Back to the Roots

I recently read about a movie that won awards at Cannes and is up for an Oscar (category: Short Film) called Ave Maria.  The title is meant to be somewhat ironic as the film is about a group of Orthodox Jewish settlers in Palestine that crash their car in front of a monastery of nuns.  As I understand the story from what I have read the plot develops around the fact that the settlers can’t use the phone as it is the Sabbath and the nuns can’t talk because they have a vow of silence.  Now, actually, no Catholic Order has a vow where their members can’t talk: that is a myth, but it works the plot apparently and it does introduce my point: religion, when it becomes an end in itself, goes toxic.  If Jews cannot use the phone in a genuine emergency or nuns can’t speak in order to help others in a crisis, there is something wrong.  As I just said, this story has a bit of an artificial set-up as the strictest of rabbis would agree that in an emergency a phone-call could be made and no Catholic Order, no matter how contemplative, is bound to a total silence.  But the fact of the matter is that from the radical jihadists of Islam to the tea-evangelists of Christianity, there are those who trump common decency with a toxic religiosity.  When settlers use some claim that God allegedly gave them sovereignty over a land and use that claim to justify bulldozing the houses and the orchards of people who have lived on that land long before the days when Joshua led the children of Israel into the Promised Land—that is toxic religion.  When Buddhists persecute the Muslim Rohingya minority in Myanmar (Burma) that is toxic religion.  When Hindus attack Christian churches and faithful in India that is toxic religion.  When Pakistani Muslims use charges of blasphemy against their Christian neighbors to justify violence and plunder, that is toxic religion.  And when “Christians” use their religious beliefs to justify discrimination against others because they are Muslims or immigrants or over LGBT issues then those “religious” beliefs are not longer authentically Christian but are a toxic corruption of our Christian faith. 

I think that it is time for us Christians to move beyond religion and for us Catholics to lead the way.  As a historian it is clear from the available sources, including the New Testament, that Christ did not intend to establish a new religion.  He founded a community of people whom he called to lead a new and different sort of life.  As a historian I am used to reading how Christianity was one religion among many in the later Roman Empire.  I disagree with that.  From reading Paul or the Gospels, I don’t see any indication that the Christians saw themselves as a religion.  The followed “The Way” (see Acts 9:2; 19:9; 19:23; 24:14;24:42).  At that time they were still within the embrace of Judaism—it was only with the composure of the twelfth of the Eighteen Benedictions, the proscription of the minim or heretics, around the year 80 AD that the Christians were expelled from the Synagogue and Christianity began to develop separately from Judaism.   “The Way” was not meant to be a religion per se but a Way of Life, a path of discipleship that transcends any notion of “religion.”

Now before I get accused of heresy by the krazies who troll this site, let me distinguish between “religion” and “Church.”  According to the gospels, Christ invited together a community, an ἐκκλησία of disciples. Εκκλησία of course is the Greek word for “Church” (as a community of people, not as a building).  Yes Jesus came to establish a “Church” but that does not mean he came to establish the “Roman Catholic Church.”  The Catholic Church (Roman and otherwise) is certainly a principal heir of the ecclesial legacy of Christ’s disciples, but is also the product of an evolutionary process that has historically developed into something quite more institutionally complex than the original communities of disciples.  By institutionally complex I mean that it historically developed doctrinally, liturgically, and governmentally (though perhaps guided by the Holy Spirit) according to human design.  So while I do not think that Jesus intended to establish a new religion, I do think he established an ἐκκλησία, a Church, a community of those who were consecrated to live according to his way.   I think it might be time to move beyond the consciousness of “religion” and refocus on being a community of such disciples. 

What do I mean by a “community of disciples?”   I am not a huge fan of George Weigel or even of his book Evangelical Catholicism but I do think in that book Weigel gives us the focus for a genuine Catholic renewal when he writes

The Catholic Church is being invited to meet the Risen Lord in the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and Prayer and to make friendship with him the center of Catholic life. Every Catholic has received this invitation in Baptism, the invitation to accept the Great Commission, to act as evangelists and to measure the truth of Catholic life by the way in which Catholics give expression to the human decency and solidarity that flows from friendship with Christ the Lord. 

