of bishops, clergy, and faithful by the Stalin Regime.  In 1931 the magnificent cathedral of Christ the Savior in the Kremlin was dynamited to be replaced by a projected “Palace of the Soviets.” The palace was never built and revised plans put a huge outdoor swimming pool on the site. (The Cathedral was rebuilt after the fall of Communism.)   Sergius was able not only to avoid arrest himself, but to be able to establish a certain amount of collaboration with the regime in which the Church was supposedly “protected” while in fact he was protected but ordinary Russian faithful were suffering greatly.  The outbreak of World War II and the German invasion of Russia did change the scene drastically and Stalin needed the support of the Church.  Stalin met with a delegation of bishops and forged an agreement with the Church.   Stories circulate that when German troops arrived on the outskirts of Moscow in 1941, Stalin authorized that the Divine Liturgy secretly be sung in the Kremlin’s then closed Assumption Cathedral to ask God’s help in the crisis.  During the War the Orthodox Church was given legal status and there was a lessening of persecution.  Stalin restored the Patriarchate and Sergius assumed the title.  He died within the year.
Sergius was succeeded as Patriarch by Alexi I.  Alexi had been one of the bishops who met with Stalin in 1943 to win some measure of relief for the Church during World War II.  Alexi’s election to the Patriarchate was approved by Stalin and the two seem to have had a sufficiently amiable working relationship in return for the Church’s loyalty during the War.  This situation deteriorated when Nikita Khrushchev came to power in 1953 and by 1958 the persecution of the Church was renewed.  Alexi was always compliant with the regime, however, so that the Church could at least survive—on whatever limited scale the Soviets would permit—if not flourish. During this time the clergy and monasteries were infiltrated with government priests and monks who spied on bishops, clergy, and monastics and reported any suspect of anti-government behavior, including the catechesis of people under the age of 18.  During the patriarchate of Alexi I, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was forcibly separated from the Roman Communion and subordinated to the Moscow Patriarchate as the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. 
Alexi I was succeeded by Pimen I who was the most open collaborator with the Soviet Regime.  He was little more than a shameless tool of the Government, but in doing so he won a slowly increasing measure of relief for the Church.  Pimen sponsored or participated in numerous “peace conferences” hosted by the Church to show European and North American Christians that the Church had great freedom in the Soviet State and that the Soviet Union was anxious to live in peace with the other nations of the world.  It was all propaganda as the Soviet power was crumbling both in Russia and abroad while in fact the Church was still under great restrictions.  Pimen’s death in 1990 more or less coincides with the collapse of the Soviet Union.  His successor, Alexi II, was elected without overt government interference.  When there was an attempt to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet Leader and the man responsible for the transition from the Soviet Union to a post-Marxist Russia, Alexi sprang into action, calling for Gorbachev’s release from imprisonment by the plotters and demanding Gorbachev be given access to radio and television.  Alexi II also had a very good relationship with Boris  Yeltsin in building a new Russia.  Alexi and his successor, Patriarch Kirill have done much to revive the “soul” of Russia and rebuild the cultural ties between Orthodoxy and the Russian People and Culture.  Overall this sort of spiritual revival—which has met with significant but limited success—is a noble ideal and parallels Benedict XVI’s less successful attempts to awaken the soul of Western Europe, but it does run the danger of the Church and its faith being manipulated for political purposes.  And that was what led to the overthrow of the Church in Russia by the Soviets ninety years ago.

