Foundations of the Anglian Church XLVII

An Anglican Bishop attired for a

session in the House of Lords.

When we look at Henry’s separation of the English Church from the Roman Communion we how it was done for the most part not by royal decree but by act of Parliament.  Henry—unconsciously for sure—created a revolution in government by his strategy, a revolution of which we Americans are heirs.   Henry was unsure of the authority of the Crown—the Tudors had not been wearing it long enough to act with the impunity of absolute monarchs—and so bolstered it with the authority of having Parliament behind him.  To get what he wanted—the annulment, the legitimacy of his heirs, and the separation from Rome—he bargained away his sovereignty.   He gave Parliament, and the House of Commons in particular, a taste for power which they were never willing to yield after that.  He could have acted absolutely as King by decree.  He probably would have gotten away with it.  He was a stronger monarch than he seems to have realized.  But by bringing his legislation all to parliament for their consent he set a precedent that the King rules with the consent of Parliament. 
In his turning to Parliament Henry needed to depend on the House of Commons.  The House of Lords was not as friendly to his projects as were the Commons.  The Lords was top heavy with Bishops and Abbots and they were bound to resist Henry’s wishes, especially in regard to separation from Rome.   (Cranmer, along with Gardiner and perhaps one or two others was the exception among the Bishops.)  The Peers, for the most part, were not anxious to play into Henry’s hands—they preferred a weaker monarch so that their power was unchallenged.  Moreover, while the Duke of Norfolk supported the marriage to Anne—who was his niece—Queen Katherine had many friends among the Peers and they were not anxious to see her replaced.  Thus Henry needed the Commons. 
Henry would eventually throw the Abbots out of the Lords and appoint Bishops friendly to his cause.  He also would flood the peerage with new members and get his majorities.  But in the meantime his strategy was to give the Commons more and more power in return for their support. 
The Commons, for their part, were mostly self-made men.  They were business men, merchants, who represented the towns and boroughs.  They were not interested in questions of theology.  As men of business they resented the immense sums being drained from England by the papacy and thought the money could be better spent in England—increasing the navy to protect trade, opening schools and colleges to educate the sons of their constituents, sending explorers out to find new sources of raw materials and new markets as Spain, Portugal, and France were doing.  In fact, over the next century it would be these men of business who would increasingly set the course of religion in England.
The rise of the Commons gave the Englishman a sense that he had the right to be heard in government, whether in regard to matters political or matters spiritual.  Democracy and religion became tied in the English mind.  This would have drastic implications a century later for the English and two and a half-centuries later for the Americans.  But all things in time. 
Some historians rank Henry as the greatest of English monarchs for “The Tudor Revolution” and the emergence of the democratic tradition.  As Henry had no intention of causing this “revolution” the credit is misplaced.  But the fact remains that for various reasons, and the emergence of the House of Commons in the government not least among them, Henry was a great monarch and perhaps second only to one—his daughter, Elizabeth.  But all that must come later as well. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church XVIII