I think that disciples are those who develop that genuine friendship with the Risen Lord through—and this is crucial—through the Scriptures, the Sacraments, Prayer, and one aspect that Weigel (in his American individualism) overlooked: community.  In the Church, the community of disciples, we together delve into the scriptures, break the Bread of Christ’s Body, and nourish our lives of intimate prayer with Christ.  If we do that genuinely and with sincerity there is no room for prejudice, no room for hatred.  We remember the commandment: love your enemies, pray for your persecutors.  If you love those who love you: what merit is there in that: even the pagans do as much. 

There are those in our society who take to themselves the appellation “evangelicals” but for the most part they are deceivers and frauds.  By their fruits will you know them.  They incite division and fear; they divide and set people against one another. And they do so in the name of Jesus.  All Christians, including us Catholics, are called to be evangelicals: witnesses to the Gospel.  By this will all people know you are my disciples: by the love that you have for one another.  It is not by our self-righteous looking down on those who are different from us, whom we judge to be sinners or non-believers that we are witnesses.  It is not by encouraging fear and hatred, by calling for people to be “sent back to where they came from,” or denies housing or education or jobs because they “aren’t like us” that we are witnesses.  When we buy into the current climate of anger and fear and prejudice we cease to be witnesses to Christ and his Gospel.  We become “evangelists” of a false gospel, the word of the Father of Lies rather than the Word of God. 

The Ancient Roots of The Palestinian Problem

Interior of a Palestinian Christian

home in the mid-19th century

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that he plans to promote legislation that will constitutionally establish the country’s status as the nation-state of the Jewish people.  This will effectively scuttle the two-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and it plays into the favor of those Orthodox extremists who, believing that the Land of Israel was given by God to the Jewish People and exclusively for the Jewish People, want non-Jews to be expelled because their presence defiles the sacredness of the land given them by God.  (It needs to be clarified that not all Orthodox Jews favor the establishment of a Jewish State as they believe that only the awaited Messiah has the divine authority to restore Israel.)  

The posting that I did recently on Rabbi Steven Pruzansky of Teaneck New Jersey and his suggestion to relocate the Muslim Noble Sanctuary from Jerusalem’s Temple Mount to “Saudi Arabia, Syria or wherever it is wanted” as well as his encouragement to push the Arab/Palestinian population from Israel/Palestine is symptomatic of this sort of thinking.  After all, it makes sense—the Arabs are latecomers to the Promised Land.  What claim do they have to live in this land that God promised to Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, and gave to Joshua and the children of Israel more than 3200 years ago?

There is some confusion about the Palestinian people and that leads to this racist misconception.  We call them Arabs because they speak Arabic, but their ethnic identity is a bit more complex.

There were native Syrian peoples living in the lands that today are called Israel and Palestine more than 12,000 years ago.  They began as nomadic tribes with their domesticated sheep and goats, but gradually settled down on the rich soil and began raising crops. Like other peoples in the “Fertile Crescent”—that geographic strip that runs northward from Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the East and then crescents south along the coast to Egypt, there was a flourishing civilization in the region some six millennia or more ago.  At this time—c.4000 BC—various tribes such as the Jebusites, Hittites, and Amorites migrated into the land and established their own settlements side by side with those already there. These people are often referred to as “Canaanites” but that term can mislead us to think of them as a single homogenous people. In fact, these various peoples tended to have distinct settlements with a minimal amount of inter-marriage except among the ruling class where inter-tribal marriage forged political alliances.  While they may have borrowed various cultural elements from one another and even borrowed the worship of various gods, they tended to remain distinct from one another with their own rulers and socio/legal traditions. 

Sometime around 2300 BC the Phoenician peoples made settlements along the coast.  Through this period these people tended to be even more unique than the various Cannanite tribes and the Phoenicians, being a sea-going people, branched out westwards into the Mediterranean establishing trading posts and colonies in what is today Sicily, North Africa, and Spain. 

