Tag: papacy

Somewhere between the Crusades and the National Council of Churches

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

That somewhere is the Land of 2k.

The reason for this reminder stems in part from a post over at Rorate Caeli about modernized Roman Catholics who don’t have much to offer Muslims:

What does modernized Catholicism do faced with Islam and its terroristic religion of violence?

Does it ask Islam to accept modernity? Does it ask it to put the person at the center in the place of God? Does it ask Islam to accept the trinomial of the Revolution, freedom-equality-fraternity? Modernized Catholicism, reinterpreted, has the audacity to expose itself, by submitting that the Catholic Church, after an erroneous refusal of 200 years, has [finally] understood how to embrace modernity, by restructuring itself into a more mature phase of religion. Consequently, the modernized Church is asking Muslims to try and take the same steps, so that they can join the assemblage of the modern religion which puts man at the centre.

What will real Muslim believers understand from this invitation? They will understand that we no longer believe in God, that we have become agnostics, that the dogmas of the Masonic religion, which support the centrality of Man, have thrown out the true dogmas – the dogmas of God!

What a disaster!

The Muslims will be confirmed in their idea that the Christian West is immoral and should be opposed.

Conservative Protestants know the feeling. If you asked Protestant modernists what they offer to Muslims, you’d also likely want to duck if you were the one to deliver the answer to the inquiring Muslim. But when this Roman Catholic op-ed writer says that Traditional Roman Catholicism has the right proposal for Muslims, you do wonder what he or she means by traditional. As much as Pope Benedict XVI might have proposed reason instead of power, plenty of popes well before Benedict showed muscle rather than intellect to Muslim infidels — think Crusades and Inquisition.

In which case, the alternative to a modernist Islam is a spiritual Islam — one that regards the spiritual as more important than the temporal. The papacy may have learned this lesson the hard way after 1870 when the pope lost his temporal estates. Even so, between 1870 and 1962, the papacy did seem to know implicitly that its power was spiritual not temporal, and it still ran a conservative church with lots of condemnations of departures from the truth.

The Turkish Republic may have also taught Islam a similar lesson when it abolished the caliphate and turned the nation’s mosques into centers of religious as opposed to political life.

Separating the spiritual from the temporal also bears on the recent discussion between Rod Dreher and Noah Milman about whether Republicans have anything to offer social conservatives. In response to Dreher’s earlier suggestion that social conservatives may need to adopt the Benedict Option of cultural withdrawal, Milman points to a Jewish community that did withdraw and is still as politicized as an Blue or Red state constituency:

Consider Kiryas Joel. This village in Orange County, New York, was designed as an enclave of the Satmar Hasidic sect. Satmar are the most insular of Hasidic sects, going to enormous lengths to keep themselves uncontaminated by the larger culture. But they participate in commerce – and they most certainly participate in politics. Specifically, they vote as a bloc for whichever candidate best-supports the narrow interests of the community.

And, funny thing, but politicians respond to incentives. This is a community that rigidly separates the sexes and imposes a draconian standard of personal modesty – and that strives mightily to impose that norm as a public matter in their community. Don’t even talk about homosexuality. But none of that prevented a Democratic candidate for Congress from earning their support by promising to help them with facilitating the community’s growth. And with their help, he narrowly won his election against a Republican who had previously earned the Satmar community’s favor.

I am not writing a brief for Kiryas Joel or Satmar. I think that kind of insulation is extremely destructive, not only for the individuals involved but for any kind of authentic spiritual life. But it seems to me that this is what the Benedict Option looks like in the real world – or, rather, this is a somewhat extreme end of what it might mean.

And my real point is that that approach – a focus on nurturing a spiritual community, maintaining however much integration with the rest of the world as is compatible with that priority, and orienting one’s politics on the specific needs of your community – is completely compatible with playing the two parties off against each other. Satmar stands opposed to basically everything the Democratic Party stands for. Heck, it stands opposed to basically everything America stands for. For that matter, it stands opposed to basically everything the rest of the American Jewish community stands for as well – it’s resolutely anti-Zionist, extremely socially conservative, refuses to cooperate with non-Hasidic groups – it even has a hard time getting along even with other Hasidic groups. And it still gets courted by Democrats.

