Semper Reformanda

Sorry for the hiatus –I have been travelling a bit and on retreat a bit and have had deadlines to meet and—well, excuses are just that, excuses—but I am sorry.  I realize every time I don’t do an entry for more than two days, the readership begins to drop off and I have to get back to work.  And while my readership is relatively small (a couple thousand hits a month) I know from your responses that it is helping a number of you think more clearly not so much about the past as what we can learn from the past for the crisis the Church is in today.  And it is in a crisis.          One of the themes I explore when I teach—and I have been exploring in this blog as well—is the  periodic  need of the Church for Reform.  There is a precept Ecclesia semper reformans, semper reformanda (the Church, always reforming and always in need of reform).  The current mess in Rome with butlers and bankers out of jobs and into court is only one sign of needed reform.  The clear signs that there is a power struggle going on behind the scenes—indeed that Pope Benedict is more a pawn of warring factions than able to give direction himself—is very troublesome.  Even more troubling is the lack of authority the faithful are willing to invest in the hierarchy.  This is clear from the immense support being given the LCWR by the average Catholic-in-the-streets whether it is comic commentator Stephen Colbert or my 92 year old grand-aunt.  The staged and trumped-up charges against the American nuns by prelates whose own integrity has been shown to be not even questionable but voided (Cardinal Law),  prelates who are known for being supercilious rather than  judicious (Cardinal Burke), prelates whose reputation has shown them to be ruthlessly ambitious climbers (Archbishop Lori) and prominent laity who are base influence peddlers with  ties to the extreme right wing of American politics (Carl Anderson) is a clear indication that there is an every-opening chasm between the hierarchy and the faithful and this is a dangerous situation.
       When we look at the history of Church Reform we see several models.  At times, such as in the Reforms of the Emperor Charlemagne and again in the Reforms of his heirs—the Ottonian Emperors of the 10^th century, the reforms were imposed on the Church by political force.  In the Gregorian Reform of the 11^th century and Innocentian Reform of the 13^th, reform was initiated by the papacy itself under the leadership of convinced and evangelical  popes who threw the traditions of patronage and favoritism to the winds and did not hesitate to clean up the rats’ nests into which much of the hierarchical Church had devolved.  Tragically, in the 16^th century when the political power was impotent to reform the Church and the vested interests in the hierarchy were too strong for effective renewal, reform came from within but ended up splitting the Church and, to be honest, throwing out too many babies and not enough bathwater.  I have to say that in my judgment the Protestant Reformations of the 16^th and 17^th centuries were not only tragedies, they were ineffectual.
       Well, not entirely ineffectual.  Human nature is human nature.  Time has shown that while liturgy and catechesis changed in the reformed Churches, human nature most often did not.  Issues of ambition, abuse of power, intellectual rigidity, greed, jealousy all carried over into the new religious groups.  Granted some of the changes were good and should have happened sooner and with sponsorship of the Catholic hierarchy—scriptures and worship in the common tongue, restoration of the Chalice in communion, etc.  (I use etc. when I can’t think of anything else but know there must be something.)
        The Reformers also triggered the papacy finally into action and led to the Council of Trent which is the most successful reform Council in the history of the Church.  Much good came from Trent, but that is not where I want to go in this entry.
       As a historian I have come to see that as much a failure as the papacy so often has been—and I believe currently is—it is it gives a continuity to the Church with which we cannot dispense.  I am terrified of a new reformation that will cause people to walk away in disgust from the papacy.  On the one hand I see the Roman Curia and many of our bishops being the very force that is undermining the papacy by creating this injurious gulf between the institutional church and the faithful.  We need leadership with credibility not with arrogant self-importance.
       It is said that once a priest becomes a bishop “he has had his last bad meal and will never hear the truth again.”  Much of the leadership of the Church is out of touch with the Catholic in the pews.  When you are out of touch you cannot effectively preach the gospel—you become a buffoon like Chaucer’s pardoner.  This is not a time for blind obedience—only God merits blind obedience and I am not sure that he desires it—it is a time for wise and strong leadership that calls us by credible example to put our faith in Christ and in his Gospel.     