The Israelite exodus from Egypt and their entrance into the land is usually dated between 1250 and 1200 BC.  The Israelites found the land already occupied by the aforementioned peoples but throughout the period of the Judges gradually carved out territories for themselves where they established their own towns and villages.  One of the chief concerns of the Judges, of Kings Saul, David, and Solomon, and later of the Prophets, was to prevent cultural assimilation with their non-Israelite neighbors and maintain their distinct tradition, Law, and religion.  This met with mixed success as we see with the infidelities of David and Solomon as well as the criticisms of the later kings for idolatrous practices by the prophets. 

The Israelites were not the last people into the land.  Only a generation after the Children of Israel entered the land of Canaan, the Philistines came and established settlements along the seacoast.  A century later the Arameans came in. 

The Assyrians, the Babylonians, and then the Persians invaded the land in 722, 587, and 540 BC respectively.  The difference with these invasions is that the invaders came to conquer but not to settle, and so they did not leave the imprint on the ethnic makeup of the land that the various settling peoples had.  The Greeks under Alexander the Great would be the next invaders in 333 BC.  They were followed by a small but not insignificant Armenian invasion around 100 BC.  In 63 BC the Romans annexed the land as a “client kingdom” under the Hasmonean dynasty until Herod Archelaus, son of Herod the Great, ruled so badly the kingdom was taken from him and formed into the Roman Province of Iudaea. 

During the period of Greek domination under the rule of the Antiochean Seleucid Kings who ruled the land after the death of Alexander the Great, the policy had been to homogenize the diverse peoples, cultures, and religions of the land into a single Greek culture.  While most of the various peoples dwelling in Syria/Palestine/Judea acceded to this plan and began to cede their unique cultural identities, the Jews, under the leadership of the Macabees, resisted this Hellenization and did so to the point of martyrdom. 

Mark 7:26 has an interesting description of a woman as “Greek, a Syro- Phoenician by nation.”  This indicates that while there was a certain amount of assimilation, particular ethnic identities survived.  One group that was distinct that we have not yet mentioned are the Samaritans.  The Samaritans were Israelites who never accepted the hegemony of the Temple at Jerusalem but had (and have today) their own Temple on Mount Gerizim in what is today Israel.   They were regarded as heretics by the Jews for whom the Temple at Jerusalem was the only place where sacrifice was to be offered.   The Samaritans, a small community today, have retained their distinct ethnic identity to the present day. 

the Jews were expelled from the land of Judea after the failure of the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 135 AD.  While small groups were able to remain in the Galilee, most of what is today Israel remained without Jewish inhabitants until the late 19^th century and the Zionist movement which encouraged Jews to return to the ancient land they claim as their patrimony. 

Under Roman Rule the remaining population continued to homogenize and as the Roman Empire gradually slid into its Byzantine Identity in the fourth and fifth centuries, Christianity gave an even more unifying force to the once distinct peoples.  Christianity was not totally unifying, however, as the segment of the population that was descended from the various Canaanite peoples and who tended more to be rural, followed the West Syrian liturgy known as the Liturgy of Saint James, while the Byzantines—townsfolk and predominately descendants of the Greeks and the Romans—followed the Greek Rite that would come to be called the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom.  The Armenians retained their distinct identity with their own liturgical rites as well as some basic doctrinal differences with both the Greeks and the Syriacs. 

In the seventh century, invaders came up from the Arabian Peninsula bringing Islam.  While they seized control of the land from the Emperor at Constantinople, they did not force either Islam or the Arabic language on the local population.  Indeed the native population remained overwhelmingly Christian for centuries and Aramaic, the common language of the land in the time of Jesus, remained the ordinary language of most of the population. 

What one had then in the land was a base population that was, except for pockets of Druze and Samaritan minorities, predominately Christian divided into their different villages according to their specific liturgical/ethnic peculiarities: Syrian, Melkite (Greek), Armenian, Maronite and with an Arab Muslim ruling class.  During the period of the Umayyad Caliphate at Damascus, Christians often held key administrative posts.  The father of Saint John Damascene, for example, was a court official of the Caliph. 