The really funny thing may be the recognition that confessional Presbyterian communions like the OPC get courted by neither Republicans nor Democrats. Part of that owes to the fact that Orthodox Presbyterians do not inhabit a Congressional District. But it also has to do with the doctrine of the spirituality of the church (still disputed in OPC circles, mind you). If the church is a spiritual institution with spiritual means for spiritual ends, and if the temporal matters of this life are just that — temporal — fading away in comparison to what is coming on That Great (not Pretty Good) Day, then the best alternative to either a sword-wielding pope or caliphate, or a pandering set of pastors or bishops, is a spiritual church. That means, a group of believers who worship together each week under a ministry reformed according to the word of God and who know that in the light of eternity political parties, geographical territories, and military conflicts don’t matter.

Winning

Published on by D. G. Hart11 Comments

Unless the local priest can be just like Jesus Francis, why bother? Why not go to church with the flabby evangelicals?

After a television interview, I was talking with a young producer who told me of her experience. She had been raised Catholic, but stopped going to church in college. Now she is engaged and was encouraged by her fiancé and Francis to give the church another try. After going to church a few times, she felt called to go to the sacrament of reconciliation. It was a disaster. The priest yelled at her and told her that everything bad that had happened to her was because she had not gone to confession in 10 years.

There will be no “Francis effect” if when people return to the church they do not meet someone like Francis at their parish. Going to confession today is like playing Russian roulette. You don’t know whether you will meet the compassionate Jesus or some angry, judgmental crank who thinks it is his job to tell people how bad they are. This is a form of abuse about which the church has done nothing.

Nor should we limit our focus to the clergy. Parish staff can be tempted to clericalism, and parish communities can ignore new parishioners who can feel lost in a crowd of people.

Try this experiment. Go to a Catholic church you have never attended and see how long it takes before someone initiates a conversation with you. Then go to an Evangelical church and try the same experiment. The Evangelicals will win every time.

Papal audacity only goes so far (sort of like wishing after hearing White Horse Inn that Mike Horton and Kim Riddlebarger could be your pastors).

Where Would Christian Europe be without the Emperor?

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

That’s what Peter Heather makes readers ask in The Restoration of Rome:

Thanks to Charlemagne’s attentions, the papacy was enriched, visited, courted and paid enormous respect, but all these gains came with a price tag. The emperor’s respect for the papacy was genuine, but he was equally convinced. . . that he had his own hotline to the Almighty. No mere vassal of St. Peter, he had no hesitation in making use of the papacy for his own purposes . . . for this too was God’s will. Nor was Charlemagne afraid actually to disagree with the Pope — even on matters of doctrine. The example par excellence is the Council of Frankfurt. There and to the Pope’s face (at least, to those of his legates) Charlemagne had his churchmen declare that Pope Hadrian’s acceptance of Constantinople’s new teaching on icons was in fact mistaken. A second, less charged example is provided by the famous filioque clause. . . .

As such, we can place [Charlemagne] firmly in a tradition which stretched back for the best part of half a millennium. From the time of Constantine onwards, overarching responsibility even for the identification of correct doctrine had been part of the Christian ruler’s job description, and Charlemagne’s attitude to Rome was nothing more than its direct continuation. Indeed, it would be extremely easy at this point to go through the same checklist we have used before, and come to the inescapable conclusion that Charlemagne was undoubtedly the head of the Church within his domains. He appointed all the leading churchmen, he called all the major councils and authorized most of the rest, and great tranches of legal directions on the practicalities of both clerical and lay piety were drawn up in his name. (332-33)

So much for that audacious papacy. Turns out the Pope would not have been the official he turned out to be without the audacity of the emperor. In fact, transformers of culture, Roman Catholic or Protestant, will never see their hopes for a Christian society realized until the ruler embraces the faith and enforces it. Not even Boniface VIII in all his pomp and show could make Europe Christian. It took emperors, kings, princes, and magistrates.

Overreach

Published on by D. G. Hart2 Comments

Peter Leithart is reading about the French Enlightenment and Revolution and comments on Tocqueville‘s observations:

The root of the hatred was not dogma but the church’s role as a “political institution.” Because of the church’s role in the old society, it too had to be “dashed to pieces” to make way for the new society.