Foundations of the Anglican Church X

Ruins of Saint Augustine's Abbey,

Canterbury

Well, back to our saga of the Anglican Church and its relationship to the papacy.  In previous entries we saw how the Church of England has two roots—one in the primitive Christianity brought with the Roman legions and colonists in the second and third centuries, the other in the missionary efforts of Saint Augustine of Canterbury, a Roman monk sent by Pope Gregory the Great in 604 at the invitation of King Aethelberht of Kent’s invitation to Christianize the Anglo-Saxon Kentish people who had settled in England after the withdrawal of those Roman troops in the fifth century.  These two Churches—the older Church which survived mostly in the north and the younger Church which Augustine brought to the south had distinctly different customs and different relationships with the Roman See and its bishop.  The older Church of the north was certainly in communion with the Roman Church but also was quite independent of it.  With its own ancient traditions and under the influence of the Irish missionaries who strengthened it during the period of the Anglo-Saxon invasions it differed in many regards from the Roman Church and its practices.  To a great extent these differences were resolved with the synod of Whitby in 664, but the English Church retained many distinct customs and rites up until the second phase of the English Reformation in 1549.  The Roman Rite was never used in England which until the First (Protestant) Prayer Book of King Edward the Sixth in 1549 followed a variety of rites including those of Sarum, Durham, York, Lincoln, Hereford, and Bangor.  The southern tradition, that of Canterbury, had stronger ties to Rome due to its origins with Augustine and his mission but also followed the uniquely English rites just mentioned.  The ties of Canterbury to Rome were symbolized and strengthened by the sending of the pallium from the pope to each successive Archbishop—a practice that would continue until Matthew Parker’s consecration in 1559 under Elizabeth I. 
During the period of Anglo-Saxon Christianity the great devotion of the Anglo-Saxon peoples to Saint Peter the Apostle built and strengthened ties between Roman and English Christianity.  In order to forge ties to Rome with the northern Church and its more independent tradition, Pope Gregory III named Bishop Ecgbert of York an Archbishop in 735, raising York to metropolitan status and thus dependent on Rome for the archbishop’s pallium, as was Canterbury.  Nevertheless Archbishops of both Canterbury and York as well as the other English bishops were almost always elected independent of papal nomination and only appealed for recognition after their election and consecration.  That would later change and while they would still be elected independently of Rome, their consecration would not occur until after papal confirmation.   One exception where the Pope did appoint an Archbishop of Canterbury was when Archbishop Wighard died in 668 on a visit to Rome to receive his pallium and Pope Vitalian uses the opportunity to selected a Greek, Theodore of Tarsus, as the new Archbishop/primate for the English Church.   

The relationship of the English Church with the papacy was strengthened by William the Conqueror who in 1066 invaded England to claim the throne after the death of Edward the Confessor.  There were two claimants to the English Throne, the Anglo-Saxon Harold Godwinson and the Norman Duke, William the Bastard.   After William defeated Harold and secured the English throne, he replaced the Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury, Stigand (who had supported Harold) with his own candidate, an Italian monk by the name of Lanfranc who had served as Abbot of Saint Étienne in Caen.  Lanfranc was succeeded in 1093 by another Italian, Anselm, abbot of Bec. To be fair, William waited three years from his conquest before sending Stigand into retirement but it was part of the Norman policy after the conquest to replace Saxons with Normans.   The Normans had strong ties to the papacy at this period—the Normans in Italy under Robert Guiscard were protecting Gregory VII from Emperor Henry IV in their dispute over the right of Emperors to invest prelates with the insignia of office.  Ironically William was fighting a variation of the same battle when it came to William of Saint Calais—his sometime rebel bishop of Durham.  That is a story for another time, suffice it to say now that with Normans on English throne and their Italian archbishops ensconced as primates, the relationship between the English Church (the Ecclesia Anglicana) and the papacy grew even stronger.  This is not to say that the Crown and Canterbury acted in concert—far from it.  William and his successors had strong intentions to control the Church in their realms and Lanfranc and Anselm both resisted royal authority and appealed to the Pope to back them up in their disputes with the Crown.  Such reliance on the papacy increased papal influence in England.  Tensions became particularly high under William’s son, William Rufus and Anselm ended up going into exile in 1097 and again in 1105 in disputes with William Rufus and later with William’s son, Henry I.  These conflicts were anticipatory of the debacle between Henry II and Thomas Becket later in the twelfth century but we will come to that matter down the line. Suffice it to say that with the replacement of an Anglo-Saxon hierarchy by a Norman hierarchy after the conquest, the relationship of the English Church to the papacy began to evolve from a relationship of ecclesial communion to the English Church becoming a client dependent on the Roman See.  It would be a long slow process and one with reverses, especially during the Avignon papacy of the fourteenth century, but throughout the one can see throughout the Plantagenet centuries a gradual loss of the ancient autonomy of the Anglican Church and its subjection to more control from Rome.  When the Plantagenets finally lost the Crown to the Tudors, this dependency would be challenged by new views of royal authority.          

