Let the Holy Spirit Shed Her Wisdom

Patriarch Bartholomew of
Constantinople

It was only three and a half years after the 1959 announcement of the Second Vatican Council that 2500 Bishops, Abbots, and General Superiors of Religious Congregations gathered for the Council’s first session in the nave of the Patriarchal Basilica of Saint Peter in the Vatican to begin deliberations that would radically alter the face of Catholicism throughout the world.  On the other hand, it has taken the Orthodox Churches fifty-five years to prepare for the first Holy and Great Council, the first such gathering of the Orthodox in 1139 years and the first since the Great Schism which divided the Orthodox and Catholic worlds.  (This refers to the Fourth Council of Constantinople, regarded by some, but not by all as “Ecumenical,” which healed the Photian Schism and was actually held not in 887 but 879-80.)
The rules are different for this Holy and Great Council than for an authentically Ecumenical Council.  In an Ecumenical Council—and here I am referring to the first seven Councils which are accepted by both Churches of the East and West—all bishops are invited to participate and the vote of each bishop counts.  There is also free (and often free-for-all) discussion of the agenda with decision by majority and not by universal consensus.
The rules set forth for the upcoming Holy and Great Council to be held the end of this week in Crete call for each self-governing Orthodox Church to send 24 Bishop-delegates and each Church will have but a single vote in the final deliberations.   Moreover, the documents of the Council have been pre-agreed on (with some exception regarding the proposed legislation on marriage) and not subject to editing upon the discussion and voting.  It is then quite rigidly structured.
And now, at the last minute, the Holy and Great Synod appears to be imploding as several of the constituent Churches—including the most powerful, the Russian Orthodox Church—withdraws.  Orthodoxy is not a single Church, nor even like Catholicism, a communion of Churches but rather a family of Churches in communion with one another.  Let me explain.  The Roman Catholic Church is a single Church comprised of local Churches (dioceses) who have irrevocably submitted their autonomy to the Patriarchal Church of the West, the Bishopric of Rome, the papacy.  The Catholic Church (as distinguished from the Roman Catholic Church) is a communion of Churches, the largest and most influential of which is the Roman Catholic Church, in Eucharistic Fellowship with the Bishop of Rome.  Some of these Churches in Communion are the Melkite Patriarchate and its constituent local Churches (eparchies or dioceses), The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Major Archbishopric (some would say Patriarchate) and its constituent Churches, The Maronite Patriarchate of Antioch and its constituent Churches, The Syro-Malabar Major Archbishopric and its constituent Churches, and others.  While there is, and certainly more so after Vatican II, a certain amount of autonomy exercised by these Churches in communion with Rome, it does not compare with the total independence of each of the fourteen Churches that comprise Orthodoxy.  The authority exercised by the Patriarch of Constantinople over the other Churches is purely titular and without any means of enforcement.  Thus the Patriarch is unable to prevent the Holy and Great Synod from dissolving before it even assembles.
There are factions within Orthodoxy that have long militated against the assembly of a Holy and Great Council.  One motivation is political.  While the primacy belongs to Constantinople, the power has long belonged to the Moscow Patriarchate which holds—by far—the allegiance of the largest number of believers.   Moscow has long been jealous of the influence of Constantinople and anxious to take over, as the “Third Rome” the universal primacy.  But even among the smaller Churches there has been a certain amount of jostling over precedence as might be expected in a religious culture so sensitive to the details of ceremonial as in Orthodoxy.
Even more serious, however, is that there is a significant number of Orthodox who fear that any assembly of bishops will bring the Church into encounter with modern heresies.  Many Orthodox oppose ecumenism for fear that it will introduce into Orthodoxy the “modernist heresies” that have infected the West.   Indeed Ecumenism is seen by many, particularly in Russia and Greece, as the arch-heresy.  The lack of a contemporary theological education on the part of many clergy and bishops in the more remote corners of the Orthodox world has confused theological substance with human traditions—a situation with which we Catholics are not unfamiliar on the part of our Katholik Krazies.  Changes in the liturgical calendar, for example, are often treated with the same apprehension as would be the controversy over the Procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father.  I am not saying that the krazies in the Orthodox world are irrational to fear a Council.  Assemble a Church and should the Holy Spirit decide to process from the Father (and the Son) onto that assembly, who knows what will happen?  Vatican II is pudding-proof of that.

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.

