|
AI: The History of the First Crusade An Account of the Origins, Events, and Legacy of the First Crusade (1096–1099) AI: Introduction:The First Crusade was a pivotal event in medieval history, marking the beginning of a series of religious wars initiated, supported, and sometimes directed by the Latin Church in the medieval period. Fought between 1096 and 1099, the First Crusade aimed to recapture Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Muslim control. The campaign not only changed the political landscape of the Near East but also had profound impacts on European society, culture, and religious life. CAFÉ COMMENT: Given that a stalemate of sorts had existed between Christianity in the West and Muslims for four centuries, why the urgency for a military action in 1095? AI picks this up in the next section. AI: Background and CausesThe roots of the First Crusade can be traced to longstanding tensions between Christian and Muslim territories, particularly concerning access to holy sites in Jerusalem. In the late 11th century, the Seljuk Turks, a Muslim dynasty, gained control of Jerusalem and much of Anatolia, threatening the Byzantine Empire. In 1095, Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos appealed to Pope Urban II for military assistance against the advancing Turks. Pope Urban II saw an opportunity not only to aid fellow Christians but also to assert papal leadership, unite Christendom, and redirect the violent energies of European knights away from internal conflict. At the Council of Clermont in November 1095, Urban II called upon Western Christians to take up arms and reclaim Jerusalem, promising spiritual rewards such as the remission of sins for those who participated. CAFÉ: AI is correct in its assessment that military pressure was building on the eastern flank which included the Eastern Christian Church and the lands around Greece and Turkey, including the seat of the Roman Empire, Constantinople [now Istanbul.] Relations between Western and Eastern Christianity had grown acrimonious in the 1000’s, and AI does not include the excommunication of the Eastern Church in 1054 by the pope, when Cardinal Humbert dramatically threw the documents upon the altar of Constantinople’s most sacred church, Hagia Sophia—during Mass, no less. [Pope Paul VI lifted the excommunication in 1965, about 900 years later, but the Orthodox and Roman Catholics are still not united at this time]. AI correctly identified Pope Urban II’s motivation for the First Crusade as enhancing the office of the papacy as the temporal and spiritual power of the Western Roman Empire. AI: The Journey to the Holy Land. The response to Urban II’s call was overwhelming. Tens of thousands of knights, nobles, and commoners from across Europe pledged to “take the cross.” The First Crusade consisted of several distinct contingents led by prominent nobles, including Godfrey of Bouillon, Raymond IV of Toulouse, Bohemond of Taranto, and Hugh of Vermandois. Before the main armies departed, an ill-fated movement known as the People’s Crusade—comprised mostly of peasants and minor knights—set out in early 1096. This group, led by Peter the Hermit, suffered devastating losses in Anatolia and failed to reach Jerusalem. The main Crusader armies left Europe in the summer of 1096, traveling overland through the Byzantine Empire. Although Emperor Alexios provided some support, relations between the Crusaders and Byzantines were often strained by cultural misunderstandings and conflicting interests. CAFÉ: Pope Urban sought to build an army of knights, and he spent considerable time in 1095 preaching in the major cathedrals of what is now modern France hoping to attract what amounted to a professional force of Norman elites. However, cathedrals could not contain or exclude the crowds, and the pope’s sermons, his “calls to battle,” were heard by the general public, leading to thousands of unskilled or “minor knights” as AI put it, to join a makeshift army of at least 20,000 in response to the promise of a plenary indulgence, under the “leadership” of Peter the Hermit. AI does not detail the scandal and ineptitude of Peter the Hermit’s actions. Pope Urban never included Peter in the committee of four who steered the general direction of the Crusade. Something of a maverick cleric, Peter’s underequipped force actually took to the field first, before the three major bodies left France. Fighting just about every territory in its path through Europe, the force took particular pains to slaughter Jews. Peter’s force created mistrust of the general Crusade as the main force—broken into three forces on different routes—made their way to Constantinople before turning south for Jerusalem. AI: Major Campaigns and Battles. The Crusaders’ first major challenge was the siege of Nicaea, which they captured in June 1097 with Byzantine assistance. The Crusaders then marched through Anatolia, enduring harsh conditions and fierce resistance before capturing Antioch after a difficult siege in June 1098. The final march to Jerusalem was marked by hunger, disease, and internal conflicts. Nevertheless, the Crusaders arrived at the gates of Jerusalem in June 1099. After a brutal siege, the city fell to the Crusaders on July 15, 1099. The conquest was accompanied by significant violence, including the mass killing of many inhabitants. CAFÉ: I was surprised that AI did not linger on an eighteen-month siege of the Muslim stronghold of Antioch. In his treatment, The First Crusade, Thomas Asbridge [see my Amazon review] devotes a quarter of his book to the Antioch siege, which nearly broke the back of the Crusader force. Much of the force was lost to battles with rescuing Muslim armies, desertions, hunger, and treachery of a sort, as at least one of the four Crusader commanders was jockeying to become the king of Antioch when it fell. The breech at Antioch was finally achieved when several of the city’s residents negotiated a ploy with the Crusaders for money. A force that numbered as many as 100,000 three years before was reduced to one or two thousand as the final three-hundred-mile march to Jerusalem began from Antioch. The trials of the war had hardened this army such that its taking of Jerusalem was indeed brutal, as AI reports. The inhabitants—an ensemble of Muslims, Christians, and Jews—were mostly massacred. AI: Establishment of Crusader States. Following the victory, the Crusaders established several Latin Christian states in the Levant, including the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, and the County of Tripoli. These “Crusader States” served as footholds for further military and religious endeavors in the region. CAFÉ: Edessa’s fall in 1144 led to a series of more Crusades. The First Crusade coincided with considerable Muslim internecine clashes. The Victories at Antioch and Jerusalem was something of a shock to various Islamic quadrants and prompted something of a reunification. This is beyond what I asked the AI program, however. AI: Legacy and Impact. The First Crusade had lasting consequences for both Europe and the Middle East. It heightened religious tensions, contributed to centuries of conflict between Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and established a precedent for future crusades. The movement also stimulated trade, cultural exchange, and intellectual development, but it left a legacy of violence and mistrust. For many in Europe, the First Crusade was seen as a triumph of faith and chivalry, while for others it was a source of tragedy and loss. Its legacy continues to influence interfaith relations and historical interpretations to this day. CAFÉ: No basic disagreement with text. AI: Conclusion. The First Crusade stands as a defining episode in medieval history, demonstrating the complex interplay of religion, politics, and culture. Its story is one of hope, hardship, conquest, and controversy, and it remains an essential subject for understanding the medieval world and its enduring influence. CAFÉ: Appropriately generic summary given what I paid for it. Which was nothing. I am going to conclude the First Crusade stream here and jump to the Fourth Crusade [1202-1204], a completely different kind of Crusade, a really different kind, in two or three weeks. I must say, it was interesting letting a machine do most of my work. I won’t make a habit of it, though.
0 Comments
I have a theory that if a Catholic studies the Crusades, not only will he or she have mastered the highlights of medieval Christianity but also come to greater understanding of realities in our Church life of 2025. I remember that my sixth-grade text in Catholic school featured one chapter on the Crusades which was mostly comprised of contemporary sketches of Christian knights protected by more metal armor than a 1959 Buick Electra. The accompanying narrative described our knights as undertaking retribution against the heathen Muslims, who came into being around 622 B.C. in Arabia and within a century was swallowing France until Charles Martel, “the Hammer of Heretics,” reversed the Islamic surge at Tours in 732. The goal of Crusaders was winning back the custody of the Holy Lands, particularly Jerusalem, where the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus had taken place. Historians refer to the Holy Land as the psychological center of Christianity in the medieval era...
Unfortunately, it wasn’t nearly as simple as that. I suppose that if my sixth grade teacher had tried to explain how the Bishop of Rome traveled to France in 1095 to strengthen the authority of his office and create a warlike enthusiasm for a religious war in the Middle East and reunite the Western Roman/Latin Church with the Eastern Christian Church in Constantinople, well, I guess I would have given up any future studies on the Crusading Era. But in 2005 I slipped a copy of The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople by Jonathan Phillips, published earlier that year, in my vacation suitcase and devoured the book voraciously in the northern New Hampshire mountains. Phillips is a remarkable scholar of that era—and I slowly began to grasp what complex issues were raised in this series of wars. [Incidentally, I wrote one of my early reviews for Amazon on Philips’ book. I was still developing a style, and let’s leave it at that.] It is hard to know where to begin a series of posts about the Crusades. I will introduce some texts which you will find eminently readable and precise in the where, why, and how this series of campaigns unfolded. It’s complicated, but worth exploring. If you know anything about the Crusades, you know that the “opposition” was Islam. So, let’s begin with the clash of beliefs. THE RISE OF ISLAM: Christianity, from its origins in Jerusalem, worked four centuries to formulate its most important doctrines on the Holy Trinity: One God in three personae, to use the Greek phrasing—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The identity of Jesus was professed as truly man and truly God, two natures functioning in one personality. This is the language of the Nicene Creed. We say the creed every week, though the miraculous truths contained in the formula should probably puzzle us more than they do. The Creed is, after all, a profession of faith. We cannot prove what Nicaea hath wrought. This Christian formulary was not universally accepted, and by the seventh century a holy man in Saudi Arabia came to believe that the divine had inspired him to bring to the world a new theology and a new book of revelation. The man, of course, was Mohammed, and his book was the Quran. Mohammed’s preaching enthused many who followed him because his description of the divine was simpler and accessible to many. He defined his creed with the principle that God—Allah in his theology—was one. There was no trinity, nor was there a godman like Jesus. As a matter of doctrine, Islam unites religion and government. The best-selling introductory summary of Islamic faith and life I came across is Introduction to Islam: Beliefs and Practices in Historical Perspective [2015] by Carole Hillenbrand. It is a pricey book, even used, but it is not necessary for the Café series of blogs on the Crusades over the next few weeks. But I do think it is a helpful idea to familiarize oneself with today’s second largest religion in the world at some point in your reading. Islam saw its mission as bringing the entire world into submission to Allah, with common worship and a public/private ethic. Because of its nature, Islam would send forth from Mecca not missionaries, as was the Christian practice, but soldiers who would subjugate entire populations to the embrace of Allah and the revelation of the Quran. Wikipedia provides a decent summary of Islamic expansion to the present day—including inside American prisons. In most cases “subjugation” did not involve violence. In fact, the tenets left by Mohammed seemed to be welcomed in many parts of the world, most notably in North Africa, which had been a Christian region—home to St. Augustine, among others. By the 700’s Islamic forces crossed Gibraltar from Africa and pushed as far north as Tours in France. In Tours Charles Martel, the grandfather of Charlemagne, repulsed Islamic advances and eventually forced the invaders from France. Spain and Portugal, on the other hand, were still expelling Muslims [and Jews] for another seven centuries. Christopher Columbus’ 1492 departure for the Americas were delayed until all non-Catholics had been expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. MEANWHILE, IN THE CHRISTIAN WEST…. From its earliest days Christianity had been a pacifist religion. Jesus himself had stated how “he who lives by the sword dies by the sword” and to Peter in the Garden, “Put thy sword back into its scabbard.” In fairness, Christianity came to be during a period known as the Pax Romana or “Roman Peace.” By 312 A.D., however, when the Emperor Constantine extended favored status to Christians in the Roman Empire, the Church became more engaged in the empire’s civil life, including its militarism. Likewise, the Emperor Constantine engaged in religious affairs, summoning all bishops to the Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., the council which gave us our most basic doctrines of faith. [The Bishop of Rome did not attend.] Later historians would look upon this shift as the beginning of Caesaropapism, the mixing of the emperor’s absolute civil authority with Christianity’s highest authority in faith, the Bishop of Rome and/or the Patriarch of Constantinople [now Istanbul], a point of some contention for centuries. The Western Roman Empire began to fall, in large part because Constantine and his successors elected to move the seat of the Empire to Constantinople. In 410 A.D. the city of Rome itself was occupied by a barbarian army and its aggressive leader, the Visigoth Alaric. A few decades later Attila the Hun threatened Rome but was persuaded [or bribed] not to destroy the city by the future St. Leo the Great, then bishop of Rome. The disorder of the Dark Ages in the West, not surprisingly, turned the attention of Christian thinkers and moralists to what would later be called “just war theory,” a debate about morally permissible acts of