Church Reform Today: The Political Ties of Bishops, 1

One of the goals, indeed the chief goal, of the Gregorian Reform was to free the Church from political entanglement with the Empire.  The purpose was not create the two separate spheres, or I should say separated spheres, of Church and State which our American mythology values so highly because the Church, with its mission to proclaim the kingdom of God, cannot act as if the State—or any other institution—simply exists in a universe parallel to itself.  The Gospel demands that we take an appropriately critical, critical according to the norms of the Gospel, stance towards the world and all that is in it.  By critical I do not mean negative.  A negative critique of creation slides too easily towards Gnosticism.  By critical I mean that we as Church must critique the world as to where it does and where it doesn’t match up to the Gospel.  Note: we as Church.  It is not the role of the “Institution” alone to do this.  Indeed, the Institution, which is not the Church but only one aspect of Christ’s Church, itself must stand under the critique of the Gospel.  That itself is a lesson that most people in the Institution seem to have forgotten these days.   But to critique with integrity we must not only have stood under the judgment of the Gospel ourselves, we must not be indebted to the institutions we critique.  I am not sure that as the Catholic Church we are equipped to critique our society.  The sex abuse scandal has revealed the lack of gospel integrity in the Church, not because of the sinfulness of certain clergy or religious (though that does not help), but because we, both as Institution and as Community of the Faithful became complicit in the abuse by our failure to address the issue honestly and openly.  We will always have sinners in our midst.  There will be sexual predators of all varieties because human society, and we are a human society, will always have sexual predators.  We will have adulterers and fornicators of both gay and straight sorts. We will have drunks and druggies, thieves, embezzlers, abortionists, those who practice euthanasia, who bear false witness, who cheat their employees, who don’t give their employers an honest day’s work, and who pollute the air and water.  We will have people who take us to wars that cannot be justified, and those who sell bonds that are junk.  Sinners are what makes the world go ‘round and moreover Jesus died for them.  They belong in Church.  indeed, they—or rather we—are the Church.  Don’t get on your high horse about “those” or “that kind of people” or “them.”  We have met the sinner and he is us” to paraphrase Pogo.  That being said, however, it is not our task as Church to bless sin by tacit complicity in remaining silent.  Acknowledging our own sins and failings, individually and collectively, we need to be able to speak out about injustices in the world around us—from sexual abuse of minors to abortion to the death penalty to unjust wars, to human rights abuses, to whatever is wrong and unjust in the ways that we relate to one another whether individually or societally.  Because I sin, there are fundamental wrongs in the way I myself and an individual treat people around me.  I need to be reminded of that and challenged to take responsibility for that.  And there are fundamental wrongs in the way that I, not as an individual but as a member of our American society, treat people around me.  I—and other Americans—need to be reminded of that and take responsibility for that.  And there are fundamental wrongs in the way that I, not as an individual but as a member of the Church, treat people around me.  I—and others in the Church with me—need to be reminded of that and take responsibility for that. 
     One of the ways that I, as a member of American society, am guilty of fundamental wrongs in the way I relate to others around me is that I tolerate the murder of the unborn, hundreds of thousands of the unborn.  I don’t approve of it but I am as complicit in it as any bishop has been complicit in the sexual abuse of minors.  I know it goes on.  I confess it is wrong.  I lament it.  But I go about my day; I eat my meals; I go to work; I hang-out with my friends; and I sleep at night in spite of it.  “I wish we could do something about it.”      But that is only one of the sins I am complicit in as a member of our society.  I stood by while Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield led George Bush like a pig with a ring in his nose to war—and led us to war along with him—a war that cannot and never could be morally justified and a war that was energized by a knowing web of lies about WMDs.  And I see the coffins come home and the mothers and the wives and the children trying to make heroes of those who are in fact victims because these deaths must have some significance more than the loss of pawns on a chessboard to make the Vice President and his friends even richer than they are.  And I watched while hundreds of thousands of senior citizens were robbed of their retirements by the Savings and Loans Debacles.  And I have no idea how many people are put to death—legally but not morally—in Texas and Virginia and wherever else while I sit down to dinner, or have a drink on the patio, or sleep undisturbed at night.  And Latinos who just want a chance for them and their children to have a better life die in the desert night after night while I dream undisturbed.   And I know that racism didn’t die with Miss Hilly Holbrook when I hear Sunday Mass goers say “Well, he isn’t my president.” 
     There was a time when our bishops gave moral leadership.  There was a time when our bishops wrote a pastoral letter warning us about the fundamental moral evils beneath “Reaganomics”—you know that system that made some people rich before it made a lot of people poor when it imploded back in 2008.   There was a time when our bishops gave moral leadership and wrote a pastoral letter on War and Peace.  They didn’t make these letters up out of whole cloth.  They took the scriptures, the Fathers of the Church, papal pronouncements, the Documents of Vatican II—they mined the whole tradition to give leadership in our day and age.  But today?  Where are they today?