Back to the Future: Saint Peter Damian

Pope Gregory VII--sponsor of the Gregorian
Reformation in the 11th century

Today is the Feast of Peter Damian—one of the most important reformers n the history of the Church and one of my favorite saints.  Peter lived a thousand years ago (1007-1072) at a time when there was an even greater need for Church reform than there is today.  The Church had become hopelessly entangled in the political scene as the Ottonian emperors (Otto I, II, and III as well as Henry II) used their imperial power to reform the Church but in the process had subjugated it to imperial politics.  What had begun as reform threatened to make the Church little more than a slave of the State and it became necessary for Church to both undertake internal reform and seek independence from the Crown.  The struggle would culminate under Gregory VII, the pope for whom the Gregorian Reform is named and who would challenge Henry IV and begin a long struggle between the papacy and the Salian (and later Hohenstaufen) Emperors.  It was not a good time for anyone—kings, popes, or faithful, but it ended with the Church asserting its independence and having benefitted from the Gregorian and then the Innocentian reformations.  Although Gregory VII (the monk Hildebrand) is credited with the Gregorian Reform there were a number of others equally important and one of these is Peter Damian.  Damian is most noted for insisting on the Reform of the clergy, especially as regards enforcing celibacy and his demands that the clergy be purged of all those whose lives did not conform to traditional moral norms.  I want to reprint some material (edited) from an earlier blog posting. 
      There was reason for Peter Damien to insist on reform with a passion. The secular clergy were not taking celibacy seriously. This was a time in which the Church was drawing more seriously on canons (church laws) derived from various early regional church synods (Elvira 306, Carthage 387, Turin 401, Orange 441) that prohibited bishops, priests, deacons, and subdeacons from being married. As we discussed in some earlier postings (July 21, 23, 24 2011) the concern in the eleventh and subsequent centuries was primarily the protection of church property from being alienated to clergy families and many bishops turned a blind eye to the fact that most of their clergy were living in what we might call common-law marriages. To Peter Damian, however, this was not marriage of any sort but concubinage. The clergy wives were, to his mind and in his vocabulary “whores”; the clergy themselves men who had given themselves over to base passions.
     Speaking of base passions, if Peter Damian thought little of the secular clergy for their loose morals, he thought less of his fellow monks. Monasteries, whether in fact or in Peter Damian’s perception (and probably to some extent in both) were filled with homosexuals, and monks, when not busy with Divine Worship, gave themselves over to the most gross of sexual practices. Peter Damian wrote a book, the Liber Gomorrhianus, (The Gomorrhean Book—named after the famous Gomorrah, twin cities with Sodom) outlining the same-sex practices of the contemporary clergy with the most explicitly vivid detail.) By the way, he did not limit his accusations of clerical homosexuality to the monks but extended it to the papal court (the Curia) whom he thought were nothing more than a coven of mincing catamites. (Now that is a word you don’t hear often.) 
      Peter Damian was even more intolerant of gay clergy than married clergy. He wanted men inclined to same-sex relations barred from ordination and those who were ordained stripped of their Orders and reduced to the lay state. When Leo IX (pope from 1049-1054 and himself an ardent reformer of the Church) refused, Peter Damian turned his anger on the pope and wrote an angry letter accusing the pope of neglect in his duties. 
      Peter Damian was by no means a stupid man, but he was quite anti-intellectual. Steeped in monastic tradition—and the tradition of the ancient desert monks more than the urbane Benedictinism, Damian rejected the importance of secular studies, even (and perhaps especially) Philosophy. For him, as for Cassian and the early monks of the Egyptian and Syrian deserts, the monk was a “man of one book”—the Bible. This no doubt contributed to his zeal (some would say fanaticism) in “purifying” the Church. He was one who, like the Gnostics in early Christianity and the Puritans in the English Reformation could simply not bear compromise with what he believed to be the Christian ideal. 