war that, to tell the truth, continues to this day. The name most associated with just war principles is St. Thomas Aquinas [1225-1274], known as the “Angelic Doctor” and the greatest theologian Christianity has ever produced, though some hold out for St. Augustine. But I need to note here that Aquinas was doing his best work after the major Crusades had run their course, and the political landscape of Eastern and Western Europe after the Crusades tended toward nation-building and different sorts of military arrangements after the Crusade era. If you can find a map of Europe in 1095, the first thing you will notice is the abundance of “little kingdoms.” The territory we know today as France is discernible, though it was composed of fiefdoms led by knights. Collectively, knighthood was the highest social rank a man could hope to achieve, and in truth it was nearly impossible to achieve this rank without family ties and wealth. A knight would typically swear fealty to a local lord or bishop, and historians tell us that most knights never traveled more than sixty miles from their estates. Except on rare occasions, fighting was generally a local skirmish, usually involving property disputes. Major conflicts, such as the Battle of Hastings in 1066, were rare. Wikipedia’s description of Hastings is self-explanatory as to why wholesale warfare was rare. The death toll on this English countryside conflict ran as high as 25,000, an enormous loss of population in an already thinly scattered demographic. In the eleventh century leading to the First Crusade, the weaponry shaped the tactics and the fighting man. In 1095, when the First Crusade was summoned, a typical knight in time-appropriate preparedness would have made an enormous financial outlay. Knights fought on horseback, though the size of the horse available then was a pony. The horse was the single most expensive item of a knight’s armaments, because a second beast was usually required to carry the equipment and subsistence of the knight and his attendant[s]. A knight’s primary offensive weapon was his sword, another highly expensive investment. Foot soldiers, who were not of the knightly class, used battle axes and daggers, and archers the bow and arrow. Interestingly, the crossbow was operational in the eleventh century, but its use was debated. “Because the crossbow enabled foot soldiers to slay knights who had been raised and trained for war, it upset the structure of medieval warfare.” [Second Lateran Council 1139] An early crossbow could penetrate wood up to seven centimeters. SO WHY THE CALL FOR A CRUSADE? Again, the sixth-grade history books provided for us kids a plausible answer: to restore Christian control to the Holy Lands and make possible pilgrimages to the sites of Christ’s saving death and resurrection. True enough in retrospect, but how many Christians in 800, 900, or 1000 A.D. had the means or opportunity to travel the 2000 miles from the French coast to Jerusalem? What about the Muslims? Weren’t they holding vast numbers of Christians hostages from their military exploits of the 600’s and 700’s? Several things to consider here. First, Western Europe was not a united entity; large regions of Europe still awaited catechizing. Secondly, Western Christianity was barely able to put a unified military force in the field in 1095, the beginning of the First Crusade, and most of these troops were Franks, France being the healthiest entity at that time in communion with Rome. Third, five centuries had passed between Mohammed and the call for the First Crusade. In that extended period, lands conquered by Islamic forces had probably adopted the religious observance of the Quran. There is evidence that some Christian communities were permitted to continue meeting so long as there was no effort to evangelize. The exception was in the Eastern Christian region close to Constantinople itself, where Islamic forces were seeking valuable land and access to trade routes. Constantinople was the governing seat of the Eastern Roman Empire; its capture would have been a tour de force, and it is known that the Eastern emperors had sought the help of the Christian West throughout the 1000’s to keep this from happening. The historic city of Nicaea, near Constantinople, was held by Turkish Moslems in 1095. So, what was the spark that ignited an improbable and zealous push to march to Jerusalem and recover the holy sites? Certainly, one cannot overlook the reformer-monk Hildebrand, who reigned as Pope [St.] Gregory VII from 1073-1085. He is most remembered for his titanic battles with the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Henry II, to establish the supreme power of the papacy. Gregory did not tolerate “Caesaropapism.” He did not believe in the “Caesaro” half of the equation, nor in royalty appointing local bishops, a practice referred to as “investiture.” Most of Gregory’s reign was involved in the “Investiture Controversy." But Gregory’s successor, Urban II [r. 1088-1089], himself a reformer in the mold of Pope Gregory, was a better strategist. He was able to bring a variety of causes together into one mammoth project, i.e., the retaking of the Holy Land. First, he understood that only a pope could summon such a venture, and if successful, Urban would have cemented the Chair of Peter as the final authority wherever Christianity was observed; Caesaropapism would die. Second, the papacy had received several requests from the Patriarchs of Constantinople for military assistance in resisting the Muslims in Asia Minor. At the very least, if Urban called for a Crusade, the Turkish Muslim armies would be diverted to fight the Western Christian armies progressing toward Constantinople on the way to Jerusalem. But beyond that, military aid from the Roman Church would, in Urban’s thinking, mellow differences between the two branches of Christianity and open the door to Church reunion. [Some historians believe that Urban hoped the Eastern Emperor would take command of the First Crusade army as it passed Constantinople; Urban, in fact, never named a supreme commander for the Western Christian army.] But Urban’s greatest feat was presenting a potential military crusade as a Faith revival. The biggest factor of medieval life that we fail to appreciate today is the fear of damnation. Asbridge notes that most knights lived in a sort of perpetual depression—desiring to be saved despite their sinful deeds. Urban decided that, when making the call for the First Crusade, he would institute a full remission of the punishment of sins and the promise of eternal life for those who engaged in the war. One AI application puts it this way: The Crusades, initiated by Pope Urban II in 1095, were presented as a religious mission to reclaim the Holy Land from Muslim control. In his call to arms, Urban II emphasized the spiritual rewards awaiting those who took part in the Crusades. He promised eternal salvation and the forgiveness of sins for all who joined the fight, which was a compelling incentive for many Christians at the time. This promise was particularly significant in a medieval context, where the fear of sin and the desire for salvation were central to the lives of believers. Thus, by transforming a military crusade into a gateway to heaven for those knights who “took the cross,” the symbolic badge of commitment to the cause, Urban was ready to take to the road—to France, anyway—to preach and recruit for this epic event in medieval history. Incidentally, a Plenary or full indulgence can be obtained today. EWTN's website lists the required steps. Back from retreat in time for a very conflicted Saturday across the country. I see that many Catholic news services and websites, and hopefully your parishes, are addressing your emotions and conflicts, and I have nothing more to add except my prayers—and my one good ear if anyone needs consolation. You can reach me privately at the bottom of the Café home page, www.catechistcafe.com.
For my part, I had the opportunity to attend Mass Saturday night [14th] for the Feast of the Holy Trinity. Our celebrant is a retired priest who joins us on weekends, Father Augustine Clark, and I am not embarrassed to admit I stole his sermon material for today’s post. I have rarely heard a meatier ten-minute sermon in my life. Preaching on the Feast of the Trinity is no easy thing. The reality of God as “trinity” or three is such a paradox that we kind of despair of understanding and blow through the proclamation of the Nicene Creed—which defines the formal doctrine of Trinity—every week. Few are aware that this year is the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed, product of the Church’s first Ecumenical [worldwide] Council, Nicaea, in modern Türkiye. The Council of Nicaea [325 A.D.] was convoked by the Roman Emperor Constantine [272-337 A.D.], who ended persecutions and legal restrictions upon Christians. Constantine was sympathetic to Christian belief and morals, though he did not convert till late in life. He could see that conflicting beliefs about Jesus were causing political as well as religious conflicts in his empire. Hence, he summoned all bishops of the known world and ordered them to formulate a universal definition on the identity of Jesus. It may be surprising to some readers that the identity of Jesus had never formally been stated prior to Nicaea. If you look at the four Gospels under a microscope you can see a development in the disciples’ understanding of Jesus’ death and future glory. St. John’s Gospel, the final Gospel to be written, gives us a taste of the state of mind of the early Church. Chapter 20 is particularly insightful. Curiously, St. John’s Gospel was one of the last to be accepted as an official book of the New Testament. The villain of the piece was Arius [250-336 A.D.], an ascetic priest and a student of philosophy who preached that God is totally One, and that to speak of Jesus as a divine offspring of the Father was to say there are two Gods. Arius did not hate Jesus or deny the goodness of his works; rather, he denied Jesus’ identity as a divinity. Did the Holy Spirit create similar challenges to the idea of One God? No, because there was a long tradition dating far back in the Hebrew Scriptures of the Spirit of God interacting on earth among the Israelites. The classical prophets [Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, etc.], for example, were said to be seized or filled with God’s Spirit as an extension of the One God’s interventions, not as a separate being from the One God. At the time of Jesus, in fact, Jews lamented that there had not been a prophet raised up since Malachi in the fourth century; the common phrase for this absence of prophets was “the spirit had been quenched.” This is why many believed that John the Baptist, and later Jesus, were the return of the intimate presence of God’s Spirit. The fathers at Nicaea needed just two months to formulate what we believe about Jesus from the liturgy of the Mass: I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; through him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried, and rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end. The term “consubstantial” in the Creed is critical in that it affirms Jesus is of the same being as the Father, and therefore divine. But at the same time, the Father and the Son are distinct; future councils would labor for a language that would do justice to God’s unity and diversity. Some theologians over the centuries defined the Trinity by function: God the Father created, God the Son saved, God the Holy Spirit sanctifies. But the Church has never endorsed this kind of division. In our prayers and in our theology, we embrace the mystery that the One infinite God chose to create us, love us, and sustain us. I would be remiss if I did not at least mention the “filioque controversy” of the Nicene Creed which constitutes a major division between Roman Catholicism and the Orthodox Church. The definition that the Holy Spirit was a distinct divine person equal in substance to the Father and the Son and not subordinate to them came at the Council of Constantinople in 381 A.D. Look at this portion of the Creed: I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets. The Council of Constantinople finalized the Creed when it described the Holy Spirit as proceeding from "the Father and the Son.” The Eastern Churches objected to the language of the Holy Spirit proceeding from the other members of the Trinity. In Latin, “and the Son” is rendered filioque. The “Filioque Controversy” endures to this day. Why? Dating back to those early days of the Councils, some Church fathers found the filioque clause contradicted in the Gospel of John. For example, from John 15:26: “But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me." [Emphasis mine.] It is also generally true that the Orthodox tradition is much more mystical in its theology and rites. We in the Western Roman Church tend to be more “just the facts” as our bloodline runs from the Roman European West, and our language reflects that. That said, theologians of recent times are examining ways of mutually understanding the language and understanding of the Creed. On another front, Pope Leo XIV has expressed interest in listening to arguments for the celebration of Roman Catholic Easter on the same day as the Orthodox observe the feast. [This is the custom in Greece; Margaret and I celebrated Easter twice last year, the second time in the Roman Cathedral in Athens.] Incidentally, if your curiosity is piqued about Orthodox faith and practice, Peter Ware’s Penguin book, The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Eastern Christianity, is an excellent introduction to our partners in faith. I found Orthodox theology and practice quite moving, as explained by Ware. Our parish’s sermon from Father Augustine this past weekend underscored the riches that the prepared Sunday sermon can have in store for us. There is an old saying about writing that “the shorter the piece, the longer the preparation.” This is true with homilies and sermons. Brief but enlightening. I close with this instruction found in the official Roman Missal: Para. 65. The homily is part of the Liturgy and is strongly recommended, for it is necessary for the nurturing of the Christian life. It should be an exposition of some aspect of the readings from Sacred Scripture or of another text from the Ordinary or from the Proper of the Mass of the day and should take into account both the mystery being celebrated and the particular needs of the listeners. P.S. All the errors in today’s post are mine and mine alone. Father Augustine pitched a perfect game. About one-third of all popes throughout history have been canonized saints. And yet, if you have ever studied medieval history, most of your teachers will admit that the most significant medieval pope was Lothario Conti. Thankfully, we have Joseph Clayton’s Pope Innocent III and His Times [r. 1198-1216], for providing a fine introduction to Innocent’s life and papacy. Clayton gives the best reason canonization of this pope has scared people off to this day. “With the passing of Innocent III passed the fullness of papal power and papal fullness in Europe.” [p. 193].