     “When a Baptist gets money, he becomes a Presbyterian,” a friend told me a few years back. “And when a Methodist wants to join the country club, he becomes an Episcopalian.  When a Catholic priest becomes a bishop, he becomes a Republican.”  One of the senior bishops in the United States, a man who has been a bishop since the “old days,” even before the Apostolic Delegation of Jean Jadot and his crop of liberal Vatican II bishops, told me “The problem with the bishops today is that they are the sons of doctors and lawyers and professionals.  They have no connection with the working class—they were raised to see the working class people as a threat—they come from ‘management’ families.”  Yes, I think that is part of the problem.  The bishops know only a segment of society, they have lost touch—as most white Americans—with their own roots.  But I think the problem is far more serious.     You have men as bishops who have lost their socio-political autonomy and who see the challenges facing society not from the perspective of a Gospel critique but from a political ideology.  More to come.   

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.     

The Gregorian Reform and the Political Independence of the Church

The Emperor Saint Henry, the last
of the Ottonian Dynasty, with a
German Archbishop

Well we have looked at the Carolingian and the Ottonian Reformations  and now we can take a look at the Gregorian Reformation—named after Pope Gregory VII—one of the greatest men to occupy the Chair of Peter.  The name is a bit misleading, however, as Gregory didn’t start this Reformation and there were many other players, several of whom played as crucial a role.  In many respects it was simply the second phase of the Ottonian Reformation—it proceeded almost seamlessly from the Ottonian Reformation and yet it took a remarkably different course and in fact it overthrew the Ottonian Reformation in its efforts to purify the Church even further than the Emperors had.  Indeed it wanted to purify the Church from Imperial control.   
    The Ottonian Reformation, you may remember, is named after the Emperors Otto I, II, and III—a series of German Holy Roman Emperors in the tenth century.  Otto I (912-973), a descendent of Charlemagne but in the matrilineal line, in fact had restored the Empire in 962 after it had all but ceased to exist.  His policy was to strengthen the Church by appointing capable bishops and abbots who, loyal to him, were a counterweight to the secular nobility who resented the expanding Imperial control over their ancestral princedoms, duchies, and counties.  To do this Otto and his successors endowed the Church with considerable wealth to make it independent of all outside (except his, of course) control.  He also needed to have capable men as Archbishops, bishops and Abbots—and capable women too as Abbesses who often held political and religious power and authority  equivalent to the Abbots and Bishops—and not mere sycophants and dependants of the various dukes and counts who were threats to the expanding Imperial power.   
      There were two other aspects, also important, to the Ottonian Reform.  The Emperors used the Church as a tool to expand the imperial power, particularly eastwards into the Slavic lands that today comprise the Czech Republic, southern Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary.  Establishing Archdioceses, dioceses, and abbeys in these new lands they expanded the Church and also brought the subjugated and converted peoples into the Empire as well as into the Church.
     The final characteristic of the Ottonian Reformation was that after long struggles with the old Roman families (and here you should probably read “Mafiosi,” which while not technically true captures the nature of the problem) who controlled the papacy which they filled with some of the most profligate men known to history.  The Roman Church was and had been through most of the ninth century and well into the tenth a scandal to Christendom and had lost the respect of all and thus any real authority.  The Church in Rome, throughout most of Italy, and beyond the Ottonian Realm was of no better moral character than the secular nobility.  There were isolated men and institutions of character—the Abbots and Abbey of Cluny and its dependencies being most notable—but the Church was almost universally beholden to the secular powers for its wealth, and bishops and Abbots were most frequently appointed not for their moral character but their family connections.   
     I do need to be careful here when I say “appointed,” as technically bishops and abbots were elected—bishops by their cathedral chapters, abbot by the monks of their abbey.  But such “elections” were all but universally directed by the king or a more local political authority who had his favored candidate who, once installed as bishop or abbot, would do his bidding.  And this would be the very abuse the Gregorian Reform would seek to end. Political control of the Church all worked fine where the Emperors Otto held sway, but what of the day when kings of lesser character sat on the Imperial throne and abused their powers over the Church?  No, the honest prelates put in place by the Ottonians knew that the Church could not risk remaining under the imperial thumb.  Otto III was succeeded by the last of his dynasty, the saintly (and indeed Sainted) Henry II.   But Henry would die without an heir—supposedly he and his wife, also Sainted, Kunigunde, had committed themselves to celibacy within their marriage (no virtue in light of the royal responsibility to provide an heir)—and a new dynasty, the Salians, came to the throne.  This was not good for the Church, but that is what we shall look at over the next few weeks with the Gregorian Reform.