Foundations of the Anglican Church IX

Dunstan of Canterbury,

Archbishop 960-988

In 735 Gregory III  sent the pallium to Egbert, thus raising the See of York to Metropolitan status—in recognition of the leadership the Bishops of York had exercised in the days of the first Christian communities in Roman Britain.  The Bishop of York had been one of the English bishops present at the synod of Arles in 314.  Making York an archdiocese divided the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury by creating another metropolitan see and placing it over the northern dioceses.  Of course those were the dioceses which had long followed Celtic customs and were reluctant to accept the Roman style Christianity of Canterbury before the Syond of Whitby some sixty years before.   
In 747 the English bishops held a synod at the instance of Pope Zacharias and a second synod held forty years later was presided over by two papal legates.  That same year Pope Adrian elevated the See of Lichfield to Archiepiscopal status at the request of King Offa of Mercia.  This was a mistake however and Leo III, in 803, reduced Lichfield to the status of an ordinary diocese, leaving Canterbury and York as the only metropolitan sees.   We can see from this information that the English Church was not independent from Rome but neither should we attribute governing power over the English Church to Rome and the Papacy.  The Ecclesia Anglicana was in the Roman Patriarchiate and acknowledged the leadership of the Western Patriarch, but remained self-governing in internal affairs as did the other Churches of Western Europe. 
Alfred the Great, the King who drove out the Danish invaders and united the diverse Saxon kingdoms at the end of the ninth century had a strong devotion to the Church in his realm and supported the distribution of the Regula Pastoralis of Pope Saint Gregory the Great to his bishops for the formation of their clergy.  Alfred also restored the payment of the Peter’s Pence which had fallen into disuse during the instability of the Viking invasions.  Nevertheless, I think it is important to distinguish between the King’s support of the Church and his support of the papacy itself.  Alfred’s prime interest was in the reform of the Church in his kingdom, most notably in the restoration of the monasteries after the Danish invasion and in improving the education and morals of the clergy which he saw as vital to the educational and cultural improvements of his kingdom.  This was not a period in which the Roman See was able to offer reform to its own Church, much less to a Church at the far end of the then known world. 
Despite the corruption of the papacy at this time several Archbishops of Canterbury, most notably Wulfhelm, Aelfsige,  and St.Dunstan made the journey to Rome to receive their pallia personally.  The other Archbishops did not make the journey but had the pallium sent to them.    An interesting case right at the most intense period of the decay of Roman morals was that of Archbishop Plegmund (archbishop 890-923).  Pope Formosus had sent the pallium to Archbishop Plegmund And when Sergius III, for political reasons, annulled the ordinations and appointments of Formosus, Plegmund had to make the journey to Rome to beg its new grant. Sergius III was the pope whose mistress was Marozia during the so called pornocracy and Sergius was the father of John XI by Marozia.  Plegmund was not the only Archbishop of Cantrbury to be exposed to the moral sludge of the papal court.  Saint Dunstan journeyed to Rome in 960 and received the pallium from John XII—perhaps the most immoral man to have ever sat in the Chair of Peter.  John XII was the grandson of the aforementioned Marozia by her first husband, Alberic of Spoleto.  Luitprand of Cremona, the historian, alleges that John had turned the papal palace “into a whorehouse.”  John was to meet his end at the hands of a jealous husband—one of scores whom he had cuckolded.  In addition to his sexual proclivities, John was given to hunting, gambling, and drinking bouts while at the same time ignoring his sacred duties as Pope.  One can only wonder what men like Dunstan thought when they came to the papal court though it does permit us to see that the English were able to have a deep and lasting devotion to Saint Peter while distinguishing the Prince of the Apostles from his unholy successors.   
