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. 

There's another Pope?

Pope Shenouda III, Patriarch and
Pope of Alexandria,
+ March 17, 2012

  So the Pope died this Saturday past.  Well, not that pope—but the Pope of Alexandria, Pope Shenouda III.  Who knew there were two popes?  Pope is, or at least was, used by some village priests among the Greek Orthodox Christians of Asia Minor and various islands in the Aegean Sea.  While this was common in the days of the Ottoman Sultanate, the persecution of Asiatic Greeks by the Ottomans and the destruction of most of those communities in the 19^th century along with the modernization that has come to Greece with its independence from Turkey have made this title obsolete.  The title survives chiefly for two of the five Great Patriarchs of Christendom—the Patriarch of Alexandria in Egypt and the Patriarch of the West, the Bishop of Rome.  The title has been used for the Patriarch of Alexandria since the time of Pope Heraclas of Alexandria in the middle of the third century. By comparison, for the Roman Pontiffs, “Pope” is somewhat of a modern affectation as the Bishops of Rome have used the title only since John I in the second decade of the sixth century.  The Greek Orthodox claimant to the Patriarchate of Alexandria also makes claim to the title, asserting that as an Orthodox (i.e. Chalcedonian) Christian he is the authentic heir to the See of Saint Mark.

The See of Saint Mark—this is what gives Alexandria its importance. 

One of the first places to which Christianity spread was Alexandria in Egypt, most likely being brought back to Alexandria by Alexandrian Jews who had been in Jerusalem that Pentecost and heard the preaching of the Apostles and accepted faith in Jesus as a fulfillment of their Messianic hopes as Jews.  There were strong ties between Jerusalem and Alexandria and Judaism was strong in that ancient Egyptian city with pilgrims regularly going to Jerusalem for the three annual pilgrimage feasts each year.  The See (or Diocese) of Alexandria is usually attributed to Mark the Evangelist, the author of the Second Gospel but it is clear that there would have been a Christian community there from the beginning—the very beginning, making the Alexandrian Christian community perhaps the second oldest only to Jerusalem—Church in Christianity. 

While the foundation of the Church of Alexandria by Saint Mark would be an overstatement of historical fact, the identification of Mark with the Church of Alexandria is from the earliest days.  The patristic sources and Alexandrian legends differ.  The Alexandria tradition puts Mark in Alexandria as early as the mid ‘40’s—just ten years or so after Pentecost.  The patristic tradition which roots the Gospel of Mark in the preaching of Peter claims that Mark was with Peter in Rome until after Peter’s martyrdom in AD 67.  There are also stories of Mark having served as first bishop of Aquileia.  These stories of Mark preaching up in the Venetian lagoons and marshes along the Adriatic are almost certainly spurious but the Patriarchate of Venice claims descent from Saint Mark as the See was translated from Aquileia to Grado and then to Venice when the Archdiocese of Venice was formed from the old dioceses of Grado and Castello. 

In any event, the traditions merge with Mark arriving in Alexandria at some point and leading the Church there.  The cultural and economic prestige associated with this ancient city was certainly as important as its connection with Mark the Evangelist in establishing it as a leading center of Christian thought and practice. 

While we Catholics usually think—naively—of the papacy as dating back to the Apostle Peter and his ministry at Rome, the fact of the matter is that the papacy as we know and would recognize it is the product of a long evolutionary process that is continuing even today.  The Church of the first centuries did not see itself universally as subject to the oversight of the Bishop of Rome.  In fact there was no Church (in our sense) in the early centuries.  There was a communion of Churches, hundreds of local Churches corresponding somewhat (operative word: somewhat) to what we would think of as a diocese.  These churches maintained communion with one another—that is they held each other in mutual respect and love, praying for and with one another, and assisting one another at times of need.  The unity of faith permitted them to share the Eucharist with one another as a sign both of mutual love and conformity of doctrine.  Quite early on, by the end of the first century, an unofficial pattern of leadership among these churches began to emerge.  Rome as center of the Empire began to exercise more and more authority, particularly as Christianity spread out westwards from Rome into what is today France, Spain, England, Ireland, and the western reaches of North Africa.  Antioch and Alexandria, two cities with somewhat different theological traditions but each centers of theological reflection and evangelization—as well as economic (and for Alexandria, cultural) influence began to exercise importance.  Alexandria achieved leadership in the African Church—both along the Mediterranean seaboard and southwards along the coastal regions along the Red Sea.  Antioch’s influence spread eastwards down into what is today Iraq and Iran and beyond into India. When the Emperor Constantine established a new Imperial Capital in Byzantium and named it Constantinople (Constantine’s City), the imperial connections gave its Church and Bishop added importance, great importance.  And finally Jerusalem, always the heart of the Christian world, achieved a prominent respect and honor once Christianity became the religion of the Empire.  By the early sixth century these five Sees became the “Pentarchy” officially recognized both by Imperial decree and Church ordinance as the leading authorities in Christendom—equal in governance but ordered in dignity with Rome first, followed by Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem.  Apostolic foundations were ascribed to each of these Sees: Rome claiming descent from Peter and Paul; Antioch from Peter (before he move on to Rome); Constantinople from Andrew, Peter’s elder brother;  Alexandria from Mark;  and Jerusalem from James, brother of the Lord. 

Infighting among the Patriarchs over jurisdiction and honors due as well as some doctrinal squabbles led to a breakup of the Pentarchy.  Jerusalem, due to the pressure of Imperial control from Constantinople, never achieved any real independence from Constantinople but Antioch and Alexandria each dissented from the Council of Chalcedon and their independence led to the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Coptic Orthodox Church respectively as these Patriarchs and the Chalcedonian Churches—Rome and Constantinople—parted ways.  Pope Shenouda, as Pope and Patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox Church has sat in the Chair of Saint Mark and served as the leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church since 1971 until his death this past Saturday, March 17, 2012.  Future postings will tell more of the Coptic Church and its late Pope.