We All Have Our Agenda cont.: Church as Monarchy

Francesco Podesti's painting of 

Pius IX proclaiming the dogma

of the Immaculate Conception 

shows the Papal Court in full 

bloom.

I mentioned the other day in writing about the blog The New Liturgical Movement/Novus Motus Liturgicus, that the self-appointed mission of TNLM/NML is to put the toothpaste back into the tube and restore the Church to its monarchial model that we can remember from the 1950’s.  I was asked by a respondent to clarify what I mean about “restore the Church to its monarchial model.” 

Throughout its history the Church has had several ways of looking at itself. In its earliest phase it was the Synagogue.  The Church was born from the Synagogue.  The Greek word συναγωγή (synagogue) means “assembly.”   Another word for assembly in Greek is ἐκκλησία which transliterates to ecclesia, the word we use for Church (the congregation, not the building).  The first two generations of Christians met in the synagogues of first century Judaism and worshipped alongside their Jewish co-religionists.  Christianity began as a movement within Judaism and the first generations of Christians were Jews or aspirants to Judaism who had come to recognize that Jesus of Nazareth was the promised Messiah.  Eventually, somewhere around the year 80, they would be excommunicated from Judaism for the dissent within the community this faith in Jesus caused.  But they took the practices of the synagogue with them.  Our tradition of Morning and Evening Prayer, for example, today enshrined in the Liturgy of the Hours, developed out of the morning and evening prayer of the Synagogue.  The synagogue was led by a board of elders—πρεσβύτεροι—presbyters or elders—under the leadership of an ἐπίσκοπος—an episcopos or overseer—from which we get our word “bishop.”  These Christian synagogues, once expelled from Judaism, recognized each other by a common faith in Jesus and though they would develop with local variations in liturgy and practice, they offered Eucharistic hospitality to visitors from other assemblies based on that common faith.  In other words, they were in communion with one another—not simply because they shared the Eucharistic communion, but rather they shared the Eucharist together because they shared the same faith.  Now notice—and I want to be very clear about this for those who speak of the pre-conciliar rites as “The Mass of All Ages”—they did not celebrate the pre-Vatican II rite.  That only comes much later, much later.   From the descriptions that survive of second and third century liturgy, they retained the basic synagogue format of readings from the Prophets and the Law, to which they added the letters of the apostles and the Gospels.  They interspersed their worship with the singing of psalms.  There were prayers both of petition and praise.  They then took a collection for the needy among the community—or those of other communities in need—and then offered the Prayer of Thanksgiving, the εὐχαριστία or, more properly, the ἀναφορά (anaphora).  We will look in a future posting at the constitutive elements of this prayer but we would know it today as the Prayer of Consecration or the Canon of the Mass or the Eucharistic Prayer.  This was followed in turn by the communion in which those present shared the Eucharistic elements as a sacramental witness that they were united in the one Body of Christ.   The various local Churches were very much aware of the ties that bound them to one another. When a bishop visited from another Church he was invited to preside at the Eucharist as a sign of the communion of Churches.  Collections were taken up in the Church to help other local Churches undergoing particular needs.  When a new bishop was chosen, the surrounding bishops would gather to approve the election by the clergy and people and to consecrate the new bishop into their fellowship. 

In this growing network of Christian assemblies certain assemblies—or Churches—stood in particular honor and prestige because of their having been founded by Apostles.  The Church of Rome held a particular honor in this regard, but so too did Alexandria (Mark), Antioch (Peter), Jerusalem (James) and Constantinople (Andrew).  Over a period of time these five Churches developed into what was referred to as the Pentarchy.  The Church moved from a communion of local Churches under their respective bishops to a communion of patriarchates with the local Churches clustered around their patriarchs.  It was only in the time of Justinian (sixth century) that it was clarified that the fives patriarchates stood in this order of importance: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.  Nevertheless, a certain primacy to the Roman Church had been acknowledged from the end of the first century (the Letter of Clement) and more definitively established at the time of the Council of Nicea and then again at Chalcedon in the time of Leo I.  The Roman Church was acknowledged for its pride of place as the leading Church because it was founded on the apostles Peter and Paul.  Peter and Paul.  All the lists of bishops of Rome for the first five centuries list Peter and Paul jointly as co-bishops of Rome.  But notice, just as they did not celebrate the Eucharist according to the norms laid down by Pope Saint Pius V, neither were the Roman bishops “popes” in the same sense or with the same authority they would later acquire.  The visible and temporal aspects of the Church are conditioned by historical development.  The Church exists in history and is affected by it as is any human institution.  And while the Church can be said to be a Divine Institution on a theological level, in its earthly manifestation it is historical and subject to the vicissitudes of history. 