York Minster, Cathedral of

the Archbishops of York

It is interesting that every so often while researching one topic, I trip across another with which I had not been familiar.  In looking at the life of Edward I, I found that he had a daughter a nun—and her life gives us a picture of the thirteenth century English Church and its spiritual vitality—or, in this case, its sad state. 
The princess Mary, known as Mary of Woodstock, was the thirteenth of sixteen children born to Edward I and his wife Eleanor of Castile.  (The widowed Edward had three more children by his second wife, Marguerite of France.)  When her grandmother, Eleanor of Provence, the widow of Henry III, decided to take the veil as a nun at Amesbury Abbey in Wiltshire, she asked that two of her granddaughters, Mary and Eleanor of Brittany, be sent along to the convent as well.  Mary was only seven years old when fated to convent life, though she was not officially veiled as a nun until she was twelve. 
Amesbury was an English house of the Fontrevault order.  Fonterevault was a monastery in Anjou (France) with strong ties to the Plantagenets, the English Royal Family.  Fontrevault had been founded by Robert of Abrissel (1045-1116), a reformer and preacher.  It was a double monastery of nuns and monks with the Abbess of the nuns as superior of both communities.  Henry II, as Duke of Anjou, had been a major benefactor of the Abbey and he, his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, and several of their children—including Richard the Lionheart—are buried there.  Amesbury Abbey had been founded under the Rule of Saint Benedict in Anglo-Saxon days but had been suppressed under Henry II and turned over to the Fontrevault Order which sent nuns to the monastery which was by  this fact reduced to priory status as a dependent house on Fontrevault.  Fontrevault was regarded as a reformed order and its level of observance was supposed to be quite strict.  But not for the Lady Mary.
Mary was given a very generous allowance worth about $100,000 a year in modern sums.  She also had a special allowance for clothing (habits and veils are expensive, I guess).  She also was entitled to 20 tuns of wine (over five thousand gallons) a year from the royal stores.  Despite the papal bull, Periculoso, requiring nuns to remain in their convents, Mary travelled freely about and maintained an entourage of servants to accompany her.  She often returned to court and she sometimes went on pilgrimage.  She ran up considerable gambling debts which her brother, King Edward II, had to pay off and she may have had an affair with John de Warrenne, a political foe of her brother the King. 
Meanwhile, her cousin, Eleanor of Brittany had become Abbess of the mother house at Fontrevault and tried to rein in this loose-living nun, but was quite unsuccessful in doing so.  Her brother the King defended her and even the Pope took her side.  Meanwhile, seeing her free lifestyle, various daughters of the nobility decided that being a nun wasn’t all that bad a deal and entered the priory at Amesbury under Mary’s “guidance,” leading to a decline in the house’s observance and reputation. 
Looking at the life of Mary of Woodstock, one can see the sort of nun that Chaucer would use as his model in the Canterbury Tales. 
Let’s go back to Henry II for a moment—remember him?  Henry was the king who had the fight with Becket.  In addition to the six legitimate children he had with Eleanor of Aquitaine Henry fathered at least two bastard children. The elder of these, indeed the eldest of all Henry’s children, was Geoffrey, not to be confused with a legitimate son also named Geoffrey.  Henry’s father was named Geoffrey and Henry idolized his father.  His father, a man of remarkable military prowess but of cold and evil temper was not worthy of his son’s obsessive admiration.  (Isn’t that so often the way?) In any case, young Geoffrey—being illegitimate and of a commoner mother—was not a suitable heir for the kingdom.  The Church could provide a career for the young man and at age 21 he was named Bishop of Lincoln.  He wasn’t ordained a priest yet, of course, and he delayed taking Holy Orders while collecting the bishop’s income.  That was not uncommon in the Middle Ages.  Geoffrey was more cut out for secular life—like his grandfather, he was a prodigious soldier.  When in 1173-74, his half-brothers (Henry the Young King, Richard, Geoffrey and John) rebelled against their father in an attempt to seize the kingdom, Geoffrey took his father’s side and played an important role in defeating the over-anxious princes. In 1181Pope Lucius III demanded that Geoffrey be consecrated a bishop or give up his diocese.  He gave up his diocese and his father, Henry, named him Lord Chancellor.
When Henry died in 1189, Geoffrey was in trouble.  Richard the Lionheart remembered this older brother had fought against him in the rebellion of 1173 and Richard was not about to allow him to remain as Lord Chancellor.  Richard wanted to neutralize any claims to the throne that Geoffrey might make, especially given that Richard was planning on going on Crusade and wanted to leave his kingdom secure.  He named Geoffrey Archbishop of York and forced him to receive episcopal consecration in 1191.  Geoffrey was a most quarrelsome prelate—fighting with his cathedral chapter, with the other bishops of England, and with his half-brother, the King.  Geoffrey adopted for himself and by no authority other than his own, the title “Primate of England” which set off a fight with the Archbishop of Canterbury who claimed the primacy.  (Eventually it was settled with York being the “Primate of England” and Canterbury being the “Primate of All England.”  (Wasn’t there something in the gospels about the apostles arguing over which was the greatest?  Do we ever learn?)   He seems to have had a chip on his shoulder that he had not been allowed to succeed to the crown and was forced to a career in the Church, a career he never truly embraced other than as a source of power and pride.  This was a huge problem in the medieval Church, however, where prelates were chosen not for their pastoral gifts, or even for their piety, but regardless of their character they were named for political reasons. 
These stories—of the princess-nun, Mary of Woodstock, and the bastard Archbishop Geoffrey fitzHenry, give us a glimpse of the malady into which the Church of England had sunk in the thirteenth century.     Traditionalist Catholics often hold that century up as the apex of Catholicism.  A century ago, the pseudo-historian, James J. Walsh even wrote  a book The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries.  It remains a perennial favorite among Catholic romanticists.   The truth is, however, that the same century that gave us Francis and Dominic also gave us characters of much lower sanctity and worth.  But every century is like that.  There is no golden age of Catholicism—the wheat and the tares grow alongside one another in the field until the day of judgment. 