Non-Muslims were free to practice their religion but they did have to pay an extra tax, the jizya.  This tax was an exemption from serving in the military, participation in which was limited to Muslims.  Over a period of time, of centuries, more and more of the population converted to Islam, in part to avoid this tax.  Nevertheless, at the time of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, almost half of the Palestinian population, descendants of these Greek-Syriac peoples who themselves were descended—at least in part—from the ancient Canaanite peoples—were still Christian.  They were about half Greek Orthodox, with the other half divided between Roman Catholics and Melkite (Byzantine) Catholics.  There were also significant Armenian and Syriac Orthodox communities and a smaller Coptic Christian community.  As the situation in Israel made life more and more intolerable for the Palestinian peoples, many emigrated to the United States, to Canada, to Australia and to other parts of the world where they would not suffer the limits of freedom and opportunity imposed on them by the unabashedly apartheid policies of the State of Israel.  The Christians, being mostly townspeople and merchants, have found it easier to emigrate than the Muslims who, being predominately farmers, are more closely tied to the land and orchards their families have operated for centuries and which are now being confiscated and turned into “settlements” for the refugees that have flooded Israel from Russia and other Eastern European countries.  

Rembering the Mother Church at Christmas

The Mar Elias Church, a Greek

Orthodox Monastery in Bethlehem.

Bethlehem is the center of Palestinian

Christians. 

Well, it is Christmas Eve and there is much to remember in our prayers but this evening let us in particular pray for the Christians of the Near East who are suffering terribly in the shifting political situations of the various nations in which they are a minority. 
     Palestinian Christians represent the “Mother Church” of Christianity, the Jerusalem community spoken of in the Acts of the Apostles, being descended from the converts made the Apostles at Pentecost.  They are mostly Greek Orthodox and Melkite Catholic (Arab Catholics of the Greek Rite in union with Rome) with smaller communities of Copts (both Catholic and Orthodox), Syrians (mostly Orthodox, some Catholics), Chaldeans (in union with Rome), Maronites (in union with Rome), Armenians (both Orthodox and Catholic) and some smaller Protestant (Anglican Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Methodist) congregations.  At one time Palestinian Christians made up as much as 20% of the indigenous population of what is today Israel and Palestine. We think of the Palestinians as Arabs but the majority are descendants of the ancient peoples of Palestine who have lived there since before Joshua led the People of Israel into the land promised them: that is to say that modern Palestinians are descended primarily from the Canaanite, Phoenician, Philistines and other peoples mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures.  During the period of Greek Rule under the Seleucid kings they, unlike the Maccabean Jews, renounced their various belief systems and adopted the Greek deities.  Under the more tolerant Roman rule they became very syncretic religiously borrowing belief systems from various sources according to their particular choices but culturally they remained Graeco-Syrian having lost their particular ancient identities as Philistines, Canaanites, etc.  When the Jews were expelled from Roman Palestine after the Bar Kokhba revolt (123-25 CE), this indigenous Graeco-Syrian population was left in the land.  Christianity, preached by the Apostles at Pentecost and afterward drew many converts and by the time that the Christian religion was legalized in the Roman Empire, most had already become Christian and were well established in the Christian faith.  The Persian conquest of 614 was devastating to monasteries and churches, the Persians being Zoroastrians and harassing Christians, but the Byzantine reconquest was quick and the effects of the Persian persecution was not long term.  It was only two decades later, however, in 636 that Arab forces under the Caliph Umar, the second Caliph after Mohammed, conquered Palestine.  There was no persecution of Christians under Islamic rule of Palestine though Christians and Jews, called dhimmi under sharia law,  were subjected to a higher tax rate than the Muslim population.  This tax for non-Muslims was called jizya and it was in lieu of military service which was restricted to Muslims.  The tax burden could be quite heavy, especially on the rural population who eked out a living by subsistence farming.  Over the centuries many rural Palestinians adopted Islam to escape the jizya while the merchant classes in the town were more prosperous, able to pay the tax, and remained Christian.  
     After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 many Arabs in the new country felt the effects of discrimination and chose to leave for North or South America as well as for former British dominions in Australia and South Africa.  (Palestine had been a British Protectorate from the end of World War I until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.)  In a similar way when Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza in the Six Days War (1967), many Palestinians decided it was time to emigrate.  Urban merchants can convert their business to cash far more easily than farmers whose wealth is in their land—a land that is poor to begin which and which now became subject to seizure at whim as the ‘settlements’ go up on what had been Palestinian farms and orchards.  Consequently the Christians have been quick to emigrate while the Muslims economically do not always have the same freedom.  The Christian population in Israel/Palestine has now diminished to less than 3% from a pre-State of Israel high of perhaps 10%.  According to the Latin Patriarchate (The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Jerusalem), the Christian Population is being driven out by a combination of Israeli policy towards Palestinians and Muslim prejudice against Christian Arabs.  There is great danger of the Christian population disappearing from Israel/Palestine and Christians losing a heritage that goes back to the preaching of Jesus.  We will look at the problems of other Christian communities—the Copts (Egypt), the Chaldeans (Iraq), and the Maronites (Lebanon) in future blogs. 

