I.

Introduction

Papacy, office of the pope, the supreme head of the Roman Catholic Church. The word is derived from the medieval Latin papa (“pope,” or “father”), a term originally applied to bishops in general. Roman Catholics believe that the pope is the successor of Saint Peter, to whom Christ entrusted the leadership of the church as recorded in Matthew 16:18-19: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church....”

The pope has many official titles: bishop of Rome, vicar of Christ, successor to the prince of the apostles, supreme pontiff of the universal church, patriarch of the West, primate of Italy, archbishop and metropolitan of the Roman province, sovereign of the state of Vatican City, servant of the servants of God. The title bishop of Rome is the basis for the others: an individual is pope because he is bishop of Rome (and thus the successor of Peter), not vice versa.

II.

Powers and Structure

As wielders of the highest power in the church, popes issue authoritative doctrinal statements, convoke councils, adjudicate legal questions, establish dioceses, appoint bishops, and perform a host of other functions. Never in history have these powers been exercised more fully or broadly than at present.

A.

The Curia

The pope is assisted by an elaborate bureaucracy known as the Curia. After many reorganizations, the Curia still retains the same tripartite structure it was given in the 16th century: (1) congregations (administrative committees), each charged with a specific area of government; (2) tribunals, to handle legal matters; (3) offices, councils, and secretariats, of which the most important now is the secretariat of state, which functions as the chief organ of government to which the others generally report.

B.

Election

The pope is elected by the College of Cardinals within several weeks after his predecessor’s death. The cardinals are sequestered into a conclave under an oath to keep the voting a secret. This system, many times modified, has been in use since the 11th century, when it definitively replaced the rather haphazard systems that preceded it. Although in theory any baptized male can be elected pope, the cardinals have not gone outside their own number since the 16th century. Until then it was not uncommon to elect as pope individuals who had not yet received priestly ordination.

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.

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).

E.

The Counter Reformation and After

In the early 16th century the popes were finally able to consolidate their political authority in the Papal States and became for the first time effective territorial princes. At about the same time, however, Martin Luther made a rejection of the papacy an integral part of the Reformation. With ever-increasing vehemence, he denounced the pope as the Antichrist, not so much for the supposed worldliness and corruption of the papacy as for its failure to proclaim the doctrine of justification by faith. In 1534 King Henry VIII of England had Parliament declare him head of the Church of England, thus dislodging the pope from that office. Although the various Protestant reformers differed among themselves on many issues, all agreed that the papacy was a pernicious, or at least an inessential, institution.

The Roman Catholic response to the Protestant Reformation was known as the Counter Reformation and began with Pope Paul III (reigned 1534-1549). By taking care to appoint worthy men to the College of Cardinals, he tried to guarantee a morally upright papacy in the future. The Council of Trent (1545-1563) did not deal with the role of the papacy in the church, although it formulated most of the doctrines and practices of the modern Roman Catholic Church.

When at its close the council handed over to the papacy its unfinished business and the implementation of its decrees, it did, however, strengthen the popes’ leadership in the church. The exchange of polemics with the Protestants, moreover, moved the papacy to a more central role in Roman Catholic theology than it had had before, and made it the mark that distinguished the Roman Catholic from all Protestant churches. This development also further aggravated the schism with the Eastern church that had occurred in 1054. Still without a clear formulation of the relationship of the papacy to the episcopacy and to national rulers, however, the Roman Catholic Church was susceptible to divisive controversies on these issues, such as Gallicanism, Febronianism, and Josephism in the 17th and 18th centuries. Each of these movements, which stressed some degree of independence of the papacy for bishops or monarchs, was condemned by papal decree. Finally, under Pope Pius IX (reigned 1846-1878) the First Vatican Council (1870) defined papal primacy of jurisdiction and papal infallibility in doctrine.

The French Revolution (1789-1799) and its long aftermath throughout Europe brought new problems to the papacy, especially the drive in Italy toward national unity (see Italian Unification) that led in the 1860s to the incorporation of the Papal States and the city of Rome into the Italian state. In protest particularly against the loss of Rome, Pius IX withdrew from the city to become a voluntary “prisoner of the Vatican,” a tiny area of about 40 hectares (about 100 acres) around Saint Peter’s Basilica. This “Roman Question” was settled in 1929 by an agreement with the Italian government of Benito Mussolini whereby Vatican City became a sovereign state with the pope as its ruler (see Lateran Treaty).

F.

The 20th Century

During the last 100 years the papacy has grown in prestige and importance even outside Roman Catholic circles. Beginning with the encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) written by Pope Leo XIII (reigned 1878-1903), it has taken some far-sighted stands concerning the moral implications of social and economic questions. The papacy held steadfast in opposition to Marxism, but after World War II (1939-1945) it tried to arrive at some accommodation with the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. It was most successful in Poland and Yugoslavia, where the church operated with some freedom even before the Communist governments were turned out of office.

The attractive personality of Pope John XXIII (reigned 1958-1963) won for the papacy an immense, worldwide respect. The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) that Pope John convoked reemphasized the functions of the episcopacy in the government of the church, without denying the decrees of Vatican I, and at the same time adopted a more conciliatory attitude toward the Protestant and Orthodox churches. The council also tended to favor a more participatory, less authoritarian style of church government. Partly in response to such initiatives, the Protestant and Orthodox churches began to reexamine the role of the papacy in the church and to show more sympathy toward that amazingly resilient institution.

Pope John Paul II (reigned 1978-2005), who was born in Poland, was the first non-Italian pope to be chosen in more than 400 years. He emphasized the worldwide nature of the church by traveling extensively, visiting all the continents except Antarctica. He was succeeded by Pope Benedict XVI (reigned 2005- ), the 265th pope in history and the first German to be selected pope since the 11th century. See also Christianity; Roman Catholic Church.