Rick Santorum's Picks in the Catholic Cafeteria

St Catherine of Sieana, Great Falls VA
Rick Santorum's parish

Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is no admirer of President John Kennedy but when Santorum swept the primaries in Alabama and Mississippi yesterday he did something that Kennedy could never have done and which he, Santorum, could not have done had it not been for Kennedy’s carving out a place in American politics for his fellow Catholics.  Santorum’s victory is a clear sign that the anti-Catholic bias that for so long has plagued the “evangelical” regions of the United States is a thing of the past.  Of course, in this election the choice was among two Catholics and a Mormon which, at least in days past, would have been an “evangelical’s” worst nightmare. 

     For years now each Sunday he is in town Rick Santorum has driven approximately twenty miles from his Leesburg VA home to his parish of choice, Saint Catherine of Siena in Great Falls VA.  Saint Catherine’s is a very particular type of Catholic Parish. In a diocese known for its distinct brand of conservative Catholicism with priests grocery-shopping in cassock and biretta and girls banned from serving at the altar, Saint Catherine’s is the Gold Standard for Catholic neo-traditionalism. Saint Catherine’s is a parish that in the days when the “Tridentine Mass” was not permitted, counterfeited the pre-Conciliar liturgy with Novus Ordo Latin Mass tricked out to look like the “real thing” complete with deacon and “subdeacon,”  with their backs turned to the congregation.  It is the parish of various Catholic luminaries such as Louis Freeh, former director of the FBI and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.  (It also was the parish of Robert Hanssen, devout Catholic and convicted Russian spy.  Santorum has this in common with Hanssen also: both men sent their sons to the private Opus Dei school, The Heights, in Potomac MD.) 

     Rick Santorum is well-known for his opposition to the legalization of Gay Marriage and even stronger opposition to legalized Abortion.  He considers contraception “dangerous.”  And, to his credit, the former senator not only “talks the talk” but “walks the walk.”  He and his wife have had eight children—one of whom, Gabriel, was born prematurely (20 weeks) in 1996, dying after only two hours.  Another child, Isabella, was born in 2008 (when Mrs. Santorum was 48) suffering from a rare genetic disorder.  Mrs. Santorum has home-schooled the children though the older boys eventually were, as mentioned above, to go on to The Heights.  (I am not sure if the girls were given the opportunity to attend Oakcrest, the Opus Dei private school for girls.  Let me also say that both The Heights and Oakcrest are top-rate schools, second only to the untouchable Gonzaga College High School in downtown D.C.) 

      Rick Santorum seems to be a Catholic’s Catholic and his Catholic supporters claim that the Santorums believe in a highly traditional Catholicism that adheres fully to what scholars call “the teaching authority” of the pope and his bishops. But does he? 

      While his stand on gay marriage, abortion, and contraception are consistent with Catholic moral teaching, Santorum differs from the Church on many other issues.  Rick Santorum was a strong supporter of George Bush’s war in Iraq despite Pope John Paul’s plea to the Bush administration not to go into that war and his subsequent condemnation of the war as unjust.  Among those things which the Catholic Church condemns as absolute evils is not only abortion, but torture yet Senator Santorum was supportive of waterboarding and other torture techniques employed for “enhanced interrogation” in the Bush administration. In his Encyclical Letter Evangelium Vitae Pope John Paul condemned the Death Penalty except under the most restricted of circumstances, circumstances not met in the American penal code.  The Pope even had the Catechism of the Catholic Church rewritten to make sure that the average Catholic is aware of this condemnation.  Santorum has consistently supported the Death Penalty, in 1994 voting against replacing the death penalty with life in prison and supporting limiting appeals from death row inmates.   Santorum believes that Climate Change is a fraud, declaring it “an absolute travesty of scientific research that was motivated by those who, in my opinion, saw this as an opportunity to create a panic and a crisis for government to be able to step in and even more greatly control your life.”  This differs from Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI who have each written and spoken about the need to protect the environment from the disastrous effects that industrialization is wreaking on our society.  Despite a consistent teaching of the Church on the rights of migrants dating back to the time of the Second World War but including papal magisterium from John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II, and now Pope Benedict, Santorum opposes any attempts for immigration reform.  Ever since Leo XIII wrote the encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891 the Catholic Church has defended the rights of labor to organize—a teaching repeated by Pius XI, John XXIII, The Second Vatican Council, Paul VI, John Paul II, and now Benedict XVI, yet Rick Santorum opposes the rights of public sector workers to organize and he consistently favors capital over labor in the private sector.  Similarly while the Church speaks of the importance of regulatory safeguards on the economy Santorum always voted against them and still opposes economic regulations. 

       Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind a Catholic candidate differing from the magisterium.  I think that while one must always follow one’s conscience, there are times when, to perform one’s public duties, one’s conscience may call the President, or Senator or Judge or Governor or Congressperson or General or Admiral or whatever to pass over a Church teaching to do his or her public duty.  (Note: I said “Church teaching.”  I did not say Divine Law, though “Church Teaching” may include the Church’s interpretation of Divine Law)   But this brings me into conflict with Rick Santorum’s philosophy too.  Santorum has decried the Kennedy doctrine which states    “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.”

     Santorum says that John Kennedy did great “harm in America” by insisting on the separation of Church and State.  I don’t know.  If it be harm, it wasn’t President Kennedy, it was future President Madison when he drafted the first amendment back in 1789.  And if it be harm, give me more of it for while I don’t want public figures to forsake their consciences, or citizens to abandon their moral principles and religious faith when voting, I do want religious institutions (and atheist and agnostic institutions) kept out of direct participation in public life.     

Yet More on the Great Schism

A Celebration of the Eucharist in an Orthodox

Church "We did not know if we were in heaven or

still on earth."

Sorry about the hiatus.  We have been without internet for several days and then I was involved in doing some moving which is always a strain on time and energy.  But things have settled down a bit and I would like to get back to the matter of the schism that has divided the Orthodox Churches of the East from the Catholic Church of the West.  I mentioned in the previous blog that the first thing we Catholics have got to get over is the idea that the Greek Church was in some way or other at one time “under” the Pope.  It never has nor had been.  The Churches of Rome and of Constantinople, and the various local Churches of their respective patriarchates, had been in communion with one another since apostolic times.  That communion was fractured in the ninth century when Pope Nicholas I, as senior patriarch of the Church, had excommunicated the Byzantine Emperor Michael III for having deposed the Patriarch Ignatios and replaced him with Photius but the Pope was acting as senior patriarch protecting the rights and authority of a brother patriarch, Igantios.  Ignatios, as a matter of fact, was restored and when, after the death of Ignatios,  Photios was elected in his own right to the Patriarchal Throne there was no breach of communion with the Churches of the West.  In fact, according to some historians, Photios’ son succeeded to the Papal Throne as Theodore II, one of the few good popes of the late ninth  century.  (He had a very short reign, only twenty days, in 897.  His death may be a witness to just how good a pope he was in a time when a fair number of evil men coveted the Throne of Peter and achieved it by very unscrupulous means.)  This time, however, the schism would be of greater and more serious duration.  
     Part of the problem is that the Byzantine Empire was in the early stages of what would be a fatal decline.  Actually, by the time of the schism o f 1054 the decline was pretty advanced, though it could—and would—get far worse.  For over four centuries the Empire had been being whittled away by first the Arabs and then the Turks.  Jerusalem, Damascus, Antioch had all fallen to the Caliphate.  Most of Asia Minor—modern day Turkey—was no longer under imperial control.  It would be another four centuries before the Empire fell completely but the effects of its diminution were already being felt.  Long-term fatal illnesses in empires, like humans, often lead to denial.  The smaller and weaker the Empire became, the more pretentious and even arrogant its claims to sovereignty.   And while it was shrinking, it remembered that while its dominion may be shaky, Rome was not little more than a clump of ruined temples and theatres in a malaria-ridden cattle field.  It was time for “old Rome” to give up its pretensions to Patriarchal Seniority and allow “new Rome” (Constantinople) its rightful dominance in matters ecclesiastical as well as civil. 
     “Old Rome” was not about to do any such thing.  Granted, the Vatican Basilica was already falling down around their ears and cows wandered grazing around those churches standing among the ruins of Caesar and Marcus Aurelius’ capital, but like a delusional old dowager whose once-expensive dresses were now patched and who no longer could afford the luxury of the beauty parlor, but who claimed yet to be the grand dame of the town’s first family,  the Popes of Rome in the squalor of the Lateran reminded anyone who would listen that they were the successors of Saint Peter to the plenitudo potestatis.  Conflict was inevitable where claims of ego were the agenda of the hour. 
     The conflict had been building over time, but the immediate conflagration was ignited when the Patriarch, Michael Caerularius wrote to the Bishop of Trani, an Italian See that had connections both to Rome and to Constantinople.  The Patriarch accused the papacy of introducing “judaizing” practices into Christianity, most notably the use of unleavened bread into the Eucharist.  (The practice in the Church, both East and West, had long been to use leavened bread for the Eucharistic celebration, but in the tenth and eleventh century the West gradually began using unleavened bread—as would have been used by Christ at the Last Supper.  The concern for the form of the bread itself corresponds to an increasing appreciation of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist that began as a result of the Eucharistic controversies in the Abbey of Corbie in the ninth century.  But note, there was no continuing tradition from the Last Supper of using unleavened bread.  Leavened bread had become the norm and then the West began introducing unleavened bread.) 
     There were other issues as well—the West had made an unilateral change in the Creed of the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople, proclaiming that the Holy Spirit “proceeded” from the Father and the Son whereas the Conciliar formula said only that the Spirit proceeded from the Father.  This is a very difficult theological point to explain, but suffice it to say that the issue was that the West had altered a formula of faith and altering a formula of faith challenges the orthodoxy of the doctrine.  This in fact is a far more significant problem than leavened/unleavened bread. 
     A third issue was that the West was beginning to impose celibacy on the clergy while in the East married men were allowed to become deacons and priests (though not bishops, at least until they were widowed).
     The Pope, Leo IX, resented the Patriarch’s sending a letter of complaint to a Bishop in the West and the Patriarch’s request that the letter be forwarded to the other bishops of the Western Church.  Leo saw this as an attack on his authority over his own patriarchate and he sent a delegation to Constantinople demanding an acknowledgement by the Patriarch of Papal Supremacy.  This would have been an innovation—the Pope may have been first but he was first among equals.  The Patriarch was not going to give in on that point.  The head of the legation, the Cardinal Bishop of Silva Candida, Humbert, marched into the Hagia Sophia during a Patriarchal Liturgy and, in the name of Leo IX, laid a bull of excommunication on the altar.  The Patriarch then in turn excommunicated the Legate.  The Patriarchal Sees of Rome and Constantinople were no longer in communion with one another, nor were the various Churches comprising their patriarchates.   As far as I can ascertain from my sources, the Patriarch’s pronouncement of excommunication was directed only towards the Legates and not towards either the Pope nor the Western Church.  As for the Bull that Humbert laid on the altar—it was not valid for it was issued in the name of Leo IX and Leo was, unknown yet in Constantinople, dead.   Well, more on this in the next entry.  But the chief point we need to pay attention to is that the schism of East and West is not a rebellion against Papal Authority for the Pope never did have authority over the Eastern Churches.  It was a break of communion as the unity of the Church was shattered as Churches equal in dignity and authority set themselves on different courses. 