In this second period then the Church saw itself as a communion of local churches ascribing to one Creed as laid down at the Council of Nicea and clarified by subsequent Councils.  The Church of Rome and its bishop stood in a primacy of honor among the Churches of the world and their bishops, but it was definitely a fraternity and not a monarchy.  It was a primacy of honor not a position of power. The Churches of the East which separated with Rome in the schism of 1054 (there are Churches which had separated from the universal communion earlier in refusing to accept the Chalcedonian formula regarding the precise relationship of the Divine and Human natures of the one Christ) still work pretty much in this fraternal model but, as in most families, with considerable jealousy and strife among some very competitive brothers.  Notice, I said that the Churches of the East separated with Rome, not from Rome.  While Rome was trying to assert its authority over Constantinople and the other Churches of the Greek World, those Churches had never acknowledged Roman supremacy and so cannot be said to have broken away from under. Primacy—yes.  Supremacy, no.   In great part it was precisely this struggle for power that triggered the break.  It was also at this period that we see, in the Western Church, the practice of bishops concelebrating the Eucharist with their brother bishops or with their priests disappear and be replaced by the senior clergyman presiding singularly over the Eucharist.  The Eastern Church which retained a more fraternal ecclesiology, also retained the practice of concelebration. 

After the schism of 1054, the Roman Bishop as Patriarch of the West, stood in a position superior to the other western bishops.  He was their patriarch.  Following much the same model as the Holy Roman Emperor was using at this precise period in history to assert his authority over lesser kings, princes, dukes, counts and other nobles of the empire, the Popes worked diligently to carve out a place of superior authority over the Churches of the West.  They had competition in this from the Emperors who saw themselves as Heads of the Church and Vicars of Christ.  That led to the investiture conflict of the 11^th century.  The papacy eventually won the point that the Pope, not the Emperor, ruled the Church.  Unfortunately in the East—the Byzantine Empire and later the Russian Empire—this point was never made and the Church remained subject to the temporal power as an agency of the State.  In the West as papal power increased, the popes also had to meet the resentment of bishops who felt their own power and right to be under siege by the growing papal authority.  It was a back and forth struggle for centuries.  While the papacy had great influence at the time of Pope Saint Gregory I (c 600), the political turmoil of the latter seventh and eighth centuries put it into decline.  When Rome went into decline, the corresponding power of the other bishops in the west increased proportionately.  A weak papacy made for strong bishops; a strong papacy for weaker bishops.  Charlemagne briefly restored the prestige of the Roman papacy but the papal scandals and infighting among the Roman families competing for the papacy in the ninth and tenth centuries sent the papacy into its worst decline.  The Reform efforts of the Ottonian Emperors and then the Gregorian Reform of the 11^th century restored the greatness of the papacy which peaked in its power in the reign of Innocent III (1198-1216).  The overweening pride of Innocent’s successors—most infamously Boniface VIII—led ultimately to the Avignon papacy of the 14^th century and the Great Western Schism that lasted until the end of the second decade of the 15^th.  Although John XXII at Avignon was one of the greatest popes of history (reigned 1316-34), overall the Avignon papacy and the situation of popes and anti-popes during the Great Schism led to a near total collapse of Papal authority.  With that collapse of papal authority we see the rise of Conciliarism—the idea that the supreme authority in the Church is not the pope but with an Ecumenical Council.  This idea is somewhat of a fallback on the ecclesiology still held by the Orthodox Churches of the East where the assembly of bishops is superior to any one Patriarch.  The papacy reached its low point when in 1415 the Council of Constance required the resignation of Gregory XII (along with the two anti-popes) and elected Martin V.  Subsequent popes were determined to establish the principle that they were not subject to Councils—or any other human authority.  It may be said that it was from this time that the papal monarchy was established. 