We are fortunate to have excellent quality reprints of this and other vintage books thanks to Kessinger Publishing Rare Reprints in Whitefish, Montana. I don’t plan to visit Montana again soon—though Glacier National Park, which I have toured, is hauntingly beautiful and very close—but someday I will make my way to Whitefish to visit this operation. Kessinger’s mission is the restoration of out-of-print books for resale in today’s contemporary market. I strongly recommend you visit the publisher’s website and scroll down to do a few funky searches of the old books in the dozens of classifications listed. Kessinger is linked to Amazon [and in some cases Kindle] for ease in sampling and shopping. My purchased copy of Innocent III was published in 1941. I first came across the name of Innocent III in the context of joining the Franciscan Order. It was Innocent who gave permission to both Francis and Dominic to continue their brotherhoods to preach a message of Catholic faith by word and example. In 1968 we were given a dramatic account of Pope Innocent’s nightmare in which the mother church of Rome, St. John Lateran, was falling over on its side until a humble man miraculously pushed it back upon its foundations. Clayton records a more practical account. In the early thirteenth century the Italian countryside was filled with independent bands of those protesting the sins of the Church and its leaders; it was not the golden age of clerical example. Pope Innocent was impressed that Francis and Dominic had sought his permission, recognizing him as Vicar of Christ and professing obedience, a commodity in small supply. Clayton provides several maps of Eurasia to illustrate the political and religious complexity facing a new pope in 1198, and these maps cannot do justice to the numerous mystical movements which passed into and out of existence holding beliefs contrary to the body of Catholic creed and practice. Innocent III was an eminently practical man, trained and studied in theology and law. He was of the long-held but rapidly declining belief that his world and mission was the extension of the Holy Roman Empire, dating from Emperor Constantine [r. 306-337] in which the pope held unquestionable religious authority over the earth and gave legitimacy to even the lay emperors of the Empire. Unfortunately for Innocent, the kings, princes, and church leaders around the empire did not share his vision of papal supreme authority, particularly in matters of money and reform of lifestyle. A pope with little land [“the papal states”] and no standing army had few tools to establish order, and Innocent was reluctantly forced to compromise to achieve what he could of Church order. This is noticeably clear in his advocacy of the Fourth Crusade [see my review of The Fourth Crusade.] It was becoming harder to recruit foot soldiers without promises from the pope of plenary indulgences—and this, three centuries before Luther--and the best military commanders to lead a crusade were engaged in protecting and/or expanding their holdings at home. The Fourth Crusade [1203-1204] is possibly the medieval Church’s greatest scandal. Once dispatched by sea to Jerusalem to reclaim the Holy Land from the Islamic world, the crusade—in partnership with Venice—turned instead to the plunder of Christian Constantinople, the seat of Eastern Christianity and home of the majestic church, the Hagia Sophia. The violence and plundering of Constantinople ended any hopes for reunion between the Western Roman Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. Innocent neither ordered or approved the actions of this Crusade against baptized Christians [the Orthodox], but it happened on his watch, and he is forever associated with it. And he would advocate for a fifth crusade before his death in 1216. Innocent devoted much of his papacy to negotiating peace between royalties and regions in what is today, Europe. He battled nobility for two prime reasons: to restore the pax Romana of a much earlier time, to end simony [the purchases of religious offices], and rejection of papal appointees. Clayton provides considerable detail, region by region, to papal efforts toward peace, good order, and clerical wholesomeness. England is the best example. King John, whose understanding of his powers included the appointment of bishops who supported him, was challenged by Innocent on the appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Innocent’s candidate to Canterbury was Stephen Langton [r. 1207-1228] who would become a major player in the watershed Magna Carta events. Meanwhile, in southern France, the Albigensian heresy was attracting so many followers that Innocent would call for a domestic crusade to suppress its spread. The Albigensian heresy and its popularity gives us a pulse on the religious hunger and misunderstandings of Innocent’s time. Wikipedia describes the Albigensian movement: The Albigensian Crusade (French: Croisade des albigeois), also known as the Cathar Crusade (1209–1229), was a military and ideological campaign initiated by Pope Innocent III to eliminate supposed heresy (nowdays grouped under the name Catharism) in Languedoc, what is now southern France. The Crusade was prosecuted primarily by the French crown and promptly took on a political aspect. It resulted in the significant reduction of practicing Cathars and a realignment of the County of Toulouse with the French crown. The distinct regional culture of Languedoc was also diminished. The Albigensian so-called Cathars may have originated from an anti-materialist reform movement advocating a return to the Christian message of perfection, poverty and preaching. The reforms may have been in some part a reaction against the often perceived scandalous and dissolute lifestyles of some Catholic clergy. Clayton is emphatic that Innocent was a religious man of good intentions who ruled in a grim time and draws his book to conclusion with a description of the Church Council Fourth Lateran, planned and chaired by the pontiff himself. The results were mixed. The Council passed numerous statutes on the conduct and reform of the clergy [who were ordered not to perform surgery in the course of their duties, for example.] IV Lateran set the rule of annual communion and confession for all the laity, which tells us the bar was set pretty low for local parochial life. This council also formally defined the word “transubstantiation” as the doctrinal term for the change in the bread and wine at Mass into the Body and Blood of Christ. On the other hand, Innocent sought and received the Council’s recommendation for yet another crusade, a fifth. Given the spiritual and material damage rendered by the fourth crusade, the only logical reason for planning a fifth was the powerful belief of Innocent that God wanted the holy places in Christian hands. Innocent died in 1216, and the actual military campaign took place during the reign of Pope Honorius. The crusaders of the fifth effort were defeated because the high command did not realize the Nile River floods every spring. Innocent III was followed by a century of popes whose claims became more extravagant as their power diminished in every sense. Within a century of Innocent’s death, the successor of Peter was hijacked to Avignon in France and his successors resided there for nearly a century. EDGY THEOLOGY
Easily one of the most influential books in my own understanding of the Gospels is Father John P. Meier’s A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Volume 1. [1991] A Marginal Jew is the first of a five-volume study of Jesus’ human existence upon the earth; Meier died in 2022 while compiling the sixth volume, which has never been finished. The New York Times carried his obituary. I never attempted to read all five volumes; the first volume provides enough introduction to open new doors of understanding how to decipher a historical core of the historical Jesus in the New Testament. Though it has been thirty years since Meier began his project, his work is still timely, though the next generation of Scriptural historians is hard at work. Sitting on my desk here is an early Christmas present from the Café staff; in the newly released The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus [2024], thirty-four essays from biblical scholars address new questions in the Biblical/historical quest for a core narrative. We consider the sacred scriptures unique among history books because of the Holy Spirit’s inspiration; there is a reality to the Gospels beyond human sciences that draws us to Baptism and the promise of a future life where “data” in the Microsoft sense becomes irrelevant. Because God delivered ultimate truth to an imperfect world, it should not be surprising that the Bible, as literature and history, is not a perfect document. Since 1943, when Pius XII issued his groundbreaking Divino Afflante Spiritu, all popes have promoted the critical study of Sacred Scripture from the vantage of all the sciences for better translations and deeper understandings of Jesus of Nazareth. It may be that some readers, unaware of the Catholic Church’s endorsement of scientific as well as spiritual study of sacred texts, find the idea of “discovering the historical Jesus” either irrelevant, irreverent, or outright dangerous. Some will say that we know already everything we need to know from the Bible, such as the Ten Commandments. True enough, but the Fifth Commandment has exceptions we would abhor, [as in Deuteronomy 21: 18-21] that needed closer study and revision. Others would criticize deep probing of Scripture as an insult to God, even though Christianity is the seeking of God’s perfect will and pleasure. And yet others may be shocked or distressed at what is not historically certifiable, forgetting that Scripture was composed under different methods, in contrasting times, in varying tongues and dialects. For example, what precisely did a carpenter do in Jesus’ time? We know today that carpentry was house framing and construction—a profession that paid well. So well that the Romans demanded Joseph and his pregnant wife come to Bethlehem to file their taxes in person. For Catholics, let me hasten to note that Meier’s work enjoys the Imprimatur and the Nihil Obstat of the Vatican: “Let it be printed” and “Nothing stands in the way.” In effect, there is nothing in Meier’s writing that endangers the faith of Catholics. On the contrary, the reader will be empowered in seeking to be of one mind with Christ by the content of the works, though in ways never previously imagined. I thought I knew a lot about Jesus, but after a few years of studying under folks like Meier, I realized I had only scratched the surface. The four Gospels came to be written late in the first century from an oral preaching tradition [traditions, actually] that extended forty years after the Resurrection. The earliest official written Gospel is that of St. Mark, composed shortly before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. St. Luke and St. Matthew composed their Gospels in the 80’s A.D. borrowing from St. Mark’s text, plus a stand-alone collection of Jesus’ words and parables called “the Q Source,” material found in Matthew and Luke but not in Mark. [Wikipedia explains the Q Source theory quite well.] Finally, St. John’s Gospel is dated from around 100 A.D. It is notably different from the other gospels, but the explanation for this difference is understandable: John’s generation was facing different problems from his predecessors. Studying the historical Jesus in each Gospel depends in part upon the theological issues each evangelist’s community was facing. Another factor facing the new Church was the establishment of what we call the New Testament canon or collection of books considered inspired. Put another way, which books are God’s direct communication? Many books purporting to record the life of Jesus were circulating through the Church, leading several Church councils to define precisely what books belonged in the Christian bible. The criteria included [1] apostolic authorship or inspiration; [2] agreement with the professed beliefs of the local churches; and [3] frequency of proclamation at the celebration of the Eucharist. Yes, the Church did establish the New