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. 

Celibacy: The Bulwark of the Institutional Church

Mandatory Celibacy only is imposed on
the clergy of the Western Church in the
Central Middle Ages, principally during

the Gregorian Reformation  

I want to continue my theme from yesterday on the reason the Church continues to maintain the requirement of celibacy for its priests and bishops.  I pointed out in the several historical entries that the practice was mandated by a series of local councils as early as the fourth centuries but that it became part of the universal law of the Church only on the central Middle Ages when the canons of these early regional synods were collected into a coherent body of Canon Law.  The unspoken issue behind celibacy was not about a sexually abstinent clergy but about the need to protect the properties belonging to the wide-flung network of parish and other churches passing from the patrimony of the Church into the hands of clerical families.  Declaring the marriages of the clergy to be null and void did not so much deprive the priest of the comforts of a wife and children as it did ensure that those children could neither be ordained themselves (illegitimacy being a bar to holy orders) nor make inheritance claims upon the lands pertaining to church where their father was rector.  Since the issue was not sex, much less any sort of “ritual purity,” clerical concubinage was tolerated and in fact a widespread practice.  As I said in my entries, such arrangements should be seen not as the priest “having a mistress” but more as having a (common-law) wife.  Generally—there are always exceptions—such clergy were (at least relatively) faithful to their partner, begat and raised children, considered themselves married and were considered by the common folk around them, especially in rural areas, to be married.  Indeed in the outlaying regions of Europe—Scandinavia, Scotland, Ireland, such clerical wives often held prestigious and even a semi-sacral position of their own even as the priest’s wife does even today in many Orthodox Parishes.  It would only be at the Council of Trent that celibacy of the clergy becomes not only the official position of the Church but the widespread practice. 