Rome had been overreaching for some time and no matter how Brad Gregory romanticized the medieval world, a plausible reading of the West is that if the Vatican had not been so caught up in its own prerogatives — spiritual and temporal, the Reformation and Enlightenment may have had different outcomes.

Leithart continues:

What catches Tocqueville’s eye, though, is that it didn’t work: “As the ancient political institutions that the Revolution attacked were utterly destroyed; as the powers, influences, and classes that were particularly odious to it were progressively crushed; and– ultimate sign of their defeat– as even the hatreds they had once inspired withered and the clergy separated itself from everything that had fallen along with it, one began to see a gradual restoration of the power of the Church and a reaffirmation of its influence over the minds of men.”

He finds the same pattern everywhere: “There is scarcely a Christian church anywhere in Europe that has not undergone a revival since the French Revolution,” and this, prescient as ever, he thinks is due to the compatibility of democracy with Christianity and Catholicism.

Well, popes from Pius IX to Pius XII didn’t get the memo about democracy and Roman Catholicism. But that aside notwithstanding, the French Republic overreached against the overreach of the church and crown (the French monarchs made the English kings and queens look like pikers). People don’t like to be coerced, whether by the church or the state. And the reason for the American people’s support for gay marriage, I believe, has less to do with rational public policy or fairness and more with pushing back the “family values” that religious conservatives incautiously pushed for three decades. At the same time, if this push back pushes too hard (which it may be doing between the Affordable Care Act and Duck Dynasty), Americans will find their underdog inner selves and rally to beleaguered religious conservatives.

If So Many Mediators, Why Only One Pope?

Published on by D. G. Hart26 Comments

Here is part of Charles Pope’s (real name) response to a Protestant who insists that the Bible teaches that Christians have only one mediator, Jesus Christ:

Rather we speak of a subordinate mediation when we seek the prayers of the saints, or of one another. For indeed we could have no communion with them or each other if it be not for Jesus Christ, who as the head of the Body the Church, unites all his members and facilitates our communion with each other.

You seem to speak of there being one mediator in an absolute sense, excluding any other possible interaction or any subordinate mediation. But Consider, that if there is only one mediator in the absolute sense you say, then you ought never again to ask ANYONE to pray for you. Neither should you attend any church, read any book, listen to any sermon or even read the Bible (since the Bible mediates Jesus words to you).

Now, a “mediator” is someone or something that acts as a kind of go-between, as something which acts to facilitate our relationship with Jesus. And though Jesus mediates our relationship to the Father, he also asked Apostles, preachers and teachers to mediate, to facilitate his relationship with us.

Thus Jesus sent apostles out to draw others to him. And St. Paul says, How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can anyone preach unless they are sent? As it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!” Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ. (Rom 10:14-15, 17) And thus Jesus has his relationship with us mediated through his Word, and through the apostles and others who announce that Word and draw us to him.

But since you say there is absolutely only ONE mediator, and no subordinate or deputed mediators, there is therefore no need to ask ANYONE or ANYTHING to mediate. So burn your Bible, stop asking anyone to pray for you, seek no advice, NO ONE can mediate a single thing to you Gerry. No one can do this because there is, as you say in an unqualified sense, absolutely only ONE mediator. ONE!

Aside from the squishy word play (Framelike) which takes one sense of interacting with other believers (including a very porous idea of speaking to dead saints) and using that to justify prayers to dead, I wonder if Pope would be that expansive in explaining papal supremacy. In other words, why be so particular with the authority of one particular bishop and not equally particular about the work of Christ? Inquiring minds and all that.

Rome in American Exceptionalism

Published on by D. G. Hart265 Comments

A constant refrain among Jason and the Callers is the notion that Roman Catholicism has one, holy, catholic, and apostolic interpretive paradigm for reading the past. (Jason has 26 posts in the category of paradigm.) I believe this is supposed to apply to the early church fathers as much as Trent, Vatican I, or the post-Vatican II church. It is, of course, a very flat view of history (and maybe the planet). As a historian, I don’t understand how this paradigm (derived from the magisterium’s dogmatic utterances almost as certainly as the neo-Calvinist w-w follows from neo-Calvinist epistemology) can actually make sense of an institution as vast and old and idiosyncratic as the Roman Catholic Church. But I am especially intrigued by the historiographical ignorance (this is Roman Catholic historiography, mind you) that claims to a single interpretive paradigm require. It is like the Landmark Baptist notion that all other Baptists, except those that trace their lineage directly to the New Testament, are not Baptists and therefore not true churches.