Testament, its most crucial decision, and not the other way around. Without the Church, there would have been no New Testament. The number of New Testament books arrived at by the fourth and fifth centuries was 27, and the canon was solemnly proclaimed at the Council of Trent [1545-1563], with St. Jerome’s 400 A.D. Latin translation of the Bible, The Vulgate, designated the official text of the Roman Catholic Church. The Vulgate Bible remained in the official Scriptural text for the Mass and other sacraments till the 1960’s, though by then the many translation mistakes of Jerome were quite evident to modern scholars and new translations were approved by the Vatican. Here in the States the New American Bible was approved for widespread use, including the liturgy, in 1970, in the English language. As luck would have it, I was living with one of the three general editors of the NAB who appeared on “The Today Show” to explain the advance in Scripture study that made possible the NAB [or NABRE]. The translator of the Book of Tobit also lived in my friary. Interesting times indeed. THE QUEST FOR JESUS INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE SACRED TEXTS. The study of the Bible—specifically, the words and deeds of Jesus—is immensely complex, and I can’t do full justice to how it was done, or for that matter, how it continues to be done. Suffice to say that since I received The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus, [2024] this Christmas, I am curious to see how the quest has progressed in recent years since John Meier’s 1990’s work. It is fair to say that the Catholic Church had settled several important questions by 400 A.D., notably the makeup of the New Testament canon itself, and an official Latin translation, St. Jerome’s Vulgate edition. “Vulgate” comes from the Latin word for “vulgar,” or “of the common people.” Jerome’s Vulgate Bible is the Latin text that lent itself to liturgical and popular usage for 1900 years. However, the first manuscripts of the Gospels in the first century—the surviving ones--were not written in Latin—a common street language. The Gospel manuscripts which have survived are in Greek, the stately philosophical and literary language of the educated. The Renaissance [c. 1400] and the Reformation [c. 1500]—not to mention the printing press—were major factors in deeper studies of the historical Jesus among Protestants and some Catholic scholars. There was, in many quarters, a new freedom from church authorities to speculate and discuss what Jesus taught and meant. The nineteenth century was a time of considerable research and debate about Jesus—how he experienced life, details of his work and home life, and particularly the precise nature of his mission as he understood himself. In an excellent if lengthy post, Wikipedia lays out the course of the “first quest,” noting that in the 1800’s there were hundreds of lives of Jesus published and sold. My Catholic professors of fifty years ago critiqued this nineteenth century era quest as psychological projection—everyone made a case for Jesus according to his expectations. Thus, there was Jesus the Marxist, Jesus the social worker, Jesus the socialist, Jesus the father of a new social order, etc. This first quest came crashing to an end as speculation about Jesus became more and more extreme, and his identity morphed into a failed, executed prophet whose followers came together to await God’s apocalyptic arrival to raise his prophet. What followed was several generations of scholars who focused on evangelistic faith and worship in the literal text of the Scriptures. However, by the 1940’s Protestant theology and method has improved significantly, to the point that in 1943 Pope Pius XII allowed Catholic scholars to work with Protestant colleagues in deciphering the meaning of the historical Jesus. The second “quest” came to several important conclusions. The first was a humbler approach toward the person of Jesus. To “psychoanalyze Jesus” was a theological and historical fool’s mission. Reputable scholars now stayed within the guard rail of Jesus’ words and deeds as reported in the canon of the four Gospels. It is certainly legitimate for Christians to study what Jesus said and did in the context of the time, the culture, and the impact on the early Church. The second conclusion of this twentieth century quest is a consensus that the Bible is a composite of identifiable “forms” of literature. For example, the Gospels themselves contain hymns, sermons, miracles, prayers, genealogies, and other literary types and historical narrations. But when we look at these forms from a distance, we notice that the evangelists did not use them in the same order, or did not describe them in the same way, or even use some of them at all. St. Mark and St. John have no infancy narratives of Jesus at all! This analysis led to the most important insight of the twentieth century historians: each of the four evangelists was a divinely inspired theologian who composed their Gospels to provide four distinct but unified understandings of Jesus, God and Man. Think of the four Gospels like a jewel held up to the sun. Turn the jewel slowly and you get an infinite range of beautiful colors and hues. For a Christian believer, the jewel of the Gospels renders new truth and beauty with every turn, which is why we are encouraged to read and reflect the Gospels every day. Each Gospel has a distinct “theological identity”—which is why Scripture courses and written commentaries are so critical to adult Catholic faith and prayer when engaging the Gospel. But we still have the history question—is there a core of history around which we can study Jesus? There are several references in Roman documents that refer obliquely to a “Crestus” who was venerated “as a god” in a sacred banquet setting by his followers. A more pointed non-religious reference to Jesus can be found in the writings of the Jewish/Roman historian Josephus, who also knew John the Baptist. And even within the Gospels, there is faith reinforced by historical clues. Late twentieth century writers such as Meier developed basic principles to estimate the chances of a Gospel text containing hardcore history that even a non-Christian pagan could not deny. Here are a few principles: The Law of multiple attestation: A text or event which appears in all the Gospels has a strong chance of historical probability. The Baptism of Jesus, [some] miracles, the collection of followers, a final supper, Pontius Pilate, and the crucifixion appear in all four Gospels, although the details vary considerably considering each evangelist’s “take” or basic message of his Gospel. The Law of embarrassment. Why would a devout evangelist create from whole cloth false information that would embarrass Jesus and/or his followers? Episodes where Judas betrays Jesus at the Last Supper, or the disciples fall asleep in the Garden of Olives, or Peter betrays Jesus three times? These narratives are unlikely inventions; more likely they are candid admissions that faith and understanding took some time to develop. The Criterion of rejection and execution: If Jesus' ministry came to a violent, public end, how did Jesus' words or deeds alienate people, especially powerful people? Put another way, who went to so much trouble to engineer the death sentence and execution of Jesus? And why would they do it? Jesus was not just another holy figure in the Bible. He was saying and doing things that led to a wholesale public execution overseen by the governor, Pilate himself. We can say, with certainty, that the actual historical Jesus was a figure noted for his words, signs, and wonders—and that his underlying message was in some way so new and challenging that people [Jews? Romans?] hastened to kill him in a very public way. There are other rules and principles in Gospel studies. What if one evangelist differs on some point in his narrative from the others? A good example: St. Mark’s sentence in 8:34—"Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” But 20-30 years later St. Luke, in 9:23, writes this: “And he said to them all, if any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.” Luke has added the word “daily,” as in “over the course of your whole life.” What do we see here? Mark was writing in a time of persecution; he may have believed that the Second Coming was extremely near. Luke, writing later, began to see the Church as a long-term institution with a need for a detailed way of daily living. Luke provides an early ideal for common daily Christian living in his Acts of the Apostles [2: 42-47] We could go and on here, but I hope at least one thought remains with you as we begin a new year. Specifically, that you and I are both blessed with greater wonder, greater insight, and greater curiosity into the life of Jesus of Nazareth; that a hunger for the Gospels stirs us every day. I will do what I can periodically to offer access to Gospel commentaries, to connect you with the best publishers and reviewers of Gospel texts. I will get to that soon. In the meantime, have a Happy New Year! A SELF-CONFIDENT CHURCH
Our study of Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium Part 4 focuses today on the lost opportunities for reform leading up to and including the Protestant Reformation itself and the post-Reformation response in the Roman Catholic Councils Trent [1545-1563] and Vatican I [1869-1870]. As we have seen in previous installments of this blog stream, “reform of the Church” was hardly a bolt from the blue problem leading Luther to post his 95 Theses in 1517. At the Council of Constance [1414-1418] the Church fathers burned Jan Hus at the stake for his calls for greater voice for the laity, symbolized over history by his demand that the laity have access to the cup at communion. But before Hus there was John Wycliffe [1328-1384] from the University of Oxford who led a biblical revival of sorts—translating the Scriptures into the English of the day—and an early populist sentiment in what was still a feudal/aristocratic age in many ways. Both Wycliffe and Hus believed that their writings and actions were prophetic insights from the Holy Spirit. As the Keys to the Council [2012] authors admit [pp. 57ff], there has been a tendency on the part of the Catholic Church since early medieval times to play down the existential or “independent” power of the Holy Spirit in the Church because most troublesome reformers claimed to have been inspired by the Spirit in directing their reform movements. This is certainly true of the controversy involving “The Spiritual Franciscans,” a branch of the Order that came to believe the mainstream Franciscans were betraying St. Francis of Assisi’s [1187-1226] rule of absolute poverty, i.e., owning nothing, as they interpreted Christ’s words in the Gospel. When popes over the next century granted dispensations to the Franciscan Order as a whole, allowing them the use of money, buildings, etc., the Spirituals claimed that popes had no such rights to do this, on the grounds that Francis had ushered in a new age of the Holy Spirit. Many of the Spirituals were arrested; some burned; all disbanded. See my Amazon review of The Spiritual Franciscans [2003] by David Burr. It is an intriguing but sad story. It is not hard to understand that the medieval leadership of the Church—its popes, bishops, clerics, most academics—understood the Church to be the voice of God incarnate, and even beyond that, synonymous with the Kingdom of God itself. Consider that the consummate free spirit, Francis of Assisi himself, hastened to Rome for Pope Innocent III’s institutional sanction of his band of brothers, even after Christ himself had reportedly commanded Francis to “rebuild the Church!” The members of the Trinity, it would seem, were not exempt from the authority of the Church, one might conclude. The Church’s self-understanding was not raw hubris or narcissism, though those features raised their heads from time to time. In the Roman mentality of good order, authority—particularly divine authority—was a philosophical and psychological given. Reform critiques—however well-intentioned—upon any part of the Church system were seen as a threat to the good ordering of God’s Church in all its members. To insist, as