     As I mentioned in the last post, celibacy permits the Church Institution to hold the priest in a financial and often psychological dependency in which his loyalty to the Institution is strengthened.  Some priests have felt “victimized” by this imposed dependency.   Many, realizing the dynamics of this dependency, have fled the priesthood to salvage their identity as self-motivating and autonomous adults.  Even more (fortunately) have developed healthy strategies to keep their maturity and psychological autonomy  intact while continuing to minister to God’s people.  But many priests have allowed their psychological and even spiritual growth to be stunted by what is an unhealthy system of rewards and punishments that bolster the power of the Institution over them and even over the weaker sheep in the flocks entrusted to them.

      You will notice that I speak not of “the Church” but of “the Institution.”  I want to make a clear difference here between the divinely established Community of Faith and the Faithful that we call “The Church” and the humanly and historically developed Institution that tries—with both holy and sometimes unholy means—to serve that Community.  I also want to point out that I don’t make this distinction or use this language in any theological sense—which is beyond my capacity—but speaking strictly from a historical viewpoint, which is not beyond my credentials.    

      Sometimes it is argued that permitting priests to marry would be financially crippling to the Church.  Actually, with sound and professional reorganization of Church finances it would be quite feasible, at least here in North America.  This again though would challenge the power of the Institution as such financial reorganization would require a transparency and accountability that is not current practice nor long—if ever—has been such practice.  

      What is probably the greater fear of many who cannot see beyond the Institutional model of Church is that marriage would encourage priests to a psychological maturity that would undermine the power of the local bishop.  A priest who has a wife (and children) has a divided loyalty.  Marriage would not divide the loyalty of the priest to God, or to the Gospel he is ordained to preach, nor to the Church, i.e. the people whom he serves; it would however make him face choices between his family’s demands and those of his bishop.  “We are not going there” a wife might say “our children need better schools.”  Or “I am not raising our children in that house!”  Or “I have my career too and I am not sacrificing it to move two hours away.”  Gone would be the days of the docile Father O’Malley with his one valise and his straw hat getting on the street-car and moving cross-town to St. Mary’s, bells or no bells.  Marriage does not make all men grow up, alas, but many a bishop would want to make sure than none of his priests made his life complicated by thinking for himself or having a wife who would have voice in his decisions.  Marriage could bring down the whole system.  And wouldn’t that be too bad!!!!    

Celibacy--Today's Situation

The Changing Face of the
Priesthood by Father Donald
Cozzens--certainly worth the

read

Professor Daniel Maguire of Marquette University wrote today in the New York Times “Letters” that   “The root of the problem (clerical sex abuse) is mandatory celibacy. There is a reason religions with a married clergy have no comparable problem — not that they are problem-free. Celibacy is not a bona fide occupational qualification for ministry.” I am a bit surprised at this because Dr. Maguire is usually better nuanced in his observations.  In the first place his claim that religions (or at least other Christian Churches) with a married clergy have no comparable problem.  I am not sure what parallel universe that Professor Maguire lives in, or perhaps it is just the rarified air of his ivory tower—and theologians have the more rarified air of all academics, allowing angels to have danced on the heads of pins for centuries—but he needs to talk with any Episcopalian or Lutheran Bishop or meet with the officials of any presbytery in the country to know that the problem of clerical sex abuse is not unique to celibate clergy.  On the other hand, he may want to visit a few Buddhist temples and inquire why their celibate monks (seem, at least to) stay out of the limelight in this disheartening problem.  Don’t misunderstand me, I am not defending mandatory celibacy. To the contrary:  I think it is sick.  Not  because it has to do with sex, but because—and here is where Maguire is on to something though he misdiagnosed it—celibacy and sex abuse (whether of minors or vulnerable adults) does have a common root.  Power. 

      The most common motivational issue behind sexual abuse is the need of one person to dominate another who is in a position of inferior power.  An adult incapable of healthy peer relationships seeks to control or otherwise dominate a person whose youth and naiveté leaves him (or her) vulnerable.  An employer or a person higher up the power chain in a corporation or an institution (for example the United States Military) has a need to flex power by exercising control over a subordinate, and what control is more total than demanding sexual favors.  Even in what might appear—and the operative word is appear—to be a healthy peer relationship, one person often has a need to dominate the other. 

      Celibacy too is about power and the need to dominate.  In 2000 Father Donald Cozzens of the Cleveland diocese published a book that “hit the nail on the head,” The Changing Face of the Priesthood.  This is one of the most insightful, indeed I think it is the single most insightful, analysis of the issues facing the Catholic Church in North America.  It deals with far more than celibacy or the sex-abuse crisis.  I think it is particularly insightful on reasons for the vocation crisis in the Church today and why parents, unlike fifty years ago, do not want their children to be priests or nuns.  It deals with how the abuse of power is structuralized in the Catholic Church. 