If Jason and the Callers read more history they might understand how far from mainstream Roman Catholic discussions of history their paradigm is. To help them out, a few excerpts from Peter D’Agostino’s important book, Rome in America:

For more than a century before Vatican Council II, American Catholics had been making two claims central to the invention of “American Catholicism.” First, like Pius IX, they demonized a vast spectrum of European liberalisms as evil, Masonic, and linked to secret and criminal forces bent on attaching the Holy Father and destroying the Church. . . . Second, American Catholics insisted that the liberal premises of the U.S. political order were profoundly different from the false, degenerate liberalism of Europe. Normative American liberalism was warm and welcoming, and it granted true liberty to the Catholic Church. In fact, Catholics argued, the natural law principles behind American liberalism and the U.S. Constitution were derived from medieval Catholicism. Both claims shaped Father John Courtney Murray’s classic essays brought together in We Hold These Truths (1960).

A new generation of Catholics who lived through, or vicariously participated in, the enthusiasms of Vatican Council II have reinvented “American Catholicism.” From Murray’s Catholic argument for an American exceptionalism, the new generation made a theological and historical leap to an environmental argument for an American Catholic exceptionalism. The unique American environment of liberty, this new generation of historians and theologians claimed, gave birth to a unique Catholicism in the history of the Church. This American Catholicism was part and parcel of the American landscape, a mainstream denomination, and not . . . a loyal minority religion operating under distinctive premises within the United States. This American Catholicism was a denomination like any Christian denomination, not “the Church.” For Ellis and Murray, it had been self-evident that the Church was a hierarchical, clerical, patriarchal, and international institution (although they might not have used those terms). Their concern had been to demonstrate that the one, holy, apostolic Church founded by Christi thrived legally and loyally within a properly ordered republic. The new generation, in contrast, claimed normative American Catholics was democratic in impulse, congregational in polity, collegial in leadership; a Catholic version of the novos ordo seclorum. (311)

This should sound familiar to Protestants in the United States who made similar intellectual moves by forgetting their European origins, conflating their churches with the American republic, and producing their own American exceptionalism. The odd feature about Roman Catholic American exceptionalism is that these Christians were supposed to be subject to a prince and prelate on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, an attachment that would supposedly undercut investing so much providence in the United States. At the same time, this exceptionalism does help to account first for Rome’s branding of Americanism as a heresy and second for the “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” phenomenon where U.S. civil religion has helped Protestants and Roman Catholics forget about their differences.

But D’Agostino believes that this exceptionalism among Roman Catholics has obscured the real tensions between Rome’s antimodernism and the West’s modernization:

The two foundational claims of American Catholic exceptionalism need to be historicized and relativized . . . . First, there was no shortage of anti-Catholicism in the eighteenth century embryonic American nation. The founders, both deists and a broad spectrum of English-speaking Protestants, did not have to seriously contend with Catholicism and surely did not have to protect the new state from the instransigent likes of Pius IX. If they had, anti-Catholic fangs would surely have shown themselves more frequently. Whether or not the American Revolution was a transatlantic religious war between dissenting Protestants and Anglicans (the English approximation of “papists”), it surely drew upon cultural forces that were deeply anti-Catholic. . . .

Second, many European liberals were also liberal Catholics. The moderate advocates of Risorgimento, those men who ruled the Kingdom of Piedmont and then the Kingdom of Italy until 1876, were overwhelmingly Catholic. After they defeated their republican opponents and protected the Church in Italy from a Kulturkampf, they granted privileges to the Church and secured the safety and independence of the pope. Had the papacy cooperated with the Catholic constitutional monarchy and taken the opportunity to reform the Church’s more antiquated structures, forces that were genuinely anti-Catholic might never have won the influence they gained in the decades of the nineteenth century. (314)

In other words, the Vatican dug in against liberalism and moderate constitutional political reforms in nineteenth-century Europe as much as Vatican II made it possible for Jason and the Callers to be spirituality of the church Roman Catholics, indifferent to politics and uncomfortable with past papal pronouncements. Hitching your wagon and paradigm to the papacy means you are in for one roller coaster of a ride.