       Surprisingly, while such a “puritan” and anxious to rid the church of what was its biggest problem, simony (the buying and selling of Church offices or positions), he was not nearly as rigid with simonical clergy as with sexually active clergy. He wrote a second book defending not simony, but the validity of the ordination of bishops and priests who had purchased their offices. Some in the Church were saying that simoniacs (those clergy who had obtained their position by purchase) were not validly ordained. (The subject of valid orders is an interesting one and one that we should take a look at sometime as it has impact on contemporary ecumenical affairs.)
To his credit, Peter Damian was a monk and not a man of ambition; nevertheless, he was forced by Pope Stephen IX in 1057 to accept nomination as a Cardinal. Stephen and subsequent popes frequently used Peter Damian as a legate to conduct business in the pope’s name in various places where the Church was having difficulties. His most important legation was to Milan in 1059, representing Pope Nicholas II to decide the dispute between the clergy of Milan—who openly violated the canons on celibacy and who, for the greater part, had obtained their various benefices through purchase. One of the cathedral canons, Arialdo of Cucciago had allied himself with Bishop Anselm of Baggio, the Bishop of Lucca, to form the pataria, an organization that motivated the faithful to reject the ministry of married clergy. Arialdo and Anselm mobilized the middle and working classes against the Bishop, Guido da Velate, and the nobility who supported the married (and simonical) clergy. It was a very complex issue, as married clergy were still the norm through much of the Church and as for simony—well that too, if wrong, was a well-established practice. Beneath the surface there were other issues. One was the attempt of the papacy to establish control over the independent dioceses such as Milan who often were allied with the Emperor and his policies.             
     Another issue was the social conflict between the working classes that supported Arialdo and the propertied classes that supported the bishop. In any event, Peter Damian effected a compromise. The archbishop agreed that no church position would be given in return for money or gifts. He then imposed penances on all who had purchased Church office, but agreed that they should keep their positions if they accepted the obligations of celibacy. The rigorists were furious, because they wanted the offending clergy—both simoniacs and married clergy—permanently deprived of office, but Damian’s compromise held—temporarily. It was to break out again under Alexander II. 
        When Nicholas II died in 1061, the Cardinals met per his instruction (Nicholas was the pope who in 1059 had designated the Cardinals to be the sole electors of the pope; see blog entry January 12, 2011) and elected the aforementioned Bishop of Lucca, Anselm da Baggio, as pope. Anselm, as we saw, was a proponent of reform. Several weeks later, an anti-reform group of bishops met at the summoning of the Empress Regent, Agnes of Poitou, and elected Pietro Cadalus as Honorius II. This created a schism in the Church as the Reform Party and Imperial Party struggled for control. This shows what the real issue for the Gregorian Reform was to be—not Church reform per se, but imperial control of the papacy. Was the pope to be free to exercise his authority unimpeded by the Emperor or was he to administer the Church at the Emperor’s bidding? Peter Damian was on the side of a free papacy and did his best to resolve the schism in the Church in favor of Alexander. He was unsuccessful in the short run, but at a synod convoked in Augsburg by the Archbishop of Cologne, Anno II, in 1062 Peter Damian made a spirited defense of Alexander and the autonomy of the papacy. Through the influence of Peter Damian, Alexander was determined to be the authentic successor of Saint Peter.