In 1015 the Danish Prince Canute invaded England and held the crown from 1016 until his death in 1035.  In 1018 he succeeded to the throne of Denmark and 1028 took the crown of Norway thus building for himself quite an empire.   He was a most fervent convert to Christianity and advanced the cause of the Church in all his realms.  In 1026 he made a pilgrimage to the Rome of John XIX.  He was crowned there as King of the English, Danes, Norwegians and “some of the Swedes.”  The purpose of his trip, other than to receive the papal blessing on his empire, was to negotiate with the Emperor about safe passage for English pilgrims going to Rome and to negotiate with the Pope about lowering the fees for which the English Archbishops had to pay to receive the pallium.  By the third decade of the eleventh century there was reform in the air in Rome—the Emperors Otto were doing their best to clean up the cesspool of the Roman pornacracy, but the Pope at the time of Canute’s visit was not a reform Pope but a member of that notorious family of the Counts of Tusculum.  John does not seem to have led a particularly scandalous life though he was far from pious but Canute would not have been one to scruple at the sexual idiosyncrasies of his peers, however, as he himself lived in open concubinage with several women while married to Emma of Normandy. 
I mentioned that during the notorious papacies of the tenth century, three English Archbishops actually travelled to Rome to receive their pallia from the Pope.  The pallium is a band of wool adorned with five crosses that an Archbishop wears over his Mass vestments to show that he is in communion with the Holy See.  I can’t help but wonder what these archbishops thought when they got to Rome and saw the state of the Church there?  I think particularly of Saint Dunstan who was a great reformer of the English Church and yet visited the court of John XII, one of the most depraved men to sit on the throne of Saint Peter.  Dunstan spent much of his time as first an abbot and the successively as Bishop of Worcester, Bishop of London and then Archbishop of Canterbury reforming the morals of the clergy and here he meets a pope who was a notorious adulterer and gambler, given to drinking bouts and hunting, not merely sloppy in his sacred duties but who openly mocked the sacred rites.  Dunstan looked to the popes as the successor Peter and the center of the Church’s unity but he did not take his cue as bishop from their leadership.  Under Dunstan the English Church was one of the brighter spots in the Christian west. 
The devotion of Dunstan and of the English in general was not to the person of the Pope as it has become in later history, but to Saint Peter  himself.  It was Peter’s relics, not the popes, that brought King Ine to Rome, that drew so many of the English to Rome in theAnglo-Saxon period and that evoked the annual tribute of the Peter’s Pence.  Perhaps one final aspect to look at in this devotion to the prince of the Apostles is the foundation of Westminster Abbey. 
The Abbey of Saint Peter at Westminster seems to date back to the early decades of the seventh century.  The Abbey supposedly was dedicated to Saint Peter because of a vision of the fisherman saint to a local fisherman, Aldrich, at the time when Saint Mellitus was Bishop of London.  At that time the City of London was somewhat downstream from the fledgling abbey which was out in the upriver fields and meadows.  Whatever the historicity of the vision, the story testifies to the devotion in which Saint Peter was held in Anglo-Saxon England and the mystique the Prince of the Apostles held over the English Church.  Saint Dunstan reformed the Abbey in the third quarter of the tenth century.  Saint Edward the Confessor, the last of the Anglo Saxon Kings (discounting Harold who was unable to maintain his throne to which he had a somewhat shaky claim in any event) began rebuilding the Abbey in 1042 as a site for his eventual burial.  The new church was consecrated on December 28^th 1065 and King Saint Edward died eight days later on January 5, 1066.  The struggle for the crown of the childless King led to the invasion of William the Conqueror who was crowned king in the abbey church on Christmas day, 1066.  The reign of William and the ascendancy of the Normans (and consequent eclipse of the Anglo-Saxons) would change the relationship between the Church of England and the Holy See.    