September 11th -- Revenge or Reconciliation

The body of Franciscan Friar Mychal Judge, is

carried from the site of the Twin Towers.  Father

Mychal, a fire department chaplain, was designated

as victim # 1 of  the attacks.

Today is September 11^th, the tenth anniversary of one of the most tragically inauspicious days in American history.  And it is not without its controversies.  No clergy have been invited to speak at the ceremony in New York.  While Archbishop Dolan, the official voice of Catholicism in New York,  had no problem with that, the unofficial “Catholic League” has joined a spectrum of “evangelicals” in denouncing the “secularization” of our society that this omission represents.  Meanwhile in Washington there also were complaints that no “Evangelical” Protestants were invited to take a leadership role at a service originally scheduled for the National Cathedral (Episcopal) but later moved to Washington Hebrew Congregation due to structural damage suffered at the Cathedral during a recent earthquake.  The Cathedral staff decided unilaterally but not illogically that they, being Christians themselves, would be the Christian representatives at this event.  Cardinal Donald Wuerl did not see the need to protest that no Catholics were invited; Catholics simply held their own memorial at a special Mass at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.  I think his Eminence knows you can’t win for losing in this game of religion in public life these days.  Personally, while I believe that public ceremonies, religious and secular, are helpful in building a pluralistic and democratic society, I have never been enthusiastic about participating in these sort of inter-religious events that require one’s religious convictions be boiled down to least-common-denominators.  I am not at all adverse to attending religious services in a tradition other than my own.  To the contrary, a mixture of curiosity and respect makes me anxious to accept invitations to various forms of worship.  What I don’t have time for is civic religion—the bland “any deity will do” sort of “prayer” that is too much pro forma and too little from the heart.  I will render my worship where I can speak truthfully and fully from the heart to God and where I am not subjected to pious platitudes that are three quarters rhetoric and one quarter feel-good philosophy light.  In any event, it turned out to be a particularly good day to be at Mass.  (Lutherans, Episcopalians, and others who follow the common lectionary hopefully found it to be a day of equally rich messaging.)  We were hit over the head this Sunday with Jesus’ no-holds-barred message of the absolute and unqualified need to forgive if we expect ourselves to be forgiven.  Forgiveness and Reconciliation: now that is a challenging message to our modern world. 
     Time Magazine ran an article on how preachers should approach this weekend.  Picking up on the themes in the cycle of liturgical readings shared by Catholics, Lutherans, Anglican/Episcopalians,  and several other Churches, the obvious message was reconciliation and forgiveness.  That did not go over well in the blogosphere where the usual crazies were fast to weigh in on how Muslims hate Christians and want to destroy Christianity and impose Sharia law on everyone.  (It never seems to hit these same people that there are plenty of Christians who want to impose their particular beliefs on society as well.  But then of course Christian beliefs come from God while non-Christian beliefs are, at best, man-devised and thus not worthy of consideration.) 