The Reform of Papal Elections, Part 2

A medieval manuscript from Krakow shows

a pope surrounded by members of his court, or

in Latin, his Curia

In our last posting we looked at the evolution of the papal election process from the second century up through the tenth.  Rome, like other local Churches, elected their bishops—the clergy (priests and deacons) voting, first presenting the candidate to the faithful for their approval and then presenting the bishop-elect to the surrounding bishops for consecration.  Those neighboring bishops could refuse consecration to the bishop-elect if they had serious question about his orthodoxy, his morals, or other suitability issues.  As we have seen in a number of postings, the system ceased working well in Rome by the ninth century when the “faithful” turned into mobs controlled by Rome’s leading families who were vying to place their candidates on the papal throne in order to control the wealth and the power of the Church for their own family benefit.  This led to a succession of notably bad Roman bishops in the ninth and tenth centuries.  There were exceptions—Nicholas I (858-867), Adrian III (884-885), Theodore II (897), John IX (898-900) and Benedict IV (900-903), but by and large this was a time of tremendous scandals in the papacy.  (check out entries for January 15^th, June 5^th, 6^th, 9^th, August 5^th among others) with stories of papal adultery, gay popes, murders to become pope, conspiracies and even the exhumation and  posthumous trial of a dead pope.   The Ottonian Emperors cleaned it up, but only by usurping the traditional privilege of papal election and appointing their candidates.  At first this was done with the façade of election, but then—as we saw in the reign of Henry III—it became mere appointment (see entry of August 13^th).  Imperial appointment actually gave the Church a number of excellent popes but it also created a dangerous precedent.  In the first place it clearly subordinated the Church to the political power.  Had this not been corrected the Catholic Church would have found itself in the same position that first the Greek Church and then the Russian Church found itself in with regard to the Byzantine Emperors and Russian Tsars respectively.  The popes would have ended up meaning no more than mere chaplains to the Emperors and the Emperors would have been the heads of the Church.  Indeed, as we shall see in a future post, Henry VIII would make the claim that since “the Crown of England is and ought by right to be a Crown Imperial” that he, the wearer of that crown, was by right head of the Church in his “imperial” realm.  But that is for later.  No sooner had the Emperors cleaned up the papacy than that very reformed papacy knew it had to break the imperial power over the Church.  That would lead to the investiture conflict, but before we go there let’s stay focused to the matter of papal elections.  Nicholas II in the papal bull, In Nomine Domini, moved to establish a definite protocol of election.  In the first place the Emperor was given no right of nomination.  The process began with the Cardinal Bishops as Nicholas empowered the seven Cardinal Bishops to select a candidate to be presented to the Cardinal Priests and Cardinal Deacons for their “election.”  This candidate would then be presented to the Roman people for their acclamation.  Only then did the Emperor have voice, having a right of confirmation; but the process was so structured that power remained with the Cardinals and their choice; there was no practical way for the Emperor to overturn the fait accompli.  By the end of the eleventh century, the separate roles of the Cardinal Bishops on the one hand and the Cardinal Deacons and Priests on the other melded so that all Cardinals participated equally in the election.  This was almost inevitable given the relatively small size of the Sacred College—rarely as many as thirty and often only a dozen or so. Remember too that at this stage of history, the Cardinal Bishops, Priests, and Deacons were all actual bishops, pastors and deacons of the Diocese of Rome who (normally) lived there and were key in administering the local Church.  They were not the international assortment they are now. 
     The Emperors were not happy with losing their right of nomination and, in fact, it was only in 1122 at the Council of Worms that they conceded the loss of that right.  As late as 1903 in the election that produced Pope Saint Pius X the Emperor (by then of Austria—the Holy Roman Empire having been terminated in 1806 when Francis I of Austria abdicated the throne of the Holy Roman Empire (where he had been Francis II) following defeat by Napoleon and loss of territories to France) Franz-Josef vetoed the impending election of Cardinal Mariano Rampolla.  Pius abolished the imperial right of veto as one of the first acts of his pontificate.  We will look more at this problem of Imperial interference in papal elections in our next posting.  For now, let’s go back to the election process.
     The right of the Roman people to “acclaim” the election persisted well into the Middle Ages but it gradually ceased to have any determinative role in determining the legitimacy of the papal selection.  The fact that in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries any number of papal elections were held outside Rome whether at Perugia, Viterbo, Naples, or Avignon and that automatically excluded the Roman crowd from participation.   Nevertheless, remember that when the papacy returned to Rome after the Avignon “Babylonian Captivity” in 1378 it was still deemed necessary to present a candidate acceptable to the Roman Populace.  By a century later that would no longer be any concern and the Roman populace was openly hostile to various popes in the sixteenth century. 
     The custom of the conclave began in the thirteenth century when, on occasion, prolonged meetings of the Cardinals failed to produce a candidate due to internal divisions among the electors.  Sometimes the papal office was left empty for over a year!  Upon the death of Innocent III in 1216 the city of Perugia—where the election was being held—blockaded the cardinals into the bishop’s palace until they came up with a pope.  After the death of Celestine IV in 1241, civil officials in Rome did the same to the cardinal electors when after 19 months they had not made a choice.  Clement IV died in 1268 and two years and ten months passed before the Cardinals came up with a pope.  The citizens of Viterbo not only barricaded the cardinals inside but first tore the roof from the building and then permitted only bread and water to be passed to the electors within.  The pope elected at that conclave, Gregory X, established the norm that the Cardinals would be secluded under relatively austere conditions until an election was forthcoming.  It didn’t always work but that is for future postings. 
    The key point we want to observe is that the Church broke the imperial hold on the selection of popes.  This was an important step in freeing the papacy from political power.  At times, it would find itself again beneath the thumb of some emperor or king but for the most part, the pope has played at least as an equal to the political forces in the world around him.  the next task would be to free the bishops from imperial and royal control.     

