Worth The Trip

The windows of the
apse in Suger's Abbey
of Saint Denis

One of my favorite churches is the Abbey of Saint Denis in the northern suburbs of Paris.  It’s fame comes from its being the birthplace of Gothic architecture and while that is certainly one of the reasons that draws me there, there is just a wonderful aura of the sacred that fills the place.  There has been a church on the site since the days of Saint Genevieve, the fifth-century nun who is said to have saved Paris from Attila the Hun and who has long been the patron saint of the city.  The church was the burial place of the French Kings from Clovis through the Merovingians down to the French Revolution.  After the Revolution the remains of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were moved from the Cimetière of the Madeleine where they had been buried in unmarked graves and reinterred in the crypt of Saint Denis.  Louis XVIII, the king at the Bourbon Restoration in 1814 is also buried there. 

The royal connections served the abbey well.  In the Middle Ages the Kings of France granted the abbey the right to hold a semi-annual fair and it was one of the largest commercial exchanges in Europe as merchants came from Italy and Spain as well as Scandinavia, Britain, and Ireland to do business.  Saint Denis was neither the largest nor the wealthiest abbey in France but it was among them.  In 1122, Suger, a monk of remarkable talent was named Abbot.    As abbot of the Royal necropolis, Suger was guaranteed a place at Court but Louis VI and Louis VII recognized his particular talents and relied heavily on his participation in the royal administration.  It was only after fifteen years of royal service that the abbot could turn to his monastic duties and one of his ambitions was the rebuilding of the Abbey Church. 

His first project was a new west front to the church, basing his idea loosely on the Arch of Constantine with its three portals.  This replaced the single door of the 9^th century church and made access to the church all the easier for the large crowds Suger hoped to draw.  Above the central portal Suger constructed what is believed to be the first “rose window” in architecture.  Much smaller than the massive walls of glass that would ornament Reims or later catherals, the window nevertheless represents a breakthrough in engineering,  The west front and the interior narthex behind it are a very interesting example of the transition from Romanesque to Gothic.  Finishing the new front, Suger moved to the other end of the church and built a new choir and apse.  It was here that the gothic became most clearly visible.  Suger modeled his design on the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius’ The Heavenly Hexarchies and its nine choirs of angels.  Suger surrounded the altar with an apse of nine bays, each containing a radial chapel.  Each of the traditional three levels—the pavement, the triforum and the clerestory—held massive windows flooding the sanctuary with light.  In order to support the roof—now that the walls were virtually of glass—several new features including external flying buttresses were introduced.  It was a radical innovation that would influence all European architecture for the next four hundred years. 

Today there is no monastic community at Saint Denis but the Abbey Church serves as a cathedral, the seat of a suburban diocese to Paris.  The royal tombs are, for the most part, empty as the royal corpses had been disinterred and thrown into a common grave at the time of the Revolution.  But when you go to Paris Saint Denis is well worth a trip out north of the city.  In some respects it is superior to Notre Dame.  It is certainly not as crowded and much easier to enjoy but I personally think the architecture is far more pure and conducive to both prayer and admiration than Notre Dame.  Notre Dame has somewhat of a squat  and shopworn feeling to it, like someone stepped on it and crushed it just a bit, whereas Saint Denis has that feeling of light pouring down from heaven and the soul soaring upwards that Abbot Suger aimed for in his design.