Conciliarism on the Eve of Reformation

Published on by D. G. Hart41 Comments

It may come as no surprise to hear that Thomas Cardinal Cajetan, Luther’s chief antagonist in 1518 at the meeting in Augsburg, was a high papalist who took a decidedly anti-conciliar position with his 1511 work, De comparatione auctoritatis papae et concilii. As Francis Oakley explains, this book by Cajetan disrupted the council, then meeting in Pisa, and the bishops (from exile) sent Cajetan’s treatise to the leading theological faculty of Europe, Paris, for evaluation. There Jacques Almain responded with a vindication of the conciliarist position. It involved three grounds, as Oakley summarizes:

First, just as coercive civil power is present in a political body as a whole before it is wielded by any of its members, so, too, is it with the Church. The supreme ecclesiastical power, which Christ admittedly conferred directly upon Peter, he had earlier conferred ‘in its plentitude’ on the Church. So true is this, indeed, that had he failed after the Resurrection to institute anyone as his supreme pontiff or vicar general, the Church being possessed already of the ‘supreme coercive power’, could itself have done so. . . . .

secondly, the ecclesiastical power residing in the Church is ‘greater in extension’ than is that residing in the pope. When Christ conferred upon Peter the keys of the kingdom of heaven, he gave them to him not as a private person but ‘as a sign and figure’ or representative of the universal Church. Hence it is by the authority of the Church and in its place that Peter and his successors have wielded the power of the keys — ‘just as kings exercise the power of jurisdiction in place of the community.’ But the general council immediately represents the universal Church and it has the power of the keys ‘more directly than does Peter’. . . .

Third, the eccleiastical power which resided in the Church is not only ‘greater in extension’ than that residing in the pope, it is also ‘greater in perfection’ too. For it resides in the Church with constancy . . . so that the Church ‘is unable to err in those things that pertain to the faith and to good morals, nor can it err in passing sentence [on such matters . . . since it is assisted always by the Holy Spirit, doctor of truth and infallible director’. . . . For popes can err, and manifestly have erred in matters of faith, and have done so in their official public capacity as well as in their private personal beliefs, whereas from that danger the Holy Spirit protects the general council, representing truly as it does that council of apostles and disciples which was the recipient of Christ’s promise that he would be with us always even to the consummation of the world. (125-26)

So strong was this disagreement between Cajetan and Almain, and so strong was the conciliarist movement, that the Council of Trent represented one of the diciest moments in Roman Catholic history. According to Oakley:

. . . concern about the danger to the papacy which [conciliar views] still posed helped, accordingly, to bolster reluctance at Rome to respond to the Protestant challenge in Germany by summoning the general council for which so many Catholics pleaded. When the Council of Trent did finally meet in 1545, it was not only suspicious representatives of the evangelicals who turned out to want the matter of the superiority of pope to council placed on the agenda. Apprehension about the potential recrudescence of conciliarism, very much on the minds of the papal legates, was also, as Paulo Sarpi was to note later on in his ascerbic history of Trent, widespread among the council fathers themselves. And not, it turned out, without good cause. Given the way in which events were to unfold, one is forced to concur in the judgement that ‘there was . . . scarcely any set problems that was so controversial at Trent or that brought the council so close to collapse as the question of primacy and the relationship between the primate and episcopate’. Disagreement about the respective powers of pope and council, though partially downplayed in response to the threat posed by Protestant dissent, rumbled on through the council’s first two periods in the 1540s and 1550s, rising to the level of something more than a subdominant whenever the issue of reform in head and members came to be discussed. And in 1562-3, during the council’s last phase when a French delegation of some significance had finally joined the ranks of the participants, the issue helped precipitate what was clearly Trent’s greatest crisis.

Aside from the ecclesiological debates over a bishop’s power (whether it came through the pope or directly from Christ), and whether bishops were bound to reside in their dioceses, was the question of papal primacy.