Need for a New Reformation

Croweds Gathered in Saint Peter's Square
the first night of the conclave that elected
Benedict XVI

We have seen that both the Carolingian and Ottonian Reformations were carried out not by prelates but by the Emperors and their officials.  These should not be considered as “external” reformations however as it was understood in both the ninth century (the Carolingian (which refers to the Emperor Charlemagne) and the tenth century (The Ottonian Reform under the Emperors Otto I, II, and III) that the Emperor, not the pope, was the Vicar of Christ and that the Church stood under his “Protection”—protection here being somewhat akin what Elizabeth I of England would later claim to be the royal “governorship” of the Church, eschewing the title “head” which was perceived in both instances as belonging uniquely to Christ.  The next Reformation we will look at is the Gregorian Reformation, named after Pope Saint Gregory VII, one of two popes Gregory known as “Gregory the Great.”  (Patristic scholars like to call Gregory I “the Great;” historians award the title to Gregory VII.  Both really deserve the title, but from different perspectives and for vastly different reasons.)  Actually the Gregorian Reform, though named after Gregory VII, began before him and was the work of a number of curial (if that is not too anachronistic a word) officials .  The reason I fear that it might be too anachronistic is this is the very early stages of development of what would today  be called the Roman Curia.  Influential in this Reformation, which will be the most successful yet, will be an illustrious array of men such as Saint Romuald of Ravenna, Saint Peter Damian, John Gracian, Bruno of Eguisheim-Dagsburg, and the monk Hildebrandwho will ascend the papal chair in 1073 as Gregory VII. 

       It is always ideal when Reformation comes from within the ranks of Church leadership whether through Papal leadership as it will with Innocent III or Conciliar Leadership as at Trent.  But what happens when the internal leadership either is not interested in Reform or cannot overcome its internal division in order to fashion and hold to a program of Reform such as happened after Lateran V in 1517?  (Don’t worry if you don’t know much about Innocent or Lateran V, we will look at those episodes in detail as time and blog entries unfold.)  As I am writing this I can’t but help think how these very days our federal government is so divided over various self-interests (Republicans, Tea-partiers, Democrats) that they can’t forge a program to meet a national crisis regarding the debt.  This is what happens when people lose their sense of the common good and seek only to preserve their own self-interest.  This happens in Church politics as well as national politics.  Original sin sits as heavy on a bishop’s mitered head as a politician’s fat ass.  

      And that is why I want to look at the question of Reformations in the history of the Church.  Today there is no Emperor to take charge and clean up the mess and the curias (or technically curiae) of John Paul II and Benedict XVI are too complicit in the problems for the their papacies to be effective in the needed reform the Church . 

     Why do I think that the Church today needs yet another Reformation?  Well, in the first place, the Church always needs a Reformation. Ecclesia semper reformans, semper reformanda—the Church, always reforming and always in need of reform.  That is just a principle of history of the Church.  Just as no one of us individual Christians is ever quite “there” but continue to journey on towards the perfection to which we are called in our baptism so too the collective assembly of the faithful is never fully what Christ calls us to be as his Church. 

      I do have some more concrete examples of why we need to have a Reformation—and it is not an exhaustive list.  I am sure there are other reasons beyond the one’s I am going to enumerate.