PAPACY

PAPACY. From the earliest centuries of the Christian Church, Rome (q.v.) was the home of the largest community of believers, the capital and largest city of the Empire, and the site of the martyrdom of two great Apostles (q.v.), Peter and Paul. It was thus a local church inevitably cast for a leading role. Ignatius of Antioch speaks to the Roman Church in tones of clear respect, as does Irenaeus (qq.v.) seventy years later in 185. With the conversion of Constantine and the transfer of the capital to Byzantium (qq.v.), the tone of the bishops of Rome begins to acquire an imperious note. Beginning with Popes Julius (337–352) and especially Damasus (366–384), perhaps in response to the loss of the emperor’s presence and elevation of the new capital, the popes laid particular stress on their see and office as uniquely in succession to Peter, the prince of the Apostles. This shift, in effect the start of an equation of the papal office in the Church with that of the emperor within the state, marks the beginning of the papacy proper.

Pope Leo the Great (440–461) (q.v.) was the apogee of the earlier development, still within the undivided Church and Empire of late antiquity. The particular eminence of the popes in the centuries following was accentuated by the collapse of the Western Empire (476) and the result that Rome became isolated from Constantinople (q.v.) and its bishops found themselves local rulers, though still the nominal subjects of the emperor. With the evangelization of the Germanic peoples of northern Europe in the 6th-11th c.-a true glory of the papacy-the role of the popes as “vicars of Peter” (vicarii sancii Petri) was further emphasized. While still a remote and distant figure for the newly Christian nations, the bishops of Rome were all the more surrounded by a unique aura of sanctity and venerability as guardians of the holiest shrine of the West (q.v.), the site of the Apostles’ death and presence of their relics, and as themselves the living voice of Peter.

A further step was taken toward the peoples of the West and away from the old Mediterranean axis of Christendom when Pope Stephen II made his alliance with Pippin I, father of Charlemagne (q.v.), in 754. The Donation of Constantine (q.v.) was published (it might also have been authored in northern Gaul) sometime in the following half century, a development literally crowned by the coronation of Charlemagne in 800. Although in political schism from Byzantium, the popes were still solicitous enough of Eastern sensibilities to avoid inflammatory actions in other areas, notably the filioque (q.v.). This changed in the 11th c. with the revival of the German empire under the Saxon emperors and the latter’s encouragement of reforming popes drawn from the northern (transalpine) territories of their kingdom.

The great era of the Gregorian Reforms in the 11th c. and 12th c., named for Gregory VII (1073–85), culminated in the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1215), who was the theocratic head of a new Christian commonwealth, Western Europe of the High Middle Ages. This new version of the ancient ideas of imperium and sacerdotium, indeed of romanitas, stood in natural-and inimical-contrast to the older version, which was all the while in force in Constantinople and the East. (See Church and State.)

The ecclesiastical schism (q.v.) between Western and Eastern Catholicism was a natural and inevitable consequence. It is no accident that 1054, the date usually assigned for the schism, occurred at the end of the pontificate of the first of the great reforming popes, Leo IX (1049–1054). The schism was sealed by the Crusades (q.v.), in particular the Fourth (1204), which took, sacked, and held Constantinople until 1261.

For the Eastern Church, developments in the West could be, and were, long ignored. Up until the reform movement, and its key signal for the Orthodox in the insertion of the filioque into the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (q.v.) at Rome in 1014, Rome had maintained its importance as the first see of the Church. It was uniquely privileged and venerated for being the site of the ancient capital, the place of the Apostles’ martyrdom, and for its (near) perfect record of Orthodoxy in the periods of Trinitarian and Christological (qq.v.) debate. It was valued by dissidents in the Byzantine Church, particularly when imperial policy threatened Orthodoxy, because it stood outside the Empire’s effective boundaries and its bishop was free to speak on behalf of the faith received. One will thus find noted saints of the East, e.g., Maximus the Confessor, Joh n of Damascus, and Theodore of Studion (qq.v.), who admired and held the Roman Church in highest regard for these very reasons.

The specific claims of the papacy-particularly as they reflected the equation of the papal with the imperial role or with the unique successor of Peter-remained by and large foreign concepts, alien to the Eastern understanding of the Church as conciliar. The novelty and shock of the papal claims were brought home only with the great reforms and, particularly, the Crusades. It is, humanly speaking, difficult to see how schism could have been avoided. The two halves of an originally undivided Christendom had become two different Christendoms, and both could see room enough only for one. Subsequent developments in the Roman Catholic Church (q.v.), in particular Vatican I’s definition of papal infallibility and “universal ordinary jurisdiction” (the position that the popes may act as the local bishop in any diocese of the Church), have only served to widen the gap.