Here the level of disagreement was such as to preclude not only that papally sponsored redefinition but also any decree at all on the controverted nature of the Christian Church. So menacing, indeed, was the atmosphere at the council, and so rancorous the dissent, that it was something of a triumph for the diplomacy of the papal legates to have succeeded finally in sidestepping the pursuit of that issue in a compromising context in which appeals were being made to the superiority decrees of Constance and Basel . . . and in which the celebrated Charles de Guise, cardinal of Lorraine, proudly proclaimed himself to be a Frenchman, one nourished at the University of Paris where, he noted, the Councils of Constance and Basel (but certainly not that of Florence) were held to be fully legitimate and ecumenical in status, and where those rash enough to deny the superiority of council to pope could expect to be censured as heretics. (130-31)

Why Jason and the Callers decided to go all in on a theory of papal primacy and chose to ignore the theory of conciliarism (which no less depends on apostolic succession) is not just a mystery but audacious.

Conciliarism Is What Christ Founded (or at least preceded high-papalism)

Published on by D. G. Hart18 Comments

The crucial decree at the Council of Constance, in Francis Oakley’s story, is Haec Sancta, part of which reads (and according to the Vatican website contradicts Vatican I on “papal primacy/infallibility”):

In the name of the holy and undivided Trinity, Father and Son and holy Spirit. Amen. This holy synod of Constance, which is a general council, for the eradication of the present schism and for bringing unity and reform to God’s church in head and members, legitimately assembled in the holy Spirit to the praise of almighty God, ordains, defines, decrees, discerns and declares as follows, in order that this union and reform of God’s church may be obtained the more easily, securely, fruitfully and freely.

First it declares that, legitimately assembled in the holy Spirit, constituting a general council and representing the catholic church militant, it has power immediately from Christ; and that everyone of whatever state or dignity, even papal, is bound to obey it in those matters which pertain to the faith, the eradication of the said schism and the general reform of the said church of God in head and members.

Next, it declares that anyone of whatever condition, state or dignity, even papal, who contumaciously refuses to obey the past or future mandates, statutes, ordinances or precepts of this sacred council or of any other legitimately assembled general council, regarding the aforesaid things or matters pertaining to them, shall be subjected to well-deserved penance, unless he repents, and shall be duly punished, even by having recourse, if necessary, to other supports of the law. (quoted in Oakley, 83)

This affirmation of conciliarism was designed to address the unity of the church, one of the true church’s four marks:

Of the four marks of the Church designated in the Nicene Creed — one, holy, Catholic, apostolic — the mark of holiness had appeared earlier and more frequently in the various creeds than had the other three. And it was also the characteristic that had given rise to some of the earliest ecclesiological controversies. But in the great late medieval tide of debate concerning the nature of the Church that was to crest during the conciliar epoch, it was less the mark of holiness than that of unity that lay at the very heart of disagreement. If, for adherents to the more prominent high-papalist position, the key to that unity lay in the firm subordination of all the members of the Christian community to a single papal head, for others the key lay, rather, in the corporate association of those members. It was from the latter group that the conciliarists of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries took their cue. Committed to the belief that the papal headship of the Church was indeed of divine foundation, but more also it seems, by memories of what today would be called the ecclesiology of communio and by the scriptural and patristic vision of the community of Christians as forming a single body with Christ, it’s ‘primary’ or ultimate head, the proponents of conciliarist views sought to combine those two convictions. That is to say, and as J. H. Burns has rightly insisted, their argument with the high papalists was not an argument “for or against [papal] monarchy as such’, but an argument about the nature of that papal monarchy. For they sought to harmonize their twin convictions by insisting that side by side with the institution of papal monarchy it was necessary to give the Church’s communitarian or corporate dimension more prominent and routine institutional expression, most notably by the regular assembly of general councils representing the entire community of the faithful. (65)

In other words, the conciliarists were looking perhaps more for an arrangement like that of the Church of England, with an archbishop in Canterbury who presides over all the bishops but is the first among equals and meets every decade at the Lambeth Conference. Of course, this is not an argument for presbyteries, classes, synods, or assemblies as Reformed Protestants know and convene them. But Oakley’s book does show once again how deficient Jason and the Callers’ understanding of Roman Catholic history is. Papal primacy and its nature has long been a source of debate among Roman Catholics (and still is among American Roman Catholics, with the Americanists wanting the Vatican to loosen up and the conservatives wanting the papacy to instill discipline and order). Papal primacy is not a solution to Protestantism’s problems because it has not solve Roman Catholicism’s problems.