Foundations of the Anglican Church, XV

The stone in the pavement of Canterbury

Cathedral that marks the site of the

martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket

The issue of papal authority in England became more acute in the reign of Henry II and in particular with his conflict with Thomas Becket, his onetime chancellor and then, as Archbishop of Canterbury, the fierce opponent of royal authority over the Church. 
Medieval canon law, recognized by the King and his law as governing the Church, exempted members of the clergy from royal justice and mandated they be tried in Church courts.  In other words, there were two parallel legal systems.  If a layman stole a cow or killed his brother-in-law he was tried in the King’s Court and punished by the King’s court.  If a member of the clergy stole a cow or murdered his brother-in-law he was tried and punished by Church courts.  As Church courts were limited in their ability to punish grave crimes—they could only impose sentences of fines, flogging, loss of clerical state and office, and excommunication—the King was not convinced they could adequately punish—or deter—grave crimes.  Moreover, clerical privilege applied not only to bishops. Priests, and deacons but to any man who had been tonsured as well as monks, nuns, friars, hermits (both monastic and lay), pilgrims and anyone who lived “under the protection of the Church.”  There were many men who had been tonsured—subdeacons, acolytes, lectors, sacristans, clerks in minor orders, as well as most university professors and even students. Probably 15% or more of the adult population qualified for Church protection.  Many of these men—the majority in fact—had no intention of ever advancing to higher orders or Church ministry.  In addition to the problem of clerical exemption for the King’s justice, there were other issues where royal authority was coming into conflict with the Church or papal authority.  Some of these matters concerned appointment to certain church posts, what happened to church revenues during the vacancy of an ecclesiastical post, the right of a bishop to appeal over and against the King to the Pope and various other issues.  In 1164 King Henry issued a charter of 16 provisions called the Constitutions of Clarendon.  They were meant to regulate the conflicting authorities of the Crown and the Church.  Needless to say, they regulated them in favor of the Crown but to the modern ear, even the Catholic ear, they do not sound unreasonable.  They did not sound unreasonable to the Bishops and Abbots of England who, with one exception, approved them.  They did, however, sound unreasonable to Thomas Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of England.  Becket refused to accept the royal decree and for that was tried for contempt of royal authority and malfeasance in his office as Lord Chancellor.  Becket fled to France before he could be apprehended.  Louis VII of France, an enemy of Henry, was only too happy to give refuge to the exiled Archbishop.  Becket spent six years in exile before Pope Alexander III was able to negotiate a compromise between King and Archbishop that allowed Becket to return to his see.
Henry was a proud man and demanded a humiliation of Becket in return for his having had to accept the Archbishop back on more or less Becket’s own terms.  Henry arranged that his eldest son should be crowned king in June 1170.  This was not unusual in the central Middle Ages—the crowning of the “young king” while the old one was still alive and well.  In fact, Henry the Father would outlive Henry the Son by six years.  The point of a coronation, somewhat strangely, is not the crowning but the anointing.  The anointing with sacred chrism confers a special character on the monarch with the scriptural admonition: “Touch not the Lord’s anointed” (1 Chronicles 16:22).  While a second coronation would often be held when old king had died, having the heir in place, crowned, and anointed was seen to provide for a smooth transition.  So Henry the Father arranged for Henry the Son to be crowned with all due pomp at Westminster Abbey.  Henry invited the Archbishop of York, assisted by the bishops of London and Salisbury, to do the honors.  But the honor of crowning the monarch belonged by right to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Becket.  Becket—for his revenge—excommunicated Roger de Pont l’Évȇque of York, Gilbert Foliot of London, and Josceline de Bohon of Salisbury for usurping his, Becket’s, right to crown the king.  The bishops, all political enemies of Becket, fled to Henry who was at the time in Normandy. Becket was on a roll and went on to excommunicate several of the King’s nobles who had committed offenses against the Church, including one who had, in violation of the Church’s right to administer justice to its own, arrested a priest, tried him for murder (outside a Church Court) and hung him.  These excommunications were seen as challenges to Henry and his authority.  Shortly after Christmas 1170, Henry, probably under the influence of too much wine, exasperated “What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their Lord the King be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?”  Four knights, overzealous to win the royal favor, immediately set out, crossed the channel, and arrived at Canterbury on December 29, 1170. They were Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy, and Richard de Brito.  They forced their way into the cathedral where they confronted Becket on his way to vespers and in the ensuing scuffle killed the Archbishop.
The murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury was not initially to the political advantage of the Crown.  Henry treated the matter lightly, advising the knights to flee to Scotland where Henry could not reach them so that he would not have to punish them.  Their property escheated to the Crown but Henry seems to have allowed them to continue to receive their incomes from their lands.  Pope Alexander III excommunicated them several months later, however, and the King was unable to protect them from the papal sanctions.  All four were ordered to go on Crusade to the Holy Land.  None seem to have returned.  Henry, though not personally excommunicated (though his lands were for a while placed under interdict), was sentenced by the Pope to go on Crusade.  Henry agreed but never, in fact, went.   By the Compromise of Avranches Henry permitted the English Church to appeal over royal authority to the Pope—thus expanding papal power in England.  He also annulled the Constitutions of Clarendon and restored the authority of Church courts to punish members of the clergy.  In other words, Henry lost the battle with Becket, but he still managed to win the war.   Henry managed to “spin” the cult of the martyred Archbishop to his own benefit and by his accepting his penances and then building shrines to the Becket and furthering the cult of the martyred Archbishop, actually became the hero of the story in the popular imagination rather than the villain.  Henry was far more cynical than he was pious but his strategy worked.  The conflict with Becket was a political misstep and Henry was unable to push back on the expansion of papal power in England, but he emerged all the stronger nonetheless.  His son, King John, would squander that heritage and lose even more power to Rome.   