the Spiritual Franciscans did, that a pope was powerless to reorganize the workings of a religious order was to question the voice of God expressed through his vicar, the Bishop of Rome, Successor of Peter. This is not to say that the Church of the late medieval era was delusional or naïve. The Council of Constance was certainly aware of the imperfections of the Church, and by 1418 it had removed three men sparring for the papal throne, elected and installed Pope Martin V, and left instructions for periodic [five or ten year] councils to continue the reform of the Church in such matters as Church Law, sacraments, conduct of the clergy, etc. Martin V was a competent pope, certainly an improvement over the previous fifty years. But he saw the office of the papacy in the pre-Constance mold, as the supreme expression of Christ’s power, beholden to none, not even the wishes of the Council of Constance. [In fact, the concept of a council having power over a pope, “conciliarism,” was condemned at future councils, notably Vatican I in 1870.] Before we move on, Constance functioned with the wind at its back, so to speak. In terms of its ecclesiastical self-consciousness, it was the only game in town. Muslims were external infidels to be converted or exterminated. The Eastern Orthodox Church, so it was believed, would “come home” in its suitable time. Catholic dissidents were to be disciplined. From a spiritual-psychological vantage point, the Council of Constance was the last Council to enjoy such self-confidence. LOSING ITS NERVE? The most drastic challenge to the nature and definition of the Church was the Protestant Reformation, because at its heart the very relationship of God and humanity was under question to a degree that Catholicism had never faced before. Was the Catholic Church the sole true mediator of God’s will, or did the believer receive the gift of salvation directly through the words of the Sacred Scripture, or sola scriptura [“by scripture alone.”] My sense is that Luther would not have articulated his impact in quite this way, nor did he ever advocate for the demolition of the Church. In many ways it is fair to say that Luther did not so much start a church as awaken personal freedom of faith. His definition of reform was the removal from institutional church-hood laws and practices lacking, in his view, clear biblical basis. The sale of indulgences had been the last straw for the monk. Salvation could not be earned by good works or purchased with money. Salvation was belief in God’s Word mediated through the Sacred Scriptures. Consequently, Catholic councils after 1517 would have to question their souls, their identities, the very order of the spiritual universe. New councils would be required to define, defend, and evangelize their position in the plan of God’s salvation, a challenging theological venture for a church not accustomed to doing this. The Council of Trent was first on the psychiatrist’s couch, so to speak. [See my review of Trent: What Happened at the Council (2013) by John O’Malley]. Trent, while jarred by the happenings of the past thirty years, had not totally lost its inner bearings. There was hope in the planning days of Trent that Catholics and Protestants might debate concerns of reformers, but by the time Trent was summoned in 1545 the Protestant reform was already broken into multiple directions too numerous for Catholic bishops to address. Consequently, Trent was faced with a new truth—an admission that it could not fix the Body of Christ, at least not in its own time. To its credit, this Council turned its energies to what it could manage, internal reform of the Catholic Church to win back the loyalties of other Christian communities, such as by insisting that bishops live in their assigned dioceses and that seminaries be established for better educated priests. The Council assumed the traditional hierarchy of authority, that the Catholic Church spoke exclusively for the will of God and recognized ultimate papal authority. The Council did satisfactory work in advising Pope Pius V on matters of Catholic reform; the Tridentine Missal for Mass was promulgated by Pius V in 1570 and remained in use till the mid-1960’s. But the Church would now have to live with the stigma of being a broken family. FULL BLOWN PANIC DISORDER Trent, at least, could console itself with the thought that its issues were religious. The next council, Vatican I in 1869, was faced with a more frightening prospect, the insignificance of alienation from the world at large. The centuries after Trent were times of momentous change in every aspect of human life across the planet—from science to learning to politics to philosophy. The philosopher Rene Descartes [1596-1650] turned human understanding upside down with his famous maxim, Cogito, ergo sum. [“I think, therefore I am.”] In a lengthy biography in the Encyclopedia Britanica Descartes is described as the father of modern philosophy in the sense that he prioritized human experience over medieval objective reality, including religious dogma. In this sense he is more influential than Luther, given that even today we live and act by our own interpretation of the world around us, more often than not. After Descartes much of the Western World rebooted to engage subjective human experience as a primary philosophical source, no longer religion, as the measure of lived reality. In Europe, for example, the principle cuius regio, regius religio became an accepted maxim: the king’s religion was the realm’s religion. The American colonies took Descartes even further, forming a government based upon democratic principles, free elections, and personal religious choice of conscience as opposed to the idea of an established religion. [American practice of freedom of conscience influenced much later Vatican II discussion.] Politically, after the French Revolution [1789] strong independent nations formed throughout Europe. The nationalist surge even reached Italy in the 1800’s, a movement known as the Risorgimento, which reached to the walls of Vatican City itself. Pope Pius IX [r. 1846-1878] perceived the changing world as a threat to the Church and its teaching authority, indeed its very place in the world. To strengthen a besieged Church against the modern world, he convoked Vatican I [1869-1870]. The first and primary work of this Council was the proclamation of the doctrine of papal infallibility, the ultimate expression of ecclesiastical authority. Consider that since the Council of Trent the modern era had truly begun: Galileo, van Leeuwenhoek [microscope], Voltaire, Locke, Marx, Darwin, Napoleon, to name just a few of the new influences of the era. Self-determination—by benign rule or democracy—shaped much of the civilized world. History and archaeology of no denominational stance addressed the composition and meaning of the Bible. Psychologically speaking, everything about Vatican I bore a sense of desperation and worry. Prior to Vatican I, in 1864 Pius IX issued The Syllabus of Errors, which included many condemnations that today seem both unreasonable and extraordinarily impossible to enforce. Essentially, Pius condemned modernity. Point eighty, for example, condemns this proposition: “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.” Pius, in condemning this proposition, is embracing the dream that history can be stopped in its tracks. In his defense, Pius IX could from his chambers hear firing of real canons, not just philosophical ones. Vatican I would take place in the teeth of the Franco-Prussian War which had spilled into Italy, already in turmoil with the Risorgimento. What is a psychiatrist to do with a patient who denies the inevitable? A mild reaction is withdrawal: stay indoors, close the shutters. Not for nothing did Pius IX coin the phrase “Prisoner of the Vatican” to describe the new position of the pope as he perceived it. However, not every Catholic feared modernity and a sizable number embraced it. St. John Newman converted to Catholicism precisely by the new study of ancient historical writings. As a rule of thumb, the attitude of the Church toward Pius IX’s Vatican I was mixed; the closer one resided to Italy or identified with the pope’s assessment of the times, the more likely one was to support the declaration of infallibility or full papal authority. The further from Rome, the passion was less. In fact, one might say that many in the Church assumed the pope already enjoyed the general principles of infallibility. i.e., the authority from God to speak with doctrinal force on matters of faith and morals. In fact, Pius had already acted infallibly in 1854 when he declared the Immaculate Conception a doctrine of the Church. [The only other exercise of infallibility occurred in 1950, when Pope Pius XII declared the Assumption of the Virgin Mary a doctrine of the Church.] No one at Vatican I took issue with honoring the Virgin Mary as Pius IX had done fifteen years earlier, but a fair number wondered if the declaration of infallibility itself might not be prudent, at least at this time. There were reservations among Catholic bishops and thinkers who wrote and expressed theological concerns about the proposal, including Lord Acton of England, who famously wrote, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Historically, Lord Acton’s caution about power was not idle speculation. Twentieth-century Catholic theologians cautioned against “creeping infallibility,” that everything a pope said was ipso facto binding. [Consider Pope Francis’ recent statement on blessing same sex couples and the kerfuffle it has set off.] There was sympathy, too, for the position that a solemn declaration of infallibility would cement the longstanding misunderstanding over the sources of Revelation; Catholicism on the one hand with its dual Scripture-Tradition belief on the one hand, and the classical Protestant “Scripture alone” position on the other. Catholics who strongly supported infallibility were called “ultramontanists, i.e., “on the other side of the mountains, the Alps, Rome.” You still see the term used today, in a broad sense. Vatican I began in September 1869 and was the first Council ever held at the basilica of St. Peter, as the church was not completed during the Council of Trent. Previous Councils, when held in Rome, took place at St. John on the Lateran Hill. Various sources indicate that opponents of infallibility had their say, but numerically their numbers were a minority, and some left the Council before a final vote was held on the infallibility question. As it turned out, only two bishops voted against the proposal, one of them being the bishop of Little Rock, Arkansas, who returned home to serve his diocese until 1907. Because of warfare in the city of Rome, the bishops returned home, but the Council was never reconvened, and it was not formally closed until Pope John XXIII declared it closed a century later, on the eve of Vatican II. See my review of What Happened at Vatican One here. Vatican II would be the third post-Reformation Council, and we will look closely at its document on the Church, Lumen Gentium, to compare the self-understanding of the 1962 Church vis-à-vis the generations that met in 1545 and 1869. In many ways, Vatican II inherited “the best and the worst of times.” What medicines would it prescribe? The Council Lateran IV [1215] was conducted under the energetic Pope Innocent III. A complex man, Innocent saw himself as the ultimate authority over Church and state alike. He attempted to renew the Medieval Church by the enforcement of order and law, and his IV Lateran Council was not a “listening session.” Like a powerful general he issued his orders, and his ecclesiastical subjects swore to carry them out—to eliminate abuses and intensify the spiritual life of the Church. He put a stop to the foundation of new religious orders—though he famously granted an exception to Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone when the latter and his dozen poorly clad brethren came to Rome to seek permission to live a penitential life in common with the Gospel itself as their rule. Today Franciscans remain grateful for Innocent’s approval. One wonders what Innocent might have achieved had he not died at a young fifty-two.