Oakley rounds out his discussion of Haec Sancta by addressing whether it was novel or reactionary in its conciliar convictions. Here he follows the path-breaking work of Brian Tierney:

Prior to 1955, scholars had long pointed out the frequency with which the earlier canon lawyers were cited in the conciliarist tracts, and the growth since the Second World War of interest in the history of medieval canon law helped focus attention on those citations. Insisting that the borrowing from Ockham and Marsiglio to be found in the consiliarist tracts usually reflected the use to which those two authors had themselves made of the canon law, Tierney argues that the strict conciliar theory, far from being a reaction against canonistic teaching or an alien importation onto ecclesial soil of secular constitutional notions, had instead deep (and impeccably orthodox) roots in the ecclesiological tradition of the pre-Marsiglian era. It unquestionably drew a great deal of inspiration from the communio ecclesiology and synodal practice of the first millennium of Christian life, and especially from the essentially concilar mode of governance that had characterized the ancient Church for long centuries after the Council of Niceaea (325). That phase of Church history had left as its enduring legacy not only the doctrinal decrees and disciplinary canons of the great ecumenical councils but also the memory of the work accomplished by a whole series of pivotal provincial councils, prominent among them those held at Toledo in Visigothic Spain. . . .

What this soluation to the problem of origins means, of course, is that conciliar theory did not represent (as Figgis and others assumed) some sort of radical intrusion — in Tierney’s words, ‘something accidental external, thrust upon the Church from the outside’. It was, instead, ‘a logical culmination of ideas that were [deeply] embedded in the law and doctrines of the Church itself. (106-107, 110)

Before You Sign Up for Christendom

Published on by D. G. Hart108 Comments

Well before Martin Luther came along, the Roman Catholic Church had problems that stemmed directly from the very structures that were designed (theologically and politically) to unify church and society. The so-called Western Schism witnessed a papal crisis – three popes at one time – that only the Council of Constance (1414-1418) could solve. (Warning to triumphalist Protestants: this was the Council that also condemned those good old forerunners of the Reformation, John Hus and John Wycliffe.)

Here is Francis Oakley on Constance:

A divided Christendom had indeed been reunited but only because a general council, acting in the absence of its papal head, had formally claimed on certain crucial issues to be the legitimate repository of supreme power in the Church, had been able to vindicate that claim, and had been willing to do so even to the point of trying and deposing popes. In the month prior to the papal election and as part of the reform package to which all the conciliar nations had already given their approval, it had also gone on to set up constitutional machinery designed to prevent in the future any reversion to papal absolutism. In the decree Frequens it decreed that general councils were to be assembled, the first in five years’ time, the second in seventh, and thereafter at regular ten-year intervals. In this decree . . . the fathers at Constance were careful to ensure that, even if the pope chose not to convoke them, general councils would assemble automatically at nothing less than ten-yearly intervals and, in the unhappy event of renewed schism, within no more than a year of its outbreak. (42)

In other words, a century before the Reformation, the papacy was on the ropes and apparently chastened. The Restoration popes were also increasingly limited in their power, not simply by councils but also by the circumstances of European politics.

Loss of control and concomitant loss of revenues notwithstanding, possession of the actual substance of power over the provincial churches of Christendom mattered less, it seems, than the retention of a theoretically supreme authority over the universal Church. Its almost inevitable corollary, however, the revenues flowing in to Rome from the Church at large having been grievously diminished, was the pressing need for the popes of the Restoration era to turn inward and to focus their attention on the government of the papal states upon which they had now come to depend for a full half of their overall revenues. In effect, however grandiose their theoretical powers as supreme pontiffs and however much people continued to pay lip service to that position, they themselves had to concentrate a good deal of their day-to-day effort on their role as Italian princes, involving themselves in the complex diplomacy and ever-shifting coalitions required by the need to protect their Italian principality, to maintain, accordingly, the balance of power in Italy, to save off the recurrent threat of French and Spanish intervention in the politics of the peninsula, and when such efforts failed, to control and diminish the extent of that intervention. (53)

Such diminished authority was obviously crucial for the assertion of the provincial churches’ authority (subsidiarity in action?), which of course happened in spades with Luther’s appeal to the German nobility, Henry VIII’s “reform” of the Church of England, the rise of city churches in Switzerland, and the eventual emergence of a Dutch Reformed Church in rebellion against Spain. Still, conciliarism was key to Protestantism’s rise and to Trent’s failure to resolve Rome’s constitutional crisis.

