Papacy

III

History

Archaeological and literary evidence supports the belief that Saint Peter was martyred in Rome and even that he was buried in the traditional site under the main altar of Saint Peter’s Basilica, but the precise role he played in the Christian community in Rome before his death is not known.

A

Emergence of Papal Primacy

The First Letter of Clement (Prima Clementis, approximately AD 100), from the Christians of Rome to those of Corinth, can be interpreted as an early Roman awareness of responsibility for other churches. By the end of the 2nd century, with Pope Saint Victor I (reigned 189-199), and especially by the middle of the next century, with Pope Saint Stephen I (reigned 254-257), the bishops of Rome assumed that the tradition of their church was somehow normative for other, quite distant churches.

During the 4th and early 5th centuries, the popes made various claims to special authority and rarely had them challenged, perhaps as much because of poor communications and indifference as acquiescence. With Pope Saint Leo I, the Great (reigned 440-461), the prerogatives of the papacy were articulated in word and deed with a new forcefulness. By this time the canon of apostolic succession, clearly proposed as a norm for orthodoxy and legitimacy at the end of the 2nd century, was fully developed, and Leo was able to exploit it as successor of Peter—indeed, as “vicar of Peter.” Backed by the civil authority of the Western Roman Empire, Leo successfully intervened in the affairs of other Western sees such as Vienne, in France, where he reversed the decision of the local bishop. Leo insisted in peremptory fashion that the Council of Chalcedon (451) accept his teaching on the christological debates then raging, and the council in effect did so. To Leo’s dismay and disapproval, however, the council also decreed that the New Rome (Constantinople) was to have in the East the same primacy as the Old Rome in the West.

B

The Early Medieval Papacy

Italy’s turbulent political history during the next century and a half submerged the popes from view. Pope Saint Gelasius I (reigned 492-496) was an exception, especially noteworthy for his collection of Christian legal and disciplinary texts, which, with their decided tendency to emphasize papal authority, would influence the way canon law developed in the Middle Ages. Like Leo, other popes during these centuries considered themselves endowed with powers over the whole church, even over the East, where this viewpoint was sometimes accepted, but more generally was only tolerated, ignored, or rejected.

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Pope Saint Gregory I, the Great (reigned 590-604), administered so well the vast territories that had accrued through legacies to the papacy and dealt so successfully with his bellicose neighbors in Italy, the Lombards, that he made the papacy a major political force, thereby decreasing papal dependence on the East. When Gregory dispatched the monk Augustine as a missionary to England in 596, he injected into the Christianity of northern Europe a sense of gratitude and loyalty to the papacy that would stand his successors in good stead for centuries. In the late 8th and early 9th centuries, the Frankish house of Charlemagne offered protection to the popes and bestowed upon them immense territories in central Italy, the basis for the future Papal States. Pope Saint Leo III (reigned 795-816), in turn, laid the foundation for the medieval German empire (see Holy Roman Empire) when he crowned Charlemagne in Saint Peter’s Basilica on December 25, 800.

C

Decline and Gregorian Reform

As political conditions in Italy disintegrated in the 10th century, the papacy fell into the hands of the local nobility. The popes were now, at best, mere liturgical figures in an almost abandoned city; at worst they were moral degenerates manipulated by their own passions and by unscrupulous barons, often their kinsmen. The pontificate of Pope Saint Leo IX (reigned 1049-1054), a reformer from Alsace, put the papacy squarely on the road to recovery and committed it to a reform of the church. Especially characteristic of this reform, as promoted by the popes of the late 11th and early 12th centuries, was its practical emphasis on papal authority as the key to restoring proper church order. Pope Saint Gregory VII (reigned 1073-1085) emerged—both before and after his election to the papacy—as the strongest advocate of this movement, known as both the Investiture Controversy and the Gregorian Reform.

The papacy that resulted from this reform, more insistent than ever on its prerogatives, had managed to convince most bishops and many princes that these prerogatives were just, had enshrined them in the new canon law then being formulated, and had translated them into the institutional form of a centralizing bureaucracy. Gregory VII and his successors were thus the founders of the modern papacy.

The legacy of the Gregorians reached its zenith in Pope Innocent III (reigned 1198-1216), whose energy and ability made him the most important person, secular or religious, in contemporary European society. He was the first pope to make consistent use of the title vicar of Christ.

D

Avignon and the Great Schism

Less than a century after the triumph of medieval papal authority under Innocent III, King Philip IV of France humiliated Pope Boniface VIII (reigned 1294-1303), and the psychological warfare he waged against Pope Clement V (reigned 1305-1314) resulted in the long residence (1309-1377) of the popes at Avignon, France, where they were under strong French influence. At the end of this period the Great Schism developed, during which each of two or three popes simultaneously contended, to the great scandal of Christendom, that he was the only legitimate pontiff. Although the Great Schism was finally ended by the Council of Constance (1414-1418), the papacy had lost prestige, and for the next hundred years it lived in apprehension of attacks on its authority from radical conciliar theory, such as that which erupted at the Council of Basel (1431-1449).