     I remember being at a Papal Audience on September 12, 2001.  The pope had much to say by means of words of consolation to the American people but he also told us not to blame Islam.  Two weeks later John Paul visited Kazakhstan where he quoted Islamic scriptures, poetry, and writers to highlight a message of peace and harmony between Islam and Christianity.  We must continue to work building bridges of understanding among peoples of all religions and no religion.  We need to cultivate a culture of tolerance and more than tolerance, but an active respect for one another and for each other’s beliefs.  We need a culture of dialogue.  I was once confident that our Catholic Church was encouraging that.  I am not so sure now.  Granted, Pope Benedict XVI has convoked another multi-religious gathering in Assisi for prayer this October.  But on a local level all I hear are negative comments about those whose faith and religious practices are different than ours.  Even among Christians, the ecumenical movement is all but dead.  Now Episcopalians and Lutherans and Methodists and  Presbyterians are derided because they don’t agree with us on same-sex marriage or they ordain women or they do not view abortion through the prism of protecting the life of the unborn.  I am no syncretist.  I am a Catholic because I believe that the Gospel of Jesus Christ contains God’s Revelation to humankind in a way that surpasses other religious traditions and I believe that the Catholic Church has preserved the integrity of that Gospel not as perfectly as it might have but even more authentically than various other Christian groups have.  That is not to say that I do not respect other religions or other Christian Churches and it is not to say that I do not recognize great truths—human and revealed—in them, but only that in my hearing the Catholic tone rings most clear and true.  Nonetheless, I know that I have much to learn not only from other Christians but from other peoples of various religions and from non-believers.  And I want to live in a society that is open to truth and the search for truth, not a society in which one religious group or another are so convinced of the monopoly on the truth that there is no need for discussion and dialogue.  Religion can be a force for human community or it can be a force against it.  Those who engineered the assaults of September 11^th used religion to divide and attack.  Those who advocate sectarianism in our society today are no better.  But those who bear the vision that in the fullness of time all things in heaven and on earth are to be summed up in Christ know that the path of mutual respect and sincere dialogue is the way to peace. 

Roots of the Reformation XVII: Who Reforms the Pope?

Otto I --restorer of the Holy Roman Empire

Charlemagne’s empire with its Renaissance and Reformation did not last.  The Emperor was succeeded by his son, Louis, who in turn was succeeded by his son Lothair.  But Lothair’s claims were disputed by his half-brothers Louis the German and Charles the Bald  The two brothers were too strong for Lothair and after much warfare among the three, Lothair was left with the imperial title but with much of the realm taken by his brothers. Lothair himself, when dying, left the imperial title to his son Louis, but divided his remaining lands among Louis and his two brothers—Lothair II and Charles of Provence.  This was not an easy time for Europe—the Vikings were ravaging the Atlantic and channel coasts and the Saracens were ravaging the Italian possessions of the Empire. On his deathbed, Louis named his cousin Carloman, the son of his uncle Louis the German, to succeed him, but his other uncle, Charles the Bald—in connivance with Pope John VIII—seized the throne.  John, by the way, is a curious personage himself and was quite effeminate.  Patrick Madrid, an amateur historian (and the operative word is amateur), suggests his effeminacy may have given rise to the Pope Joan legends.  That is a very complex topic and we will have fun someday soon looking at those stories.  However “light in his buskins” he may have been, John was a good pope; indeed a great pope.  Of course the competition at the time was not much.  John had a problem and that was the Saracen (Muslim) pirates who were raiding papal Italy and so the pope turned to the Carolingians for help just as Leo III had turned to Charlemagne and Pope Zachary had turned to Pepin in their respective political woes in the previous century.  They let him down—they were too divided among themselves for any sort of effective response—and the popes had to pay tribute to the Saracens.

Speaking of the Carolingians,  Charles the Bald was succeeded in the Imperial title by his nephew, Charles the Fat.   Meanwhile in each of these successions various grandchildren and great grandchildren of Charlemagne kept dividing lands and squabbling with one another, each trying to expand his own power.  Most were not interested in the imperial title because it had become nothing more than that—a title.  Power was local and the central administration of Charlemagne had completely broken down.  In fact, with the death of Berengar of Friuli in 924 the throne was empty and remained so for thirty-eight years.  All this at a time when Europe needed strong leadership—and when the Church needed a protector not only against Vikings and Saracens, but against some of the most unworthy men every to sit on the throne of Peter.   This was a time when popes obtained their office by cash, by murder and by adultery.   