In November 1518, in anticipation of the papal sentence, and again in 1520, Luther himself appealed from the judgment of the pope to that of a future general council. In his appeals, ironically enough, he drew the legal sections from the text of the earlier appeal launched by the theologians of Paris. For the pope, it may be, that was worrying enough in itself, but probably less worrying than those later calls, emanating from Catholic as well as Lutheran circles, for the assembly of a ‘general, free Christian council in German lands’. But, for one reason or another, worry did not prove enough to precipitate any sort of action that was truly timely, decisive, and effective. In that respect, two particularly surprising things may be noted about the response of the popes to the Protestant challenge. First, their failure for the better part of a quarter-century to convoke the general council for which so many Christian leaders called and upon the determinations of which so many anxious and conflicted spirits reposed their hopes. Second, when finally it did assemble, and despite the challenge laid down by the novel Protestant ecclesiologies of the day, the failure of that long-awaited council to promulgate any dogmatic decree on the nature of the Christian Church – and that despite its readiness to address so many other controverted issues. (58)

Again, I wonder when Jason and the Callers’ theory of papal sufficiency is going to catch up with historical reality.

Postscript: Oakley apparently has not left conciliarism to the archives or study carrel.

Step Aside Beza and Locke, Say Hello to Almain and Mair

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

A week away gave me the chance to read another very impressive book by Francis Oakley, this time on conciliarism. I will be posting about the implications of Oakley’s argument not only for claims of papal supremacy but also for considering the relations between the Middle Ages and the Reformation. But for now, here’s an earlier argument from Quentin Skinner on the import of medieval conciliarism for resistance theory and revolution:

The study of radical politics in early modern Europe has for some time been dominated by the concept of “Calvinist theory of revolution.” I have now sought to suggest that strictly speaking no such entity exists. The revolutions of sixteenth-century Europe were, of course, largely conducted by professed Calvinists, but the theories in terms of which they sought to explain and justify their actions were not, at least in their main outlines, specifically Calvinist at all. When the Calvinist George Buchanan stated for the first time on behalf of the Reformed Churches a fully secularized and populist theory of political resistance, he was largely restating a position already attained by the Catholic John Mair in his teaching at the Sorbonne over a half a century before. Mair and his pupils had bequeathed to the era of the Reformation all the leading elements of the classic and most radical version of the early modern theory of revolution, the version most familiar to us from the closing chapters of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. It only remained for Mair’s pupil Buchanan to take over the concepts and arguments he had learnt from his scholastic teachers and press them into service on behalf of the Calvinist cause. (“The Origins of the Calvinist Theory of Revolution,” in After the Reformation, 324-25)

Striking to observe is Skinner’s account of when the scholastic conciliar ideas regained traction in Europe:

Early in the sixteenth century these legal and conciliarist ideas were revived and extended by a group of avowed followers of Ockham and Gerson at the University of Paris. The occasion for this development was provided by the fact that the French king, Louis XII, became involved in a quarrel with Pope Julius II in 1510, after the collapse of the League of Cambrai. Alarmed by Louis’ decisive victory over the Venetians in the previous year, Julius sought to repudiate the alliance he had formed with the French in 1508. Louis responded by appealing over the pope’s head to a General Council of the Church, calling at the same time on the University of Paris to confirm his claim that the Church as a body possessed a higher authority than the pope. The professors at the Sorbonne produced in reply a number of systematic works of political theory, defending the idea of popular sovereignty not only as a claim about the government of the Church, but also as a thesis about the location of political authority in the State.

Skinner notes that one of these professors was John Mair (1467-1550), under whom Buchanan and Calvin studied.

For Almain as well as Mair the point of departure in the analysis of political society is the idea of the original freedom of the people. . . . The origin of political society is thus traced to two complementary developments: the fact that God gave men the capacity to form such communities in order to remedy their sins; and the fact that men duly made use of these rational powers in order to “introduce kings” by “an act of consent on the part of the people” as a means of improving their own welfare and security. (321-22)

Rather than the papacy being a solution to the disorder of the modern world, the popes’ assertion of power in the heady days of the 13th and 14th centuries may have produced reactions that allowed republicanism and constitutionalism to eventually prevail in the West.