This development of the papal monarchy at the end of the 15^th century corresponds to the rise of the nation states in Europe.  Just as the Popes make it clear that they are not answerable to the bishops, so too were Kings in France, Spain, Portugal, and England making it clear that the power of the feudal nobles was giving way to the absolute power of the Crown.  Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the theory of the Divine Right of Kings would establish itself.  In Protestant England this absolute monarchism  would be checked by the Civil War/Commonwealth (1642-1660) and the Glorious Revolution (1688).  In Catholic France, Spain, and Portugal Divine Right would continue until the French Revolution (1789) and its Napoleonic aftermath.   Papal power and authority consolidated itself at this same period not only over the Papal States but on a “spiritual” plane—over the Western Church.  The collapse of Papal civil government in 1870 only reinforced the Pope’s absolute monarchy over the Church.  The Italian anti-clericals who supported Italian nationalism and the seizing of the Papal States thought that by destroying papal civil authority they would destroy the Church.  This only made Pius IX and his successors more determined to tighten their hold over the Church—a kingdom beyond the reach of Garibaldi and his anti-Church red-shirts.  Despite being confined to the 108 acres of the Vatican and teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, the Papal Court maintained full splendor in ceremonial—not only in the basilica but in the Apostolic palace. For full-court occasions, prelates were garbed magnificently in scarlet and purple silk with trains and furs and bejeweled rings and pectoral crosses.  Noble Guards and Swiss Guards and Palatine Guards—each in their varied uniforms stood in their assigned places.   Gentlemen of the papal chamber in velvet knee breeches and cutaways and frilled shirts waited on the pope and his attendants.  And everyone except the pope had shoes with silver buckles; the pope wore embroidered slippers.  It was splendid—any Persian satrap would be green with envy, though it probably left Jesus scratching his head wondering what it was all about. 

In 1958, the same year that Pius XII died, Queen Elizabeth abolished the custom of debutantes being presented at Court.  Princess Margaret said: “We had to put a stop to it; every tart in London was getting in.”  Considering that Margaret herself was somewhat of a slut one can only imagine the sort of trash that was being allowed to curtsey to the Queen.  It certainly wasn’t like when the Countess of Grantham presented Rose MacClare to George V and Queen Mary in last season’s Downton Abbey.  Ah, but the world changes.  No one knows that better than Queen Elizabeth.  Over the years she has made great changes in the Court of Saint James.  In fact, she has all but abolished it.  Oh, she still takes a Lady in Waiting or two with her wherever she goes.  (Someone needs to carry the odd banknote in case the Queen wants some spur-of-the-moment shopping.)  Most of the antique offices have been abolished.  The Groom of the Stool, for example, was responsible for providing a portable toilet (I know, the Queen prefers the less vulgar “commode,” but my “gentle readers” might not be familiar with the precise meaning of that word) for the sovereign—a convenience rarely needed in this day of almost universal plumbing.  And who needs a garde-vaiselle today?  Who even knows what a garde-vaiselle is?   No, modern conveniences and the fact that the £ simply does not go as far today as it once did, had required certain economies to be made on behalf of the Crown.

Similarly Paul VI took a look at the papal court and trimmed it way down.  Unlike John XXIII who loved the pomp of the papal monarchy, Paul VI drastically simplified the dress of prelates, eliminated the noble and palatine guards, and did away with many of the superfluous members of the papal household.  It simply was time.  Paul also laid aside the papal tiara—an ornament that the popes had worn—in one form or another—for over a thousand years. 

Correspondingly, It was in the reign of Paul VI that the custom of concelebrating was revived in the Roman Rite.  During the Second Vatican Council, Paul made a point of concelebrating with bishops as a visible sign of the collegial—rather than monarchial—nature of authority in the Church.  Bishops too in their dioceses began concelebrating with their priests at various occasions, indicating that (at least symbolically) they understood their priests shared in the bishop’s ministry and authority.  Priests don’t concelebrate with the faithful as they have different roles in the Eucharistic celebration, but churches began to be designed to show the priest(s) with the faithful gathered around in a community and the priest(s) celebrating with as well as on behalf of their people.  

There were other changes as well.  Many priests began wearing ordinary clothes more often, especially in social occasions with their parishioners.  And many priests began going by “Father-and-their-Christian-name” rather than by their title and surname; in fact some priests have grown comfortable being addressed on a first name basis.  It is rare now to see a person kiss the bishop’s ring—a monarchial custom if ever there was one.  And titles like “Your Excellency” are less commonly used than simply “Bishop.”  Of course sometimes such changes—whether on a parish or diocesan level—are only cosmetic and power sometimes remains what it had always been, the pastor or bishop following a dictatorship model rather than a royal one—but that is human nature.  Some people just need to be in charge.  Jesus didn’t think much of that; neither do I.  And there are those who miss the days of silk trains and canopies and buckled shoes.  Fortunately the “canons” of the Institute of Christ the King, Sovereign Priest, continue to offer an ecclesiastical fantasyland for those who want to play dress up and bow and curtsey.  But when I see that I feel like agreeing with Princess Margaret: we have to put a stop to that: every tart in Christendom is getting in.  