 

More on The Catholic Church and Same Sex Marriage

Cardinal Spellman presides at the Marriage of
Edward (Ted) Kennedy and Joan Bennett
November 29, 1958

In our last post we spoke of the issue of Gay Marriage because New York State, despite the protests of the State’s Catholic Conference and the Catholic Bishops in New York, passed the recognition of Same Sex Marriage into Law.  Governor Andrew Cuomo is not exactly the paragon of Catholic Laity for a number of reasons in his personal life; nevertheless there was pressure on him as a Catholic to veto the Bill.  He did not, of course—he was one of the strongest supporters of legitimizing Same Sex Marriage.  There are those in the Church who think that Catholics should oppose the recognition of Gay Marriage in civil law because such a “marriage” is not a marriage at all.  Perhaps what needs to be considered is the difference between the legal recognition of a marriage in the civil law and the theological recognition of Matrimony according to the norms of Christ and his Church.  This is not an artificial distinction in any sense.  Two people come to the parish office and wish to marry in the Church but not civilly.  There could be a sound reason for this.  Perhaps one or both parties are in the United States illegally and they do not want to draw attention to that fact by applying for a civil license.  Perhaps by entering into a legal marriage, one or both parties might lose certain pension or Social Security benefits which they need to survive.  There can be other reasons as well, but as long as no ecclesiastical impediment exists, a priest or deacon is free—in the eyes of the Church—to witness and bless their entering into the Sacrament of Matrimony.  Legally there is no marriage; in the eyes of God and the Church, there is.

Let us consider another situation.  A couple, one of both of whom are Catholics, marries in front of a Justice of the Peace or a Protestant minister.  Perhaps one or both have a previous marriage which is not annulled.  Perhaps they have been cohabiting and the priest has refused to marry them until they separate.  Perhaps the bride is pregnant and the priest has declined to marry them, unsure that the marriage is being entered into freely and with mature discernment.  Perhaps a non-Catholic partner has insisted in marrying in his or her Church.  Perhaps they simply wanted a “garden wedding” rather than the required Church service.  There are all sorts of reasons that people marry outside the Church.  The Catholic Church does not recognize that marriage as a sacramental bond but, at least in practice, it does recognize it as a reality in civil law. 

Divorce is a tricky issue.  Until the sixteenth century marriage and divorce were subject to religious authority, and only in a secondary sense to civil law.  In medieval Catholic Europe there was no such thing, strictly speaking, as divorce for the Christian majority. Traditional rabbinic law permitting divorce governed the Jewish minority.  While we say that there was no divorce for Christians, we must be careful how we nuance “divorce” for ecclesiastical annulments, especially those granted by the Holy See, often functioned as divorce in as that they permitted one spouse to leave another and remarry.  An example of this would be the dissolution of the Marriage of Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine.  The marriage was “annulled” on a pretext of kinship—and all royal marriage had sufficient kinship to use this claim—but in fact the marriage simply had gone sour and each was anxious to marry someone else.  Louis married Constance of Castile; Eleanor Henry of Anjou who became Henry II of England.  Popes, or sometimes (as in the case of Eleanor and Louis) synods of bishops regularly dissolved marriages for causes real, alleged, or totally fictitious but always political.  Royalty was seldom denied their “annulments” and when we eventually look a the case of Henry VIII we will see that the only reason he didn’t get his annulment from Katherine of Aragon is that it interfered with Medici politics.  But that is a later story. 