It would be two hundred years before the next Council, and not even a man of Innocent’s acumen could have foreseen the events that lie ahead after his death, some of which he himself inaugurated. By the 1200’s and 1300’s nations were taking shape, nations with kings and princes who were not to be trifled with. This was certainly the case with France, which was beginning to find papal taxation, levies for crusades, and other Roman interventions vexing, to say the least. England was another such region; in fact, the Hundred Years War between France and England was in full tilt by the mid-1300’s. Of this war Wikipedia writes: “The Hundred Years' War was a series of armed conflicts fought between the kingdoms of England and France during the Late Middle Ages. It originated from English claims to the French throne. The war grew into a broader power struggle involving factions from across Western Europe, fueled by emerging nationalism on both sides. The periodization of the war takes place over 116 years, wherein the war was interrupted by several years of truces.” One such “truce” was more fatal than any battle: the Black Death, which arrived in the West in 1347. Curiously, I discovered that I had reviewed John Kelly’s The Great Mortality in 2005 in which I described the plague in considerable detail. I had not read the review in nearly twenty years, and reading it today, after several years of Covid, made me reexamine the Plague in a new light. Scientists and historians tend to agree that the mean death toll across Europe [1347-1352] was 50%. American military planners still use the Black Plague as a measuring stick for atomic damage in the twenty-first century. It is hard to imagine the impact of the plague on the Church. I recall my sixth-grade teacher explaining that the “good priests” stayed in the cities and ministered to the dying, while the bad priests fled to the mountains and partied. Kelly’s book affirms this to a point; he notes that the population took either a despondent approach to the disease or a “bacchanalian one.” In any case, the disruption to European Church life caused by the plague is scarcely imaginable. The severity of this plague –after all, there were others throughout history—was exacerbated by several decades of poor weather and a limited food supply, which touched off unrest among feudal peasants and created a flight to the cities, which became hotbeds of unhealthy living and social unrest. There was a surge of populism that included segments of the Church. Two of the most famous reformers were John Wycliffe, [1328-1384] who among other things translated the Gospels into the vernacular or local tongue of his native England; and the Czech Jan Hus [1370-1415]. Hus was a social and religious warrior for the rights of the Church laity; he is famous for his advocacy of the laity receiving communion from the chalice. Innocent III had been a respected if not necessarily beloved pope, but the quality of the men who followed him declined over the next century. There is a dynamic at work here: as secular rulers became stronger and habitually ignored the popes, Innocent’s successors felt compelled to claim with greater volume and energy their rights as supreme rulers over “altar and crown alike.” This crescendo came to a stunning halt during and immediately following the papacy of Boniface VIII [r. 1294-1303], who in 1302 issued the encyclical Unam Sanctam. Wikipedia cites the noted historian Brian Tierney’s assessment that this encyclical was "probably the most famous" document on church and state in medieval Europe. In truth, the document was a death knell for absolute papal expansion into civil affairs. Unam Sanctam laid down dogmatic propositions on the unity of the Catholic Church, the necessity of belonging to it for eternal salvation, the position of the Pope as supreme head of the Church and the duty thence arising of submission to the Pope in order to belong to the Church and thus achieve salvation. The Pope further emphasized the higher position of the spiritual in comparison with the secular order. Boniface was, in effect, claiming the same power as Jesus himself: Consider the post-Resurrection encounter of Jesus with his disciples [Matthew 28: 18-20]: Then Jesus approached and said to them, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.” This was the straw that broke a lot of backs. One of those backs was King Philip IV of France. Tired of French wealth taxed for Roman coffers, Philip sent an army to Rome which physically assaulted the pope, leading to his death in 1303. [Interestingly, Dante, in his Inferno, puts Boniface in the eighth circle of hell.] The next pope, Clement V, found the atmosphere of Rome too contentious, and accepted the French invitation to move the papacy to France, thus beginning the “Avignon Papacy,” 1309-1377. Over the years of teaching, I discovered that most Catholics have no idea that the popes lived outside of Rome for nearly a century and find the fact quite surprising. It was Pope Gregory XI who reestablished the papal capital in Rome in 1377, but this move did not stop the Avignon court of cardinals to elect a second pope. Soon a council In Pisa put forth a third pope. Thus began the papal Western Schism [1378-1417]. For forty years Europe was divided in its loyalties. The Western Roman Church faced a test of its own internal powers to correct itself and obey the call of Jesus to be at one, “just as the Father and I are one.” The intelligentsia of the Church—the men and women of letters, university faculties, many bishops, cardinals, and even state sovereigns—were deeply alarmed by this seeming disintegration of the papacy. Those with the slightest grasp of history were aware that the Church was broken by Islamic conversions and the major split between Eastern and Western Christianity in 1054. Now the once solidified Western Roman Church was fragmenting, too. After a generation of multiple popes, these leaders of church and state came—with considerable reservation—to the consensus that a power greater than the pope had to reform the Church. No king could do this. The reform would need to be led and sustained by churchmen. Among them was the remarkable Jean Gerson, [1363-1429], Chancellor of the University of Paris, then one of the intellectual centers of the Church. Gerson articulated what many had been thinking: that in an emergency such as this, the supreme authority of the Church reverted to an ecumenical council which could override papal authority and correct the papal line of succession. [See my review of Jean Gerson and the Last Medieval Reformation (2005) by Brian Patrick McGuire here.] A council in Pisa in 1409 had attempted to solve the papacy issue but fell short for too many reasons to cite here. However, a larger and much more effective Council began a four-year congress in 1414, known today as the Council of Constance, it is considered one of the twenty-one legitimate Councils of the Church—remarkable in that the Church later rejected its working principles. The Council of Constance did not get off to an exemplary start. Deeply worried about radical ideas proliferating in the absence of a strong papacy, the Council issued a flag of safe conduct to Jan Hus [cited above] to discuss his theological concerns. When Hus arrived, his pledge of protection was lifted, he was tried as a heretic, and burned at the stake during the Council. Turning to its major concern, the Council of Constance passed three reforms for future stability of the Western Church. First, it established that a universal council was the highest authority in the Catholic Church, a principle which came to be called conciliarism. Second, it legislated regular Church reform councils at five-year intervals. This was a remarkable product: no longer would Councils be called just in cases of emergencies. Rather, the leadership of the Church would take a universal pulse on a regular basis and address the strengths and weaknesses of the Church before there were wholesale divisions and misunderstandings. The third reform was the ouster of all three papal contestants and the Council’s election of Pope Martin V in 1417, with the stipulation that he call another council in 1423. Martin proved to be an industrious pontiff who oversaw a restoration of the old beauty of Rome. He was credited with a “Roman Renaissance,” and he founded the University of Louvain in modern Belgium. He called for a crusade to Africa to deal with the slave trade, and another to address the Hussite risings after the burning of Jan Hus at the Council in 1415. A third crusade was dispatched in 1420 against the Ottoman Empire but it was unsuccessful; Constantinople was defeated by the Turks in 1453 and its name changed to Istanbul. Martin dutifully called for an Ecumenical Council in 1423, but it was poorly attended and never called to order. Seven years later, as Martin lay dying, the Council of Basel-Florence was convoked [1431-1449] to address a wide range of topics which netted only modest results. The next Council, Lateran V, [1512-1517] was convoked by Pope Julius II “to restore peace between Catholic rulers and to assert the authority of the pope.” If the saying “timing is everything” has any truth to it, consider that this Council concluded on March 16, 1517. On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther posted his theses on Church errors to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg. WHAT CAN WE SAY ABOUT THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE? One of the most curious facts about this Council is that it saved Western Christianity from shattering into chaos, and yet later the ways and means of its accomplishments were modified and/or condemned by later generations of the Church. This Council dared to state for the record that grave defects in the office holder of the Chair of Peter could be overridden by the actions of a universal council. History supports the claim that the Council of Constance had no other option. For all of that, the Church later fell into a retrospective post-traumatic shock to what it had done in Constance and immediately disengaged from such drastic action in the future. Conciliarism as a principle was condemned at future councils, most recently Vatican I [1869-1870] which, incidentally, was the same council to define papal infallibility. Constance established another principle which was not acted upon, this time with dire consequences. The story of Jan Hus and the subsequent revolution of his followers was a powerful lesson in how society was changing in the early Renaissance era and required the Church to pay much more attention to its pastoral woes. Constance’s call for future councils at regular intervals [five years or ten years] was brilliant, particularly when one considers that Luther and Calvin were less than a century away. The 5–10-year plan was never followed through, because future popes feared the echoes of conciliarism. It was not until Vatican II [1962-1965] that the power structure and working relationship between the pope and bishops was openly discussed in, among other places, Lumen Gentium. In paragraphs 18-29 the term “episcopal collegiality” broaches the idea of collective authoritative consultation. Vatican II reemphasized the identity of the pope as a bishop in union with his fellow bishops, who were true and distinct successors of the apostles. Wikipedia describes the process: “the pope as a member and the head of the college of bishops forms with it at all times an organic unity, especially when the council is gathered in a general council.” Vatican II never recommended the diminishing of the position of the pope as the Vicar of Christ. Rather, it envisioned a church where the pope would join with his brother bishops in discerning the will of the Holy Spirit for the Church. It is worth noting, though, that Popes John XXIII and Paul VI did not allow discussion of certain topics at Vatican II, notably the possibility of marriage for priests of the Latin Rite, and the prohibition of artificial birth control. Pope Francis [r. 2013-] has attempted to add another dimension to church life and governance: attention to the consciences and experience of the laity through his planned “Synod on Synodality” in 2024. The lukewarm response of many in Church authority in the United States and elsewhere to the listening process is a dysfunction that calls for the attention of those ordained to the apostolic ministry. NEXT: The Council that came too late: Trent [1545-1563] THE SLOW AND STRESSFUL “DARK AGE” By the year 600 AD, the Eastern Roman Empire had arrived at its full glory as the center of culture and civilization. The Roman Emperors resided in Constantinople [modern day Istanbul, Turkey], and one of them, Justinian [r. 527-565 A.D.] is responsible for creating a code or template of civil law that endures to this day. The Christian religious leader of the Eastern Empire was the Patriarch or Archbishop of Constantinople, appointed by the Roman Emperor, as were the other metropolitan bishops in the East. Constantinople housed the most famous Chistian Church in the world, the Hagia Sophia [“holy wisdom” or “divine wisdom.”] The Western Christian Church, centered in Rome, was laboring through a period of spiritual and physical poverty. Looking at Christianity in 600 A.D., the Eastern half was in its full midlife maturity, while the West—the Italian peninsula and lands west and northwest—was in adolescent mode in every sense of the word. It is worth noting, though, that adolescence has an energy that shapes its future. By 600 A.D. the Irish monks had created the rite of personal and repeatable Penance that we use today as well as composing moral manuals, known as “Irish Penitentiaries.” Pope Gregory the Great [r. 590-604] sent missionaries to convert the many regions still unvisited by the Church. There is a famous story of Pope Gregory walking by a slave market and noticing a young man in chains. “Where are you from?” The young man replied “Anglelond.” [home of the Angle people, i.e., England] To which Gregory replied: “You may be an Angle, but I will make you an angel.” We have this story from a doctor of the Church, St. Bede the Venerable, writing several centuries later. Whether or not it is true, Pope Gregory dispatched the future saint Augustine of Canterbury and forty monks to England, the first visits of the Catholic Church to that land. As I noted in the first blog entry on Vatican II, there were twenty-one Councils in the history of the Church. The first four [Nicaea, 1 Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon] were the keystones of the Creed we profess at Mass on Sundays, “the oath of our belief.” If you look at this list of all the Councils, you may notice that Councils five through eight are metaphysical and conducted in the East. They reflect the tenor of Eastern Christianity, which was [and is] more mystical and devotional, particularly in the celebration of sacraments, as opposed to the active religious psychology of the Latin West. Eventually, the East and the West split, into the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, in a dramatic excommunication in 1054 where the Roman envoy Cardinal Humbert excommunicated the Patriarch Michael Cerularius at the high altar of Hagia Sophia. Pope Paul VI lifted the excommunication of Cerularius in 1965 as a gesture of good will to the Orthodox, but I think reunion is still many centuries away. ISLAM AND THE CRUSADES Count this as one of those historical altering events that few could have envisioned in 600 A.D. Demographers today tell us that at the present worldwide rates of births and conversions, Islam will surpass Christianity as the largest religion on the planet by the end of this century. Given these demographics and the fact that Catholicism’s first encounter with Islam was a war that lasted almost 900 years—the Moors were finally driven out of Spain as Columbus set sail to the New World in 1492—there will need to be much more