The Foundations of the Anglican Church I

The Galilee of Durham

Cathedral,  site of the tomb

of the Venerable Bede

In the previous posting, I raised the issue of whether the newly discovered remains of Richard III—Shakespeare’s evil hunchback king—should be reburied with Catholic Rites or Anglican ceremonial.  Richard was, after all, a Catholic.   But then Anglicans claim that he was Church of England at a time when the Church of England was in communion with the Roman See.  Was there a Church of England  before Henry VIII and his break?  This is an important question for historians because the legitimacy of the Anglican Church hinges on the question: Did Henry VIII found the Anglican Church or did he take the already existing Anglican Church out of communion with Rome?  If the former, the Anglicans are a sort of religious Johnny-come-lately religious movement; if the latter then they have a legitimate identity as one of the ancient Christian Churches.  Should Catholics work for the conversion of Anglicans and Episcopalians—or is our aim to restore communion between the Churches of the Anglican Communion and the Church of Rome? 
Popular opinion thinks of the Anglican Church as being founded by Henry VIII when he split the Church in England from the Pope so that he could marry Anne Boleyn, having tired of his wife Queen Katherine of Aragon—but that just shows us how little we know about the history of the Church, or rather, how much our understanding of the  history of the Church has been shaped  by religious opinions rather than  historical facts.
The term “Anglican Church” was around for at least three hundred years before ol’ Henry ever got peeved with the Pope and the idea of a Church of England, if not the terminology itself, is even much older.  Certainly the Venerable Bede, a Church historian (673-735) had a very clear idea of the English Church as a body with a distinct identity within Christendom that differentiated it from the Roman Church and the other distinct ecclesial communities that comprised the universal Christendom of his time.  To Bede, the English Church was as different from the Roman Church as was the Greek or the Irish Churches of his day.  Bede, in fact, wanted to smooth over some of the differences in religious practices, but he did not want the English Church to lose its unique identity.  Of course the English Church—that is the Anglican Church for Ecclesia Anglicana means simply that, the English Church—was in communion with the Roman Church  but it was in no way absorbed into it.  While it held the Roman Church and its Bishop (the Pope) in honor, it had its own distinct rites and ceremonies, it chose its own bishops, it held its own synods and councils and it formulated its own canons. At the time of Bede, it was its own Church in full and free communion with universal Christendom represented by the five great Patriarchial Sees of Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem.  As a Western Church it had its strongest ties to the See of Rome, the Western Patriarchate but like the other Churches maintained its autonomy.  
Christianity had come to England before the end of the second century and perhaps as early as the last decades of the first century.  What is today England and Wales was a province of the Roman Empire and even as the faith had spread to Rome from the Pentecost Preaching of the Apostles, it spread from Rome throughout its empire as merchants and soldiers and government officials and slaves and tourists and sailors moved about the wide empire, settling in countless places and bringing with them the religious beliefs of the Empire, of which Christianity was but one.  There is even an old tradition that Joseph of Arimathea had comes as a missionary after the Ascension of Christ.  Other legends talk about Philip the Apostle sending missionaries to Britain, or perhaps even one or another of the apostles going there themselves.  None of this can be verified, however, and all of these stories have the stuff of legends more than facts about them.  But that is not to say that Christianity may have arrived in Britain even as early as 50 AD, or perhaps a few years before.  We simply do not know the earliest date but we can say that by 150 it is all but certain that there were Christian communities in the Roman towns of Britain.  We know that there were three British bishops present at the Council of Arles in 314. One of these was Restitutus, Bishop of Londinium, today’s London. British bishops were also present at the Council of Sardica (Sofia, in modern day Bulgaria) in 347 and the Council of Rimini (In what is today Italy) in 359.  This tells us that the British Church was not a stand-alone entity but was in communion with the Universal Church represented by the Emperor.  (Yes, it was the Emperor, not the Pope, who represented the oecumene or Universal Oneness of the Church just as it was the Emperor, not the Pope, who had the right and duty to convoke Ecumenical (oecumenical) Councils. Bet you didn’t learn that in fifth grade. 
You see, the “Church” of the first five centuries was not a single Church under a Pope but a communion of local Churches, each with its own bishop, who recognized the authenticity of faith and legitimacy of practice of one another.  There were certain measuring sticks of orthodoxy—the Trinity, the divinity of Christ—as well as a  unity of practices such as the weekly celebration of the Eucharist, baptism as the rite of initiation into the community, and an Episcopal system of leadership where deacons and presbyters assisted the bishop in his ministry. As the centuries moved on the rites of these Churches began to vary more and more in incidentals, but they used, for the most part, the same scriptures in their worship and common patterns, if not the rites themselves, for their liturgies.  By the sixth century these local churches began to coalesce around one or another of the five great patriarchial Sees.  Christians the West, both Europe and North Africa, began looking more and more to the Church and Bishop of Rome for leadership.  Christians in the eastern parts of North Africa looked mostly to Alexandria.  Christians in Greece and Asia Minor—what is today Turkey—as well as southern Italy and Sicily to Constantinople because they were under the political domination of the Emperor there.  Christians in Syria and beyond the Eastern boundaries of the old empire, looked to Antioch.  Christians in the ancient places of Palestine, looked to the Patriarch and Church of Jerusalem.  This period of the history of the Church uniting around the five great Patriarchs is called the Pentarchy.  It surprises us Catholics to think of a period of the history of the Church where the Pope wasn’t running the show but a universal jurisdiction of the Roman See only emerges in the eleventh century.   But we can talk about that at another time; we are getting ahead of our story if we want to focus on England.  Suffice it to say that by the fourth century Christianity was well established in Britain and the Roman Church and its bishop were held in honor but not acknowledged as having direct authority. 