Who's buried in Peter's Tomb?

There are a variety of strings I am anxious to pick up—especially the one on the American Nuns’ investigation—which isn’t about the American nuns at all but about the religious sisters in the States. But give me a day or two and I will come back to that. Right now, I am going to do a little more on the Vatican, specifically the Vatican Basilica.
Everybody knows that St. Peter was buried in Peter’s tomb, but he wasn’t—at least not for long. Granted, when the tomb—or more properly, grave—was excavated in the 1940’s, skeletal remains had been found in it, but it turns out they were an odd assortment of various bones from several individuals, including an older woman and a young man, as well as several animals. Obviously they were not Peter’s bones. Hmmm. What is that all about?
Of course the first problem is there is no definite evidence that Peter had ever been to Rome, alive or dead. There is an ancient tradition (note the small “t”) to that effect, but no contemporary text relates the information. (The Acts of the Apostles tells us that Paul was at Rome, though it doesn’t mention his death there.) There were counter-claims about Peter. A first-century ossuary (a box used to hold the bones of a person who had died, had been entombed, and then when the only the bones were left, whose bones had been put in this “ossuary” so that the tomb could be used again) that had the name “Simon bar Jonah” engraved on it had been found in the 1950’s in the Kidron valley, the great burial field between Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives to the east. On the other hand the name Simon bar Jonah would be no more rare in first century Palestine than say “Mike Johnson” might be in twenty-first century ‘merica today. The tradition of Peter dying at Rome—going back to the end of the first century, and the lack of any significant counter-claims, gives plausible weight to the argument that Peter went to Rome and was put to death there under the emperor Nero circa the year 64.
As for the bones in the grave not matching Peter’s age or sex, it turns out, the archeologists excavating the site had overlooked a second set of bones. These bones were not in the grave but had been concealed in a niche in the buttressing wall that supported the monument of “trophy” that had been built over Peter’s grave in the mid second century. This monument is called the “trophy of Gaius” because a Roman presbyter named Gaius left a description of this monument in the final decade of the second century. The bones in this niche had originally been thought to be insignificant as they were not where Peter’s bones were supposed to be—in the grave beneath the monument. The curious thing about this second set of bones is that they are all from one person, they are from a man between sixty and seventy years of age (Peter’s probable age if he died in 64 AD), and they had been disinterred from a previous grave and located in this niche after the flesh had decayed. Moreover, the soil samples clinging to these bones matched the soil in the grave beneath the monument—in other words, the soil of Peter’s grave. Hmmm. So these bones had once been buried in Peter’s grave.
But wait—there is more. Bits of purple thread and golden thread indicated that the bones, at the time of their being immured in the niche, had been wrapped in a very precious fabric, indeed (because of the purple) a fabric which would have been reserved to the use of the Imperial family, or at least the very highest of the Emperor’s household. The story grows more curious.
If you have ever been to the Basilica of Saint Peter in the Vatican, you have seen in the “confessio”—the open well immediately in front of the papal altar that leads down to the crypt—the “niche of the pallia.” The pallia are woolen scarves that the pope gives to newly named residential archbishops each year as a sign of their communion with him in the unity of the universal Church. This niche holds a silver coffer (they say it is silver but they had better get some polish and a little elbow grease, it looks to me like bronze) in which the pallia are stored until the day they are bestowed on the prelates—the feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul, June 29—each year. The niche is decorated with an ancient mosaic of Christ. The only problem is that the niche is slightly off center. One would expect it to be directly under the center of the altar which itself stands directly over the presumed site of the tomb of the apostle? Why is the niche off center? Again, hmmm.
The niche is not new. It is original to the basilica which Constantine constructed in 325. It is also directly over—not Peter’s grave, but the recess in that buttressing wall which held the bones of the sixty-something year old man that had been wrapped in the imperial cloth after they had been taken from Peter’s grave. In other words, the architects of the basilica seem to have known the true location of the bones presumed to be Peter’s when Constantine built his basilica. So what is the story?
The most probable story is this. Peter was martyred in the circus of Nero, a large amphitheater built by Caligula and Nero across the Tiber from Rome. The tradition is that he was crucified upside down—probably one of dozens or even hundreds crucified that night for a variety of reason ranging from being persecuted Christians to rebellious slaves to common criminals. There are stories that they were not only crucified but covered in pitch and set alight as sort of living (or actually dying) torches to illumine the stadium. It is possible; I don’t think there is historical data one way or the other. After the crowds emptied out of the spectacle, disciples probably came and claimed the body or perhaps just rushed off with it in the confusion. (There are some indications of the body just being carried off—namely the absences of any bones from the feet—the Christians having just quickly cut the body down and abducted it.) Peter's body was then taken to a necropolis (a pagan cemetery) across the via Cornelia from the amphitheater and buried in a simple earthen grave less than 500 feet from where he died. Once the body was buried it was left undisturbed in its grave, but the grave itself underwent a series of improvements to protect it against erosion. Then almost a century after Peter’s martyrdom, the Christian community in Rome built a monument over the grave. It was a simple monument—a brick wall faced in red plaster with a white marble pillared canopy over it, the canopy itself surmounted by a marble framed recess. The pillared canopy is about four feet tall, too high to have been meant as an “altar” as some suppose. This monument is the “trophy” mentioned by Gaius. In 258, during the persecution of Valerian, the bones were exhumed and brought for safe-keeping to the catacomb of Saint Sebastian on the Via Appia. Meanwhile “decoy” bones were placed in the traditional grave to mislead any who wished to violate the grave. At a later date, the authentic bones were returned but placed in a concealed aedicule (recess) in the wall supporting the monument so they could be venerated in the traditional spot but not exposed to being stolen or desecrated. When Constantine was building his basilica in 325, he had the bones wrapped in precious cloth, and returned to their aedicule. In building the basilica he constructed a window-like opening over the aedicule through which pilgrims could lower bits of cloth or other souvenirs to touch the tomb (the aedicule which held the bones) and then take home again as relics of their visit. This opening is what became the niche of the pallia and explains why it is off center.
More on the building of the basilicas in a future posting.

There is a variety of images today. The first is a sketch of the "Trophy of Gaius" that was constructed over Peter's grave c. 160 AD. The second is a map of the relationship between the circus of Nero (see third image), the ancient necropolis in which Peter was buried (depicted in blue) and the Constantinian basilica--depicted in yellow--built over the necropolis in 325.