In 962 the great-great-great-great-grandson of Charlemagne, through a predominately feminine line, took the throne and revived the empire.   His name was Otto.  He had become King of East Francia in 936, that part of Charlemagne’s empire that went to Louis the German and is what we call today Germany (West Francia, or West Frankreich being France, also known at this period as Neustria).  Otto arranged for his coronation at Charlemagne’s capital of Aachen and in Charlemagne’s cathedral where Charlemagne’s bones lie.  Now, just in case you’re missing this—he is trying from the beginning to establish a claim to Charlemagne’s title and realm.

In the early 960’s, the papal possessions in Italy—the Papal States—were overrun and conquered by Berengar II, the grandson of Berengar of Friuli who had been the last emperor, dying in 924.  Berengar was a thug.  The Pope—John XII—was worse.  Nevertheless, when John asked the help of Otto in regaining his temporal possessions, Otto came down into Italy, defeated Berengar, restored the Pope to power.  The Pope, for his part, then crowned Otto as Emperor, restoring the lapsed imperium.  Pope and Emperor then established the Diploma Ottonianum, a treaty in which Otto and his successors would protect the papacy. 

This brings us back to the thorny issue of papal versus imperial power.  Charlemagne saw himself having supreme authority over the Church in the model that the Byzantine Emperors had exercised from the time of Justinian, and in fact from Constantine’s control over the Church.  Certainly Constantine met nothing but gratitude from Popes Miltiades and Sylvester.   Justinian, for his part, kept papal authority dependent on the Imperial exarch in Italy.  This was and would be a problem for Eastern (later specifically Orthodox) Christianity where the Emperors—first the Greek Emperor at Constantinople and later the Russian Emperors at Moscow and Saint Petersburg—firmly kept the Church under the imperial thumb and the Church thanked them for that.  So deeply ingrained was the Caesropapism in Orthodoxy that centuries later, even under the worst years of Communist oppression and persecution, the Russian Church was totally compliant with the Soviet government.  But, to be fair, that was its strategy for survival and in so far as it was a survival strategy, it worked. 

The Western Emperors saw their authority in the same way and for several centuries most popes agreed.  We saw (see blog entry of May 12, 2011) that Charlemagne altered the Creed of Nicea and, in direct contradiction to Leo III, insisted that this revised Creed be used in the liturgy)   In 824, Louis the Pious, his son and co-emperor, Lothair, and Pope Eugene II promulgated the Constitutio Romana, a protocol by which the Popes recognized, among other things, that the authority of the Emperor was supreme.  The Popes, for their part, were in a bind.  They needed the military protection from a series of foes—Lombards, Magyars, Saracens, and a host of Italian warrior-counts—to protect Rome and the papal territories.  Secondly they, like everyone else in Europe, were used to thinking of the Emperor as being supreme, indeed as being the Vicar of Christ which was a title the emperors had appropriated to themselves.  Finally, the popes had very little real power.  Bishops were elected locally, admittedly often under some royal or noble pressure.  Local Bishops, not popes, made decisions regarding liturgy and cult as well as Church discipline.  Papal authority was exercised more by encouragement and exhortation than by decree.  There was not much point into getting into Turf warfare with the Emperor.  That would change, but for the time being, the popes were willing to let the issue slide.  And it was just as well—the Church needed the emperors to clean up a papacy that had become hopelessly corrupt.  I did a blog entry on what historians call The Pornacracy (cf. January 15 2011) which means the Rule (of the Church) by whores and refers to a period.  While you’re looking at that check out the January 24 2011 entry which is about the Cadaver Synod.  This might give you a picture of just how mad things were in the Church in the tenth century.     I think tomorrow we will talk about John XII—the pope who asks Otto for help.  It will show you why we need some outside authority to clean up the mess in Rome.  Just remember the old Italian axiom—il pesce puzza dalla testa—the fish rots from the head: it was coined about the papacy.