Lumen Gentium II: The Dark and Dawning Ages

 
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]