     In the last several posts, I have shown that celibacy historically was used to protect Church property against alienation to the families of priests in the medieval period.  That is not an issue today. Today I would suggest that celibacy is a key factor in creating a psychological dependency of the clergy on the hierarchy.  The priest is never allowed to achieve a full social maturity.  He is required to live in Church-owned housing.  With housing provided, he is paid a less than professional salary—enough to live on but not enough to give him any independence.  While some priests are able to supplement this dependency-income with family money or are canny enough to successfully transform their resources into something of a fortune sufficient to let them buy a home and have an income sufficient for independence, most clergy remain for their entire lives dependent on their diocese or religious community for housing, meals, automobile, and an income just sufficient for clothing and relatively modest vacations.  Such dependency creates a relationship with the Institutional Church and its representatives not unlike that of the abuse victim afraid to break the ties with his abuser.  Where can he go?  What choices does he have?  He comes to see himself as powerless over his life and life choices.  Who will have him if the abuser (or in this case, the Institution) turns him out?  The abuser (or the Institution) is someone that everyone esteems.  While he, the abused (or the priest) finds himself unhappy with the situation, it must be him and not the situation since the abuser (Institution) is so highly respected that they can do nothing wrong.  Or perhaps the victim (the priest) feels “honored” to be the recipient of the reflected glory and power of the abuser (Institution).  And there are rewards.  Just as an abuser might take his victim for a nice vacation, buy him or her some clothes, even a car, or give him access to money or a career.  So too the priest has the hopes of being sent on for higher studies, given a better parish, maybe even being made a monsignor, or—dare he think it?—a bishop! 

      This is not to say that that there are not good priests, sincere priests,—there are, hundreds, even thousands.   There are many men who have found an interior freedom that lets them function effectively in a dysfunctional institution.  They give generous service to others and have found strategies to maintain their own emotional and spiritual health despite the unhealthiness of the system in which they work.  On the other hand, many good priests have come to realize just how dysfunctional the system is and for their own welfare have chosen to find other vocational paths.  And, tragically, the Church has more than a significant share of men who have drunk the clerical Kool-Aid and live not in the freedom of the Gospel but in enthrallment to an Institution that is in dire need of Reform.  More on this in the next posting.          

More on The Catholic Church and Same Sex Marriage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Same Sex Marriage: Did the Church Always Disapprove?

Saints Sergius and Bacchus, a seventh century icon
in which historian John Boswell interprets the placement
of Christ to be the pronubus (or best man) at a same
sex wedding. 

New York State has just joined the list of States approving same sex marriage.  Twenty years ago, I don’t think anyone saw this concern coming but now it is an issue which is not going to go away for the foreseeable future.  The Catholic Church has taken a strong stand against the legalization of Gay Marriage and it seems obvious that this is consistent with our tradition.  But, at least from a historical perspective, the issue may not be so simple. 

John Boswell, an exceptionally talented historian, wrote Same Sex Unions in Pre Modern Europe (Random House, 1994) arguing from his exhaustive research that the Catholic and Orthodox Churches blessed same sex unions from late antiquity until well into the early modern period.  His interest in this subject arose from a seventh century Icon of Saints Sergius and Bacchus.  Boswell interprets the icon as a marriage icon in which Christ is standing as the pronubus, the man who stands behind a marrying couple in the Orthodox ceremony holding the marriage crowns.  This is equivalent to the “best man” or “supporter” in our western marriage ceremonies.  It is a curious interpretation.

Boswell made his name as a historian with an earlier book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (University of Chicago Press, 1980) in which he investigated the long history of how homosexuality was viewed by the Christian Church from apostolic times through the Medieval period and how those views shaped social attitudes towards same-sex relationships. 

John Boswell was himself gay and Catholic—a convert to Catholicism who became a very devout practitioner of the faith.  He was a devout Catholic who attended mass daily and who did not rebel against the Church’s teachings on homosexuality but who did want the Church to reexamine and refine its teaching in the light of current knowledge.  He died of an AIDS related illness in 1994 at the age of 47.  As a historian he was an enfant terrible—while still in his thirties achieving an unparalleled reputation as a talented and meticulous scholar whose incredible ability with languages, ancient and modern, opened archival material beyond the reach of even most good historians.  A Harvard graduate, he chaired the history department and taught at Yale.  Revered and loved by his students and all who knew him he was a gentleman and a scholar.   What can one say about the quality of his work?