thought and energy on the part of our Church on how we will live in peace with what will soon be our larger neighbor. Vatican II addressed Islam in several documents, including Lumen Gentium, para. 16: “But the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place among whom are the Muslims: these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day.” This statement is an enormous step forward from 1870, the Church world of Vatican I, where the fences between families of faith were built high. Much more attention was paid to Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate [1965] regarding Catholic relations with the Jewish Faith. Introduction to the story of Mohammed and Islamic faith are taught—or should be taught—in standard Catholic religious education programs. When I first heard an explanation of Islam in my Catholic elementary school in the 1950’s, it went something like this: “Allah is God, and Mohammed is his prophet.” And I thought to my young self, “Now that’s pretty simple.” It took me a lot of years to wonder if the attraction to Islam might in fact be its simplicity itself. Look again at the topics of the later Eastern Christian Councils [five through eight], which are admittedly heavy and give evidence of a variety of commentaries on the first four Councils which form our Creed. It is also true that Islam developed in an Arabic culture, not Greek, as were the early Christian Councils. Islamic expansion began in the seventh century, and within a century its armies had circled westward across North Africa—a strongly Christian region at the time, the home of St. Augustine—continuing across Gibraltar and through Spain and well into modern day France, then a divided region of warring princes. Our Catholic history books hailed the defeat of the Islamic force at Tours in 732 by Charles Martel and the beginning of the gradual expulsion of Islamic forces from western Europe. However, it was Charlemagne and Pope Leo III who did as much as anyone to stabilize [relatively speaking] the state of affairs, both politically and religiously in Europe. The two men restored the old concept of “the Holy Roman Empire” when Leo crowned Charlemagne on Christmas Day, 800 A.D. The dozens upon dozens of small ethnic entities which made up Europe in 800 A.D. would haltingly begin to form “nations” we would recognize today, and the idea of “Holy Roman Empire” strengthened the unity of the western Church under the restored respect for the bishop of Rome. The post Charlemagne era saw a powerful new academic interest in things Roman—law, order, the classical writings, etc., as well as the emergence of Catholic intellectual life in the western or Roman style. Ancient Rome’s gift of law and order also brought to the fore the major stumbling block of “crown and altar” arrangements—did the Holy Roman Emperor receive his authority from the pope, or the pope from the emperor? THE REVIVAL OF WESTERN COUNCILS Councils 9 through 12 marked a major switch from their predecessors. They were known as the “Lateran Councils” because they were conducted at the mother church of the West, St. John Lateran, in Rome. [St. Peter’s was not built; the popes’ church was dedicated to the Apostle John and located on the Lateran Hill. Hence the name “John Lateran.” Contrast these names with Vatican I and Vatican II.] The Lateran Councils were not held in the East because western Catholicism and eastern Catholicism had split in 1054, the East half becoming the “Orthodox” Church which does not recognize the authority of the bishop of Rome. Consequently, all future Councils are events of the Roman Catholic Church, dealing with issues of Western Christianity, and they reflect the Roman heritage of good order, law, and logical thinking—though some councils were more successful than others at fidelity to these principles. The Council Lateran I [1123] addressed, interestingly, the “crown and altar” problem: “Confirmed the Concordat of Worms (1122), in which the Pope and Emperor sought to end the dispute over investiture (the attempt by the secular powers to assume authority in appointing bishops; this was a main source of Church/state friction during the Middle Ages).” Curiously, one glaring issue not treated in I Lateran was the Crusades, which had begun in 1095. [Much could be said here about the Crusades. I hope that in your lifetime you do take the time to read one or more volumes to understand the rationale, spirituality, strategy, code of conduct, atrocities, and outcomes of each of the five major Crusades. One of the most intriguing and troubling volumes in my library is The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople [2005] by Jonathan Phillips. My review on Amazon is here. The mother of the Lateran Councils was undoubtedly Lateran IV, convoked by among the most powerful popes of all time, Innocent III [r. 1198-1215]. Again, the topics, achievements, and crushed hopes of this Council are far too numerous to explore here, but several points relative to Vatican II are noteworthy. Lateran IV lasted less than a year, in part because Innocent spent a long time listing the items he wanted passed, and then passed them out to the bishops for their approval. Vatican II was prepared in this fashion by the Curia, which planned for a six-week Council to tighten the screws. At Vatican II, however, Pope John XXIII was more sympathetic to his bishops and had the agenda rewritten, including Lumen Gentium. Lateran IV covered a wide range of topics—from Crusades to monastic life to “the Easter Duty” to receive communion during that holy season. He defined the word transubstantiation as the official term to describe the change in the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ at Mass. Wikipedia covers the 70-some canons or rulings and gives a flavor of the wide scope of its work. [The product of Vatican II is sixteen chapters, each with a number of commentaries in paragraph form.] It was a “disciplinary” council in that the final canons on each subject were clearly defined and obedience was expected. In Vatican II John XXIII decided against Innocent’s model. He allowed his bishops—after considerable advice against doing so by his Curia—to reset the agenda and to discuss, openly and honestly the strengths and weaknesses of Catholicism in 1962 and to lay out paths for the future, based on the Church’s history and the perspective of the participants. It is worth noting that Pope Francis’s “Synod on Synodality” copies this model to a degree to engage all the faithful in the re-evangelization of the Church. There were serious mistakes made at Lateran IV. Pope Innocent ordered Jews and Arabs to wear distinctive identifiable clothing—and he did not rescind orders by the City of Venice, for example—that forced all Jews to be cordoned off into parts of a city, ghettoes. And, after the dismal results of the Fourth Crusade, he demanded the Church undertake a fifth—one that changed little and cost countless lives. Vatican II, learning the lessons of history, was able to avoid egregious errors. Problems have arisen with the implementation of Vatican II, particularly in bringing its teachings to the faithful in the spirit with which they were written. NEXT: PART 3--COUNCILS IN THE NEW WORLD—Constance [1414-1418]; Trent [1545-1563]; Vatican I [1869-1870]; and Vatican II [1962-1965] There have been several Church Councils devoted to the very identity of the Church, though such councils did not become necessary until someone or some movement or some crisis came along to challenge its identity or authority. The first such challenge led to the Ecumenical [worldwide] Council of Nicaea [modern Iznik, Turkey] in 325 A.D. and the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople [modern Istanbul, Turkey] in 381 A.D. The challenge came from “Arianism,” the theory that while Jesus was unique, he was not “of one substance” or ‘consubstantial” with the Father as we say every Sunday. St. Jerome, the first translator of the full Bible into Latin, wrote in 357 A.D. that “The whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Arian.” The fourth century was a determining moment of Church self-understanding as it was called upon to state for the record its basic belief in the Trinity.
The Nicaea-Constantinople [or “Nicene”] Creed professes every Sunday the phrase “one, holy, catholic, apostolic.” The next time you attend Mass, notice that the word “catholic” in the Creed is not capitalized. Evolving from a Greek work, the original meaning of “catholic” was worldwide, broad, multi-faceted, or universal. Even in modern English, the word is sometimes used in literature without Christian overtones, such as “he is a reader with catholic taste,” meaning he reads deeply from many diverse sources. Under the guidance of the Spirit, the fourth century Council fathers at Nicaea/Constantinople identified its full understanding of the reality of the Christian Church in their day. In John’s Gospel we have the clearest statement in the New Testament [John 17: 21-23] of the unity or oneness of the Church with God. At the Last Supper Jesus states, “I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one—as you are in me, Father, and I am in you. And may they be in us so that the world will believe you sent me.” A united church, then, is God’s outreach to the world until the end of time as well as its greatest witness to the world. The fathers go on to call the church “holy.” Today this attribute or “mark of the Church” is understood in several ways. Wikipedia puts it this way: “The word holy in this sense means set apart for a special purpose by and for God. The Church is holy because it has been set apart to do God's work, and because God is present in it. Christians understand the holiness of the Church to derive from Christ's holiness.” Paragraphs 824 and 825 of the Catechism attribute the holiness of the Church to God’s plan and presence within it, but it adds, quoting from Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium, that it is premature to say that the Church on earth—in its members—has reached perfection just yet. "The Church on earth is endowed already with a sanctity that is real though imperfect." In her members perfect holiness is something yet to be acquired: "Strengthened by so many and such great means of salvation, all the faithful, whatever their condition or state - though each in his [sic] own way - are called by the Lord to that perfection of sanctity by which the Father himself is perfect." Consider Jesus’ words: “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” As we have seen, the term “catholic” in the Nicene Creed is a geographic adjective and thus not capitalized. God’s plan for the Church was not parochial. St. Matthew’s Gospel records Jesus’ last words to his disciples: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.” The term apostolic in the Creed defines the patrimony of Jesus if you will. We are dependent upon the eyewitness and preaching of those closest to the historical Jesus of Nazareth, and through the Pentecost events [there are several in the Gospels]. The wonder of the Incarnation is God’s passage from pure spirit to material reality: substances, time, space, and human interaction. The apostles witnessed this in their unique place in history, and by the Spirit were empowered to pass down this body of religious experiences through their consecrated successors, bishops. Interestingly, during Vatican II [1962-1965] the world’s bishops forcefully confronted the Roman Curia on this very issue of apostolic succession. The bishops argued that they were treated as little more than field reps for the pope and the Roman Curia or centralized Vatican administration. They fought for their rightful authority to lead their dioceses based upon the witness of the New Testament. Or, put another way, their authority is not reduced to carrying out papal housecleaning mandates, but rested on the authority of the apostles, whose successors they were. This keynote address of the bishops received a ten-minute standing ovation on the floor of the Council. The head of the Curia, Cardinal Ottaviani, was insulted and absented himself for two weeks. When one includes the Council of Ephesus [modern Selçuk, Turkey] in 432 A.D. which declared Mary the Mother of God, and the Council of Chalcedon [modern Kadiköy, Turkey] which defined that Jesus is fully God and fully man with one operational personality, the primary credal self-identity of the Church was established. However, it has probably crossed your mind that the first major doctrinal councils were held in the Eastern portion of the Roman Empire, in the Turkey/Greece region. Not only that, but all these councils were also convoked by Roman emperors, most notably the Council of Nicaea where the bishop of Rome did not attend. St. Leo, the bishop of Rome during the Council of Chalcedon, participated by mail. [The office of pope had not evolved to its full stature in these early times.] And, after the Council of Nicaea, the capital of the Roman Empire was moved to Byzantium [modern Istanbul] and renamed “Constantinople” [by whom, do you think?] Where I am headed here is the irony that in the years when the Church was unifying its doctrines into creed, there were obvious signs of division on the horizon; in fact, they were already in play. The fourth century saw a blossoming of the eastern Roman Empire and the shift of the Roman Army away from the Italian peninsula toward Constantinople and the East. Today’s historians no longer use the term “Dark Ages,” [a victim of “wokeness,” some say] but when the term was in play, it referred to the abandonment and decay of just Western Europe, not the entire civilized world. Attila the Hun’s famous attack on Rome in 451 never took place because, due to famine, there was nothing in Rome to steal. In 476 A.D. a “barbarian” became “emperor” of the Italian peninsula. Old Rome was licking its wounds and transitioning. Although there was no formal division, the thriving Eastern Church was the center of Christendom for a time in terms of intellectual and cultural life. The British historian R.W. Southern, in writing about Rome in the Dark Ages, observed that visitors might pay their respects to the bishop but then proceed to venerate the bones of St. Peter. Outbursts of faith and works in the West were sporadic but powerful in their own ways. The Italian peninsula’s St. Benedict [480-547], the founder of the Benedictines and western monasticism for men and women, was such an exalted figure in those troubled times that during Vatican II Pope Paul VI declared him the patron of Europe. The most noteworthy bishop of Rome in the “Dark Ages” was easily St. Gregory the Great [r. 590-604] who instilled a measure of civil order and even theological writing into the bleak Christianity of the West. If you reflect upon the outstanding growth of monastic life in Ireland beginning around 400, what begins to emerge is a picture of Western European Christianity that is less mystical than in the East, but considerably more muscular. Good thing, too, because the seventh century saw the march of Islam. Next: as the Dark Ages receded, Church councils returned to the West and the Western Roman Church identified itself as protector of the Faith on the battlefields and in its Medieval Councils, the latter shaping much of the Church we know today. I spent this past weekend involved in two things: watching the U.S. Open Golf Tournament which was on TV here on the East Coast from suppertime till midnight for four straight nights, and during the afternoons reading my second killer history book this month, Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis [2022] by John T. McGreevy. The golf tournament was exhilarating—an upset winner by one stroke—but the book is more discomfiting because [a] it is thinning my herd of sacred cows, and [b] the last third of the book covers my lifetime, a very troubling thing when you still feel young enough to be making history.