The East West Schism--more on that story

The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.  After

having served as the seat of the

Patriarch of Constantinople for

centuries, it was turned into a

mosque.  Since the secularizaiton

of Turkey at the end of World War I

it has been a museum. 

Well, I think we have looked enough, at least for awhile, at the problem of so many bishops not being up to the grade needed to meet the leadership challenges of the Church in the Modern World and we can return to the eleventh century.  I will have some entries to bridge the Gregorian Reform of the eleventh century and the Innocentian Reform of the Thirteenth, but before we go there I would like to return to the topic of the East-West Schism.  You might want to check the entries for January 25 and August 23. 
     The first notion to get out of our heads is the idea that the Greek Orthodox Church “broke away” from the Roman Catholic Church.  Break they did, but the Greek and the Roman Churches broke away from each other, or rather, they broke with each other.  The Greek—and other Orthodox Churches—were never “under” the Pope.  As pointed out in the August 23^rd entry, the five patriarchs were recognized as equals and each was seen as supreme in his own jurisdiction.  The Roman Patriarch was the first among these equals, and recognized as such since the First Council of Constantinople.  The other Patriarchs ranked—according to the Council in Trullo (recognized as Ecumenical by the Eastern Churches but not the Western) Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.  Indeed, Jerusalem was recognized almost solely for its antiquity as the Mother Church; it really had no daughter Churches to speak of in its patriarchy.  Antioch on the other hand controlled the Churches of Syria, Iraq, Persia and down into India—a vast region.  Alexandria led the Churches of Egypt and North Africa as well as along the Red Sea with the Coptic Church of Ethiopia.  And then there was Constantinople.  The Patriarch claimed descent from Saint Andrew, the First-Called and elder brother of Peter.  These titles nudged the Bishop of Rome a bit about his position.  Yes, Peter was the leader, but it was Andrew who told Peter that he had met the Messiah and invited Peter to come along in discipleship.  (John 1:41).  Andrew the First-Called was a reminder that, well maybe, Constantinople should be first and Rome, Peter’s See, second.  After all, Constantinople was the capital of the Empire and Rome was now just a backwater town, abandoned and in ruins.  And the Emperor—the real Emperor, not that German fool in bearskins and with dirty feet—reigned in Constantinople.  And there was the great basilica of the Hagia Sophia and the splendid liturgies in Constantinople while in Rome Saint Peter’s was falling down around the congregation as the papal chaplains stood around yawning and scratching their backsides at Mass.
     The tension was building on a number of fronts.  Constantinople was sending out missionaries to convert the Slavic Peoples to the North and West in what is today Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania.  The Holy Roman Emperor was sending out missionaries with papal ties to the Slavic Peoples in what is today the Czech Republic, Poland, and Croatia.  What would happen when the western missionaries spreading papal ties met up with the eastern missionaries spreading dependency on Constantinople?  Meet they would in what is today Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and along the fault line between eastern and western Slavs. (I don’t mean to imply here that the Hungarians are Slavs—they are not—but they got caught in the mix, sort of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.)  Actually in 862 the Greeks had sent the brother team of missionaries Cyril and Methodius to the Slavs but the brothers had been politic enough to first go to Rome and get the pope’s encouragement for their mission as well.  Both Catholic and Orthodox Slavs look to these brothers as their Apostles, but the peace the built between East and West and was not to last.     
      Greek missionaries had reached beyond the Black Sea up the Dnieper River to the site of modern Kiev where they had made progress in converting the local Rus people.  The Rus were of Viking extraction, peoples from modern Sweden, who had colonized along the Rivers of the Ukraine as the Norse had settled along the Seine and Loire in France.  There is an old story that Prince Vladimir the Great, the leader of the Rus, had wanted to introduce Christianity (the religion of his Grandmother, Saint Olga) to his subjects and so he sent an embassy first to Rome and then to Constantinople.  The ambassadors witnessed Mass in the Vatican Basilica. It was ok.   Proceeding on to Constantinople, they witnessed the Divine Liturgy in the Hagia Sophia.  “We did not know,” they claimed, “whether we were in Heaven or still on earth” for the beauty of the Divine Liturgy.  It is a lovely story, but the facts are that the ties of the Russian Church had always been to the Constantinople Patriarchate.  While the Roman Church never claimed authority over the Russian Church, the spread of Greek Christianity among the Slavic Peoples on the frontier between the two empires was an annoyance to both sides.
     Then came the Photian schism.  You can read about it in the August 23^rd entry.  Basically the Emperor deposed Patriarch Ignatios of Constantinople because he had offended the Emperor’s uncle.  The Emperor, Michael III, appointed a new patriarch, Photios, in Ignatios’ place.  The Pope, Nicholas I, felt that as senior patriarch he had to defend the cause of the Ignatios, claiming that an Emperor had no authority to depose a Patriarch.  In the end Ignatios was restored, the breach was healed and when Ignatios died Photios was elected in his own right and Pope and Patriarch played nice.  But it was remembered that the Pope had interfered in internal matters of the Greek Church.   The Greeks resented this.  The Latins, for their part, stopped claiming that Nicholas had done this as senior patriarch protecting the rights of his second-in-dignity confrere, and instead began to claim that the Pope had a universal jurisdiction over all Christians.  This was a considerable advance in the theory of papal authority.  And the Greeks would respond in kind—but that is for the next entry. 