Most common people in the Middle Ages did not bother with a religious wedding.  Peasants in particular simply came to some sort of agreement—financial and personal—and took up life together.  From the thirteenth century on more and more townspeople went through a church blessing because it was fashionable, a copying of a ritual more common among the “bluebloods.”  And when such marriages failed, the husband (and sometimes the wife) would just “take up” with a new partner without any formal to do.  It may surprise you to know that marriage in the presence of a priest was not required until the 1917 Code of Canon Law.   

With Luther and the other Reformers marriage did not make it into the category of a Sacrament and in fact came to be regarded primarily as a civil contract.  In Protestant societies this permitted marriage to slide from ecclesiastical jurisdiction to the authority of the Civil powers.  In seventeenth century England and its colonies, divorce became an established legal procedure.  It was not easy to obtain—adultery was the most common cause for it to be granted—but it was neither impossible nor uncommon.  It was simply an established legal reality in the American Colonies (and later States) and the Catholic Church never had to resist its legalization, except perhaps in Louisiana. That was not true everywhere.  In Catholic Italy, Divorce was prohibited by the Lateran Concordat of 1927 between the Kingdom of Italy and the Holy See.  It was approved by a referendum in 1974 despite the opposition of the Catholic Church.   Ireland had a similar story.  At the insistence of the Irish hierarchy, the 1937 Constitution prohibited it; in 1995 a referendum overturned that Constitutional provision.  Malta—again against the opposition of the hierarchy (though not vast numbers of ordinary parish priests) just approved civil divorce in May of this year.  Today only the Vatican itself and the Philippines are Catholic countries that make no provision for civil divorce. My point here is that the Church has gradually lost control, even in Catholic Countries, of marriage.  Marriage is a civil relationship, defined and governed by civil law.  Matrimony is a distinct reality with theological meaning and defined by the very Tradition of the Church.  Once united, they are now distinct and subject to different authorities. 

It is strange that the Catholic Church does not object to marriages that are not matrimonial except in the circumstances of same-sex unions.  If two non-Catholics, one or both of whom have been previously married, wish to get married, the Catholic Church has no objection whatsoever even though, by Church teaching, that relationship is nothing more than an adulterous union. One or the other of such a couple be an employee of the Catholic Church there is no objection to paying spousal benefits even though the Catholic Church sees that relationship is inherently sinful.  In fact, there are many Catholics who are in invalid marriages and who work for the Catholic Church as secretaries, maintenance and facilities personnel, health professionals, business managers, program administrators, social workers, and countless other positions and the Church pays spousal benefits.  Let both partners be of the same sex, however, and it is a very different story.   No person who knows our Catholic Tradition will say that the Church is wrong not to recognize same-sex marriages from a religious perspective, but there is an inconsistency when the Church recognizes the civil legal character of “sinful” unions between a man and a woman but not the civil legal character of a union of two members of the same sex.   The Church has every right to define Matrimony as the union of one man and one woman; but marriage is a contract in Civil Law and Catholics, like everyone else,  can have their opinions and vote their prejudice—that is the prerogative of all citizens in a democracy—but civil marriage is determined by Civil Law and not religious doctrine.

What we probably need to do in this age where “Traditional Marriage”  is collapsing among Catholics at the same rate that it is collapsing among the general population, is to undertake a genuine “Defense of Marriage” not by excluding same-sex couples but by developing means to assist traditional Catholic families to grow more deeply in their commitment to God, to his Church, to one another, and to their children.  Let society deal with those whom it recognizes as married; let us as Catholics and Chrisitans try to minister more effectively to those members of our Church who need guidance and help in making their relationships true Sacraments, true outward signs of the Love of God for his people and the Love of Christ for his Church.