McGreevey’s book deserves a lot of attention and discussion. I review books for Amazon, which you may see posted from time to time, but I have a 1,000-word limit on those submissions. [My last review was my 190th with Amazon, dating to 2000.] But in many cases a book deserves a multi-faceted discussion, necessitating a brief Amazon summary for its book site and a longer treatment on the Café blogsite, which has no word limit beyond human compassion and exhaustion. Catholicism deserves a lot of thought and soul searching. I suppose the first question would be the relationship of the French Revolution and the Age of Napoleon to the era of Vatican II? McGreevy is not the first historian to begin a modern church narrative with Napoleon. In his What Happened at Vatican II Father William O’Malley begins with a lengthy overview called “The Long Nineteenth Century” in which he essentially dates the moving forces for Vatican I and Vatican II from the era of the French Revolution, which is dated from 1789. The French Revolution—caused in part by French government bankruptcy incurred, ironically, assisting the American Revolution—created a chain of events in Western Europe that ended what is often called “the marriage of throne and altar,” or the interlocking of church and state. After the Napoleonic Wars there was a shift across Western Europe from the older absolute monarchy model toward representational or democratic government with an emphasis upon independence from churches, particularly Roman Catholicism. Coupled with this was the emergence of strong grassroots nationalism and newfound belief in the freedom and conscience of man independent of religious discipline, rooted in the modern philosophies from Descartes to John Locke. In shorthand, the modern secular era had arrived for good. No two nations went through these processes precisely the same way, and McGreevy’s book discusses variants of the process, but across the board the changing face of the West in the nineteenth century created a major challenge to the power, influence, and authority of the Catholic Church. Recall that at the time of the French Revolution Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were Catholic monarchs surrounded by Catholic aristocrats. The immortal phrase “let them eat cake” came from a Catholic queen to an angry and hungry populace. When the French Revolution took its violent turn, the properties and riches of the Church were seized, and the new transitional government would eventually persecute and execute clergy and religious. Ever since the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, the Church had laid claim to secular as well as religious authority—consider, for example, that when Spain and Portugal began exploration and settlement of the Western Hemisphere after Columbus, Pope Alexander VI [conveniently, for Spain, a Spaniard] drew the famous “Line of Demarcation” to divide the claims of the two nations in the New World in 1493. [His line, incidentally, ultimately created Brazil as a Portuguese-speaking nation.] What became very clear in the nineteenth century after the French Revolution was the decreasing influence of the papacy in the course of world events. While Napoleon was finally planted in permanent exile on St. Helena, the future of Europe was debated at the Congress of Vienna [1814-1815], which redrew the map of the old Holy Roman Empire through the workings of Metternich and Talleyrand, to cite two famous international diplomats of the day. Although represented in Vienna, the pope was not invited to draw maps as he had three centuries earlier, and few European leaders were disposed to ask him. The post-French Revolution era was marked by the birth of a liberalism characterized by national identity and pride, greater democratic process, emphasis upon the rights of man, economic free enterprise, and freedom of governments from interference from organized religions, primarily the Roman Catholic Church. McGreevy provides examples of Western liberalization and distrust of a monarchical Catholic Church in such diverse nations as the United States, England, and Italy. By the terms of the founding documents written by the thirteen original colonies, the United States should have been a safe haven for Catholicism, and in many locales the practice of Catholicism was tolerated to a degree. However, periodic flareups of anti-Catholicism were widespread and deadly. In her 1997 The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862, Carol Sheriff describes the animosity between residents of New York State and the Catholic Irish immigrants, hard fighting and hard drinking Irish Catholics who had come to America to dig the canal from Albany to Buffalo. It is no accident that the “Know Nothing Party,” a powerful third-party xenophobic force in American presidential politics, had deep roots in Western New York. The Wikipedia entry on the Know-Nothings has interesting overtones of recent American electoral politics: Fearful that Catholics were flooding the polls with non-citizens, local activists threatened to stop them. On August 6, 1855, rioting broke out in Louisville, Kentucky, during a hotly contested race for the office of governor. Twenty-two were killed and many injured. This "Bloody Monday" riot was not the only violent riot between Know Nothings and Catholics in 1855. In Baltimore, the mayoral elections of 1856, 1857, and 1858 were all marred by violence and well-founded accusations of ballot-rigging. In the coastal town of Ellsworth, Maine, in 1854, Know Nothings were associated with the tarring and feathering of a Catholic priest, Jesuit Johannes Bapst. They also burned down a Catholic church in Bath, Maine. As more Irish, German, and Italian Catholics poured into America throughout the nineteenth century, white Protestant Americans feared that these immigrants were, at heart, loyal to a foreign power, i.e., the pope in Rome, and if the opportunity arose, would take over the United States as a fiefdom of the Papal States. Catholic politicians in the U.S. were accused of representing the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” a charge that rumbled through American politics well into the twentieth century. And, if you listen close enough to monied American interests even today, you hear strains that Pope Francis is a socialist who wants to take our hard-earned money and redistribute it south of the equator. The more things change… In England, the historical memory of Queens Elizabeth and “Bloody Mary” was enough to inflame similar violence against Roman Catholics throughout the post-Napoleonic nineteenth century. Fears—rational or not—of Roman Catholic takeover of the established Church of England were exacerbated by that nation’s own mistreatment of Ireland, highlighted by the Potato Famine, and resulting in protests and immigration. But by far the most tempestuous impact of the post-Napoleonic era may have been the upheavals in Italy itself, the cradle of the Church. If you are a little rusty on your Italian history, the Wikipedia entry entitled “The Unification of Italy,” often referred to as the Risorgimento, chronicles the civil upheavals of the peninsula in the nineteenth century. Italy had not been a unified nation since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 475 A.D. The papacy—with its hold on “the papal states”—lived in constant conflict with outside intruders dating back to the Goths in the 400’s to the newly minted nation states after the French Revolution. [The Church Council Vatican I was disbanded prematurely in 1870 amidst the canon fire of the Franco-Prussian War on the doorsteps of Rome.] The Risorgimento called for a unified Italy with a measure of self-determination, a direct challenge and threat to papal civil authority and land holdings. Recall that the status of the papal states and some reassure of Church independence in the new, unified Italy was not legally defined until the Church’s Concordat with Mussolini in 1929, an arrangement that deteriorated soon thereafter. The French Revolution and its aftermath had two opposite effects upon the Church itself. On the one hand, a sizeable segment of Catholic intellectuals in the Western World began to assess a new understanding of Church life in the “modern era.” The nineteenth century may have been a period of international unrest and searches for new national identities, but it was also a time of intellectual and economic explosion. Consider that the century after the French Revolution would see the advent of modern industrialization, scientific expansion, historical and archaeological advances, democratic governments, medicine and psychology, and even the theories of air travel and nuclear power. Coupled with this were new philosophies and methods of understanding the world, from Hegel to Darwin to Marx. Religions, including Catholicism, could not isolate themselves from the rapid developments of the times. The nineteenth century saw an explosion in religious scholarship in both Protestant and Catholic circles, and it was impossible for Catholic thinkers and leaders to ignore what was happening around them. Possibly no one better embodies the religious complexities of the time or thought more creatively about them than England’s John Henry Newman, the Anglican priest-scholar who converted to Catholicism in 1845. Newman’s journey to Roman Catholicism was long and complicated. As an idealistic youth his evangelical faith caused him to regard the Catholic pope as the antichrist. In his college years he matured into the mainstream of Anglican faith and scholarship. But convinced that the Church of England stood in need of reform, he joined with other Oxford scholars in a spirited study of the early Church Fathers, which they published as papers or “tracts” that came to be known as the Tractarian Movement or the Oxford Movement. In his studies Newman and many of his confreres came to be believe that the Roman Catholic Church had best embodied the traditions of the Christian roots of the Fathers. He converted to Catholicism and would eventually become a Cardinal of the Church. Newman would become one of the greatest minds of modern Catholicism, and his thought forms the basis of many of Vatican II insights, including his writing on the development of doctrine. He was, in fact, canonized on October 13, 2019, by Pope Francis. Newman appreciated better than most that Catholicism would need to make considerable accommodations to the scholarship and the spirit of the best of contemporary thought and practice to remain intellectually honest, but he appreciated—far ahead of his time—the challenges we face today as Catholics. In a famous essay on the nature of a university, Newman described the dilemma of the Catholic in the new world at hand: [From Wikipedia]: Newman believed in a middle way between free thinking and moral authority—one that would respect the rights of knowledge as well as the rights of revelation. His purpose was to build a Catholic university, in a world where the major Catholic universities on the European continent had recently been secularized, and most universities in the English-speaking world were Protestant. For a university to claim legitimacy in the larger world, it would have to support research and publication free from church censorship; however, for a university to be a safe place for the education of Catholic youth, it would have to be a place in which the teachings of the Catholic church were respected and promoted. Finding the balance of “being in the world but not of it” was one of the significant challenges of Vatican II, but that was still long in the future. For despite the insights of Newman and others, much of nineteenth century Catholicism was governed by two Popes, Pius IX, and Pius X, who saw the Church as the last bastion of a sacred history that must be preserved at all costs, the driving force of the Council Vatican I [1869-1870]. Theirs was the predominant reaction of Catholics to the post-Napoleonic upheavals, the “Ultramontantist Era” [from “the other side of the Alps mountains,” a reference to Rome and the papal states.] In our next discussion of McGreevy’s book, we will immerse ourselves in the Ultramontanist revival, which many of us may recognize as the pre-Vatican II world we grew up with. |
Church HistoryArchives
November 2025
|
RSS Feed