The East-West Schism: 1054 and All That

His Ecumenical Holiness,

Bartholomew I, 270^th  

successor of Saint Andrew

the Apostle

Sorry about the recent hiatus—we have had issues with our wireless internet connections over the last few days, but now it’s time to refocus and to return to the subject of the Gregorian Reform.  But before we focus on the Reform itself, let’s take a brief detour here and talk about the East-West Schism since it was at this time that the papal legate Humbert of Silva Candida excommunicated the Patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Caerularius and the Patriarch—always a gentleman—returned the compliment.   You may remember from our last posting (August 13^th)  on the Gregorian Reform, the one on German Reform popes, that Leo IX had sent Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida to Constantinople on a mission that went bad and ended up with the Cardinal (in the pope’s name) and the Patriarch excommunicating each other. 
     Tensions between the Sees of Rome and Constantinople had often been tense.  Contrary to Catholic Mythology, the Patriarch of Constantinople—like the other Apostolic Patriarchs of Jerusalem. Antioch, and Alexandria—had never been “under” the pope or his authority.  As successor to various apostles, they were “brothers” among whom the Patriarch of the West, the Bishop of Rome, stood out as first among equals.  The Council in Trullo (692), a Council which the Eastern Churches recognize as Ecumenical but the Western Church does not (since no delegates from the West were there) determined the precedence to be Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.  The First Council of Constantinople (381), which both the Churches of the East and the West recognize as Ecumenical, had already determined that the Bishop of Rome held precedence over the Bishop of Constantinople.  This was not a matter of jurisdiction, however, but only of honor.  Each Patriarch was supreme authority in his own jurisdiction; indeed each bishop was supreme in his own diocese.  A patriarch could settle disputes among the bishops in his patriarchate.  Each patriarch in his own jurisdiction also was the court of appeal should the clergy have a canonical or doctrinal grievance against their bishop, but the universal Church had a very collaborative structure rather than the hierarchical structure that was to emerge in the Middle Ages.  From the time of the Apostles until the Emperor Justinian (d. 565) the universal Church was a communion of local churches;  by the sixth century, it had become a communion of the five patriarchates which in turn were communions of the local churches that comprised them.  Universal Jurisdiction of the papacy would only be claimed towards the end of the first millennium and even then it did not approach the authority claimed by the popes since the fifteenth century collapse of conciliarism—which is a future topic. 
     That is not to say that everything in the church was all buddy-buddy among bishops, metropolitans, and patriarchs—to the contrary. Male animals in nature do not share territory; likewise in the Church there have been squabbles of jurisdiction ever since the beginning.  As Constantinople, the capital of the surviving Roman Empire, grew in importance and Rome, abandoned by its Emperor and bereft of its Empire, declined in its significance, the bishops of Constantinople pushed more and more to be recognized as the first bishop of Christendom.  The bishops of Constantinople were (allegedly) the descendents of Andrew and Andrew was, after all, Peter’s older brother—and the “first-called.”  (Saint Andrew is venerated to this day in the Churches form the Byzantine Tradition as “The First-Called.).  