Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (30 page)

These were genuinely revolutionary beliefs, which corresponded to nothing in the tradition, certainly not to the actual historical exercise of papal authority, or that of the episcopate. ‘Representative’ theories of this sort imagined the unity of the Church in terms of a political conglomerate, not as a communion of churches united in charity under pope and bishops. They were as subversive of the Church’s tradition as the most extreme papalism. Such extreme theories were held by only a handful of theologians, but they clouded theological debate among sincere supporters of the councils, and they permanently prejudiced the papacy and the cardinalate against the whole notion of Conciliar reform.

For Constance was intended not merely to end the schism, but to reform the Church. All previous reform councils, however, had been papal councils, planned, convened and managed by the popes, and debate raged at Constance about whether the reform programme or the election of a new pope should be dealt with first. In the end the papal election was held before the reform decrees were promulgated. Since these included limitation of the numbers of cardinals (thereby restricting the papacy’s freedom of appointment), reduction of papal power and restriction of papal rights of provisions and dispensation, there was widespread, and in the event justified, gloom about the
prospects of the reform decrees being implemented. The Council attempted to tie the popes to reform and the scrutiny of councils, by decreeing that another council must be held within five years, another within seven years of that, and thereafter that there must be a council every ten years.

Apart from the solution of the schism and the election of Martin V, the Council of Constance is best remembered for the condemnation and burning of the Czech reformer John Hus. Hus held views on predestination and the membership of the Church, partly borrowed from the English heretic John Wyclif, which were heretical by the standards of the late medieval Church. His uncompromising moral fervour and denunciation of the corruptions of the clergy, however, echoed the convictions of many devout men and women. Many of the religious changes he called for – greater access to the Bible, more preaching and catechising, greater involvement of the laity in religious affairs (symbolised by the restoration of the chalice in communion, which for several centuries had been administered to lay people only in the form of bread) – were in no way heretical, and had widespread support among reform-minded intellectuals. Hus himself seems to have had no desire to challenge the fundamentals of Catholicism. His condemnation by a council intent on reforming the Church by restoring her unity did not bode well for the papacy.

The election of a universally recognised pope did not put an end to the Conciliar movement. The demand that councils should meet regularly was a nightmare prospect for a papacy struggling to reassert its authority, and one which Martin V and his successors were to resist vigorously. The Council of Basle (1431–9) was dominated by this conflict between Pope and Council. Only a small proportion of the participants in the Council were bishops, the rest being theologians and proctors appearing on behalf of absentee bishops. At the opening session, not a single bishop was present. Pope Eugenius IV (1431–47) therefore decided to dissolve the Council, but the members refused to accept his decision, and after two years of haggling the Pope gave way. The Council began to behave as if it collectively were pope, appointing its own officials, acting as judge in lawsuits, even granting indulgences. Its reform programme was wide-ranging and much needed, but it was dogged by an anti-papalism which was certain to bring it into conflict with Rome. The reform party worked on the belief that, if the head were reformed, reform of the
members would follow. They therefore homed in on the corruptions of papacy and Curia, and decreed the abolition of the payment of clerical taxes to the Curia, a measure which would have deprived the Pope and cardinals of most of their income, without any form of compensation. Finally the Council declared itself superior to the Pope, and when Eugenius protested, declared him deposed, and elected the saintly Duke of Savoy as the Antipope, Felix V.

Felix V was never able to establish his authority outside his own dominions, and was eventually reconciled to Pope Nicholas V (1447–55), who made him a cardinal. The Council’s action in resurrecting the papal schism, however, did much to discredit it and the Conciliar movement, even among the many clerical intellectuals who longed for reform. The papacy received a further boost from the success of Eugenius’ rival papal Council of Ferrara/Florence, which in 1439 took advantage of the desperation of the Byzantine empire in the face of the Turkish threat to achieve a triumphant resolution, on Latin terms, of the schism with the Eastern churches. Attended by the Greek Emperor himself and by representatives of the ancient patriarchates, the Council succeeded in securing Greek acceptance of the
Filioque
and other Western doctrines like purgatory. Above all, it solemnly reiterated the doctrine of papal supremacy, in terms which made a nonsense of Conciliar attempts to subordinate the Pope to a council. Like the union of 1274 under Gregory X, this agreement was widely disowned in the East, and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 buried it, but at the time it was a tremendous coup for Eugenius and the restored papacy.