I had read Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality as a graduate student.  Boswell had not only taught my professor but directed her doctoral dissertation.  She was a great admirer of his—as indeed were most (if not all) of his students.  I probably should reread the book today.  Boswell was an incredible linguist.  I, for my part, cherish my Greek as a distant but useless memory; my Latin—on the other hand—is pretty good.  When it comes to other ancient languages—Syriac, Coptic, even Hebrew—well, truthfully, I have never studied them and will not be as pretentious as those who with some scrap or other of linguistic knowledge will presume to evaluate Boswell’s work.  For evaluating Boswell’s uses of sources, I can only use the Latin.  To be fair, indeed to be profoundly respectful, towards John Boswell, he always put the citation in the original language in the footnote with a translation for the student.  I did find that at times, even frequently, the Latin citations were well translated but any ambiguity was translated in favor of his thesis.  In other words, sometimes when I looked at the Latin text, I thought to myself: “yes, it could mean that; but it doesn’t have to.”    He didn’t fudge his Latin translations, but neither did he always warn the reader that the citation might not be as strong an endorsement of his thesis as he implied. If he did this with the Latin, I suspect he did it with other languages as well.  And as he did this frequently, I am not sure he always proved his point.  On the other hand, the University of Chicago Press does not print history books whose arguments are questionable; Harvard does not grant the doctorate to students whose language skills are faulty; and Yale does not hire shaky scholars.   Bottom line, I do not always agree with Boswell, but one has to take him seriously. 

As to his book,   Same Sex Unions in Early Modern Europe—if my Greek is but a distant memory, don’t expect me to be able to work with Old Church Slavonic.  I don’t have a clue about Slavonic, old or new.  And again—Syriac and the variety of near-Eastern languages—not a word do I know.  Some of the medieval French, English, or Italian I can handle.  And again, I find the Latin to be biased.  It has been several years since I last read Same Sex Unions, but I was not convinced.  On the other hand, one has to admit the possibilities—especially given the vast number of same sex alleged Marriage Rites that Boswell uncovered that there could be something here.

When Boswell published Same Sex Unions there was a flurry of reviews, pro and con, but they tended to be more polemic—pro or con gay marriage—than substantive reviews.  The problem is that there are few scholars with the linguistic abilities to evaluate Boswell’s interpretation of the vast array of documentary sources cited.   

Among other archives where John Boswell found his sources was the Vatican Archives and Library.  He had to obtain access to the material by deceit as Vatican officials knew his reputation as a “gay historian” and would not facilitate his use of documents that might establish the thesis that the Church had once blessed same-sex unions.  This is surprising as the Vatican Library and Archives are usually most helpful to scholars, even scholars who are known to be challenging Church teaching.  The Church, at least at the highest academic levels, does not fear dissent but normally seeks to engage it in scholarly conversation;  Boswell's thesis, however, apparently was too hot an issue to allow for conversation.   Boswell arranged with a Jesuit scholar who was working in the library at the same time that he, Boswell, would ask for the documents the Jesuit needed and the priest would ask for the documents regarding same-sex marriage rituals; they then would exchange materials and do their respective work.     

Boswell wrote a third book, The Kindness of Strangers: Child Abandonment in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (University of Chicago, 1988).  This book is particularly interesting, not for its content (though it is interesting and well written) but as a contrast to his two books with Gay themes.  Here I found no ambiguity in his use of sources.  In that regard—his objectivity—it might be considered his best book. 

Well, since ambiguity might be considered the theme to today’s entry, and I seem to be rather ambiguous myself on how to interpret Boswell’s thesis that the Church has, in the past, not only approved but blessed Gay unions, what does all this say about the history of Same-Sex Marriage?  I have to say that I don’t consider the thesis proved, but the existence of scores of these rituals in both the Eastern and Western Churches in late antiquity up through the Renaissance, the similarity of these rituals to known heterosexual matrimonial rites, and the explicit mentioning of the partners “sleeping together” (to be taken in the literal and not the euphemistic sense) certainly does not close the door on the possibility that at various times and places in the past same-sex marriages were blessed with Church authority.  That does not mean, of course, that the Church should today—or even could in the future—do the same.  Doctrine develops—which means it changes—and we are not bound to the past but called to respond faithfully in the present.  There are  other things which the Church once approved—the death penalty for example—that it no longer condones and there are things it condones today that it once condemned (the loaning of money at interest).  Gay Marriage will be a political “hot potato” for some time to come but it is an understatement to say that it is unlikely that the Catholic Church might someday sanction it.  Nevertheless, at least from a historical perspective, the issue may not be as black and white as some might declare it.