Rome, on the other hand, was jealous of its ancient prerogatives and suspicious of Constantinople’s designs.  The political situation made matters even more tense.  Increasingly after the seventh century, the Emperors in Constantinople were unable to defend Rome from the Lombards and other Germanic tribes as well as from the Saracen pirates who dominated the Mediterranean.  As a result, the popes looked more and more to the Merovingian and Pippinid (Carolingian) Kings of the Franks for protection.  When Charlemagne assumed the title “Emperor” in 800 AD, the Emperor—the “real” Emperor in Constantinople—was furious that this illiterate animal-skin wearing baboon in the West would assume equality with his perfumed and silk-clad dandy self in Constantinople.  Mirroring the political tension between the emperors, mistrust and antagonism grew between the Church in the East (Constantinople) and the Church in the West (Rome).   
      Now, over the centuries there had been  a number of popes who had been chosen from the East.  In antiquity there had been Anacletus, the second successor to Peter, Telesphorus (+137), Hyginus (+140), Sixtus II (+258)  Zosimus (+418)  among others.  Even as the tension between East and West mounted, Greek and Syrian popes were common—among them (there were more) were Boniface III (+607)  Theodore I (+642) Agatho (+681) Sergius I (+687) Constantine (+715)  Zachary (+752) Stephen III (+772).  The Greek and Syrian popes brought much to the Western Church—the “Kyrie” of the Mass being one contribution.  Nevertheless the tension began to build. 
    858 the Emperor Michael III of Constantinople deposed the Patriarch Ignatius for political reasons and replaced him with a theologian, a layman, Photios.  Under normal circumstances Photios would have made an excellent patriarch—he was both holy and scholarly.   Ignatius had dared to excommunicate the Emperor’s uncle for having an affair with his widowed daughter-in-law.  Pope Nicholas I, as senior patriarch, felt he had a responsibility to speak up for the deposed Ignatius whose rights had been violated.  He did not claim universal jurisdiction but rather acted as the senior patriarch protecting one of the four junior patriarchs. Nicholas excommunicated Photios and the Emperor.  This created a schism between the Eastern and Western Churches.  When Ignatius died, Photios was elected in his own right to succede him and the schism was healed.   But it left a bad mark.  Ironically, according to some historians, Photius’ son succeeded to the papal throne as Theodore II. 
     There were other points of tension that persisted even after the schism had been healed.  The Western Church unilaterally altered the Creed of the Council of Nicea, declaring that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Son as well as the Father.  The addition to the creed “and the Son” is known by its Latin phraseology: filioque.  As the western Church began to impose celibacy on the clergy, the Eastern Church maintained a married parish clergy.  The Western Church began using unleavened bread for the Eucharist as Christ had used unleavened bread at the Last Supper; the Eastern Churches kept to the apostolic custom of using leavened bread.  When the Greek Church banned the use of icons—images of Christ, Mary, and the Saints in 730, Pope Gregory III convoked a synod that defended the use of Icons.  This caused many Greek Christians to flee to Rome to maintain their practice of using icons in personal prayer as well as corporate worship.  The second Council of Nicea in 787 affirmed the use of icons, but  the East and West remained suspicious of each other’s doctrinal position