The Conciliar crisis posed in an acute form the question of the Pope’s authority to teach. The jurisdictional primacy of the popes, and their function as centre of unity, had always been inseparable from their doctrinal authority. The tradition that the See of Rome had always preserved the apostolic truth, and would always do so, had been enshrined in 519 in the formula of Hormisdas. This freedom from error was never called ‘infallibility’ – only God was thought of as infallible. Nor was it thought to exempt individual popes from the possibility of error, for Honorius and Vigilius had erred. It was the fundamental and continuous teaching authority of the see, not individual utterances by particular incumbents, which was believed to be faithful and reliable. In the high Middle Ages the Decretalists had specifically excluded heretic popes from the universal principle that
the Pope is to be judged by no one. And papal teaching authority was not thought of as being independent of the other teaching authorities in the Church. Scholastic theologians like St Thomas Aquinas recognised that the Pope could introduce new formulas of faith, but Thomas thought of this in the context of papal councils like the Lateran councils, and saw papal authority to determine the faith as being exercised as the head of such a council, not in opposition to it or independence from it. It became Dominican tradition that individual popes might err when speaking in their capacity as individuals, but that popes could not err when acting with the counsel of the Church. This Dominican teaching would be reiterated to good effect in the debates at the First Vatican Council.

A crucial influence in the development of the idea that the Pope himself might be free from error came from the Franciscan debates about poverty. Successive popes had ruled in favour of the Franciscan rejection of property. When Pope John XXII repudiated that teaching, and denied that Christ was a pauper, Franciscan theologians appealed against his judgement to the infallibility of other, earlier popes. They argued that the Church, in the person of those popes, had repeatedly accepted the Franciscan view of poverty as an evangelical form of life. John XXII, therefore, was in error in rejecting this infallible teaching – and since true popes do not err, this proved that he was no longer a true pope. Papal infallibility was here being invoked not to
exalt
the Pope’s authority, but to limit it, by ensuring that a pope did not arbitrarily reverse earlier Christian teaching.

All these thoughts looked different in the light of the Great Schism and the Conciliar crisis. St Thomas’ assumption that popes and councils were always in harmony no longer held good. Confronted with the struggle between Pope and Council, some Conciliarist theologians for the first time asserted the freedom of councils from error, while insisting that popes might err. Their papalist opponents, by contrast, asserted that Councils might err, unless approved by the Pope, but that true popes were always preserved in the truth. The debate polarised opinion, and set the prerogatives of the popes over against those of bishops and councils, though the early theorists of papal authority, like Leo the Great or Gregory the Great, had seen papal authority as serving and supporting that of other bishops. These polarities helped undermine Catholic theology of Pope and Church, and would dog thinking about these issues up to the
twentieth century. A debate had been opened which would rumble on till 1870 and beyond.

The schism left the papacy wounded, suspicious of the whole notion of general councils, and dangerously resistant to the growing demand for reform. In political terms, too, it was drastically weakened. Though papal approval was still a card worth having in a monarch’s hand, and papal hostility a problem for the ruler of a Catholic people, never again would a pope unmake emperors, or exercise real jurisdiction over the traditional feudal fiefs of the papacy. There would never again be an Innocent III. The restored popes of the fifteenth century were no longer the unchallenged arbiters of nations, and had as much as they could do to recover and hold on to the core of the Papal States. To undermine the claims of the councils to decide on their legitimacy, Martin V and Eugenius IV came to individual agreements or ‘concordats’ with many of the rulers of Europe. Such concordats relentlessly eroded many of the papal prerogatives wrested from the secular powers by the reform papacy, and drastically reduced papal control over local churches. In the process they also reduced papal income. In the aftermath of the schism, this was less than half what it had been before the move to Avignon, and the bulk of it came from the secular revenues of the papal state, as national churches ceased to pay the spiritual revenues which had funded the reform papacy. Conciliarism had placed a weapon against the papacy in the hands of the nation states, and they did not hesitate to use it. In 1438 the King of France unilaterally adopted twenty-four of the decrees of Basle and incorporated them into French law as the ‘Pragmatic Sanction’, asserting the supremacy of councils over popes, limiting papal rights of appointments to French benefices, abolishing many of the sources of papal revenue such as annates, and forbidding appeals to Rome.

It was hardly surprising that secular princes, keen to assert their authority over a Church which transcended national boundaries, were determined that the high medieval doctrine of papal supremacy should not be recovered and consolidated. In 1477 Lorenzo de’ Medici declared that there were definite advantages, scandal apart, in having three or even four popes. After the arc of achievement on which Leo IX had set them, the popes were once again trapped within the politics of Italy, obliged to concede control of the local churches to kings and princes, under fire from the best
informed and most devout churchmen of the age, and once again perceived as the chief obstacle to desperately needed reform. The papacy, it seemed, had come full circle.

CHAPTER FOUR

PROTEST AND DIVISION
1447–1774

I T
HE
R
ENAISSANCE
P
OPES

The Renaissance papacy evokes images of a Hollywood spectacular, all decadence and drag. Contemporaries viewed Renaissance Rome as we now view Nixon’s Washington, a city of expense-account whores and political graft, where everything and everyone had a price, where nothing and nobody could be trusted. The popes themselves seemed to set the tone. Alexander VI (1492–1503) flaunted a young and nubile mistress in the Vatican, was widely believed to have made a habit of poisoning his cardinals so as to get his hands on their property, and he ruthlessly aggrandised his illegitimate sons and daughters at the Church’s expense. Julius II (1503–13), inspired patron of Raphael, Bramante, Michelangelo and Leonardo, was a very dubious Father of all the Faithful, for he had fathered three daughters of his own while a cardinal, and he was a ferocious and enthusiastic warrior, dressing in silver papal armour and leading his own troops through the breaches blown in the city walls of towns who resisted his authority. Leo X (1513–21), son of Lorenzo the Magnificent of Florence, was made a cleric at seven and a cardinal at thirteen years old: as pope he ruled both Rome and Florence. He was the Pope whose Indulgence issued to fund the rebuilding of St Peter’s led Luther to publish his Ninety-Five Theses, and so precipitated the Reformation. At his death Leo left the Church divided and the papacy close to bankruptcy. From the universal pastors of the Church the popes had declined to being Italian politicians: after 1480 even the business of the papal Curia was being conducted in Italian – not, as before, in the lingua franca of Latin.

All this presents a luridly one-sided picture of the Renaissance popes. It takes no account of the massive task of reconstruction which
confronted the papacy in the wake of the Great Schism. The popes of the later fifteenth century had to reinvent Rome. Medieval pilgrims were, for the most part, interested only in the churches and the holy relics with which Rome abounded, caring little for the remains of ancient Rome which lay buried all around. Medieval Rome was in fact a series of linked villages clustered near the Tiber and the Ponte Sant’ Angelo, surrounded by grassy wooded mounds from which the wreckage of the pagan past stood out. Most of the pagan city lay abandoned and overgrown, used as a quarry for modern jerry-building, its marble facings and statuary fed into lime-kilns to make cement, its windowless ruins squatted in by beggars and farm animals. Cattle grazed in the Forum, sheep wandered over four of the seven hills.

Rome had no industries except pilgrimage, no function except as the Pope’s capital. The city and its churches were radically impoverished by the long absence of the popes in Avignon and the schism which followed. On his return to Rome in 1420 Martin V found it ‘so dilapidated and deserted that it bore hardly any resemblance to a city … neglected and oppressed by famine and poverty’. When Martin restored his derelict cathedral of St John Lateran in 1425, he constructed the magnificent decorated floor by the simple process of looting porphyry, marble and mosaic from the city’s ruined churches,