Papacy

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Papacy

The papacy is the office of the bishop of Rome as successor of the Apostle Peter and visible head (under Christ) of the Roman Catholic Church. The origins of the Roman primacy are historically unclear, but from the earliest days of Christianity Roman bishops such as Clement assumed that they had the right and the duty to intervene or mediate in the disputes that rent other local churches, and their intervention was accepted. By the patristic age the church at Rome had acquired a reputation for orthodoxy, which gave special weight to its voice at ecumenical councils and in theological controversies. In the Middle Ages developments such as the temporal power and the growth and systematization of canon law added a political dimension to the authority of the bishop of Rome, and the cultural and ecclesial separation of the Eastern churches, which left Rome as the only apostolic see and the only patriarchate in the West, also contributed to the growing prestige and power of Rome among the Western peoples.

The Gregorian reform and the struggles between the church and the Holy Roman Empire during the Middle Ages led to an extremely high level of papal power, which culminated in the period from Innocent III (1198–1216) to Boniface VIII (1294–1303). The fourteenth century saw a reaction to this, as secular governments reaffirmed their rights, and the French domination of the papacy led to a seventy-year "Babylonian captivity" at Avignon. This was followed by the Great Western Schism, which divided Western Christendom between two (later three) claimants to the papacy. This traumatic split was only solved by claiming that an ecumenical council could depose all three claimants, including the legitimate one, but this solution resulted in a century-long struggle by the popes to reaffirm their supremacy against the claims of the conciliarists. The conciliar movement had raised hopes of reform, which were frustrated by the success of the renaissance popes in evading the dangers of conciliarism—both to the papal primacy and to the more worldly convenience of the popes and their court. The failure of the popes to address reform was a major cause of the Protestant Reformation. Even after the Reformation, the popes continued to combine resistance to heresy with resistance to the reform of ingrained abuses, until the situation rendered the convoking of a reforming council at Trent unavoidable.

By the time the Council of Trent met, the emerging Protestant movement had come to believe that the development of papal authority over the previous fifteen centuries was both unwarranted and anti-evangelical; many of them identified the pope with Antichrist, and all were adamant that the papal office was unacceptable in a reformed Christianity. The council mandated sweeping reforms in Catholicism but also strengthened the Catholic position on those issues the Reformers had rejected. As a result of this sixteenth-century experience, Catholics came to feel that loyalty to the concept of the papacy was essential to the preservation of Catholicism; separation from Rome became inconceivable even for groups such as the eighteenth-century Gallicans, who disputed papal jurisdiction at the local level.

The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars ushered in an age of hardships for the papacy; revolutionary France tried to impose a schismatic constitution on the clergy and persecuted those priests who remained loyal to Rome, and with Napoleon's victories in Italy, two successive popes were dragged into captivity in France. While the Papal States were restored at the Congress of Vienna, Italian aspirations toward national unity led to the unpopularity of the papal government and to the gradual despoliation of the papacy's temporal power, which culminated in the fall of Rome to the Italian Army in 1870.

These developments, however, actually worked to the advantage of the papacy as a moral force. Catholics throughout the world came to see Pius VI and Pius VII as brave men who, with no weapons but their moral fortitude, stood up to the most powerful man in Europe, and later saw Pius IX as a holy old man abused and bullied by secularist power but never losing his dignity. At this time Catholics began to develop a dangerous tendency toward a personality cult of the reigning pope. Indeed, it was in 1870, as the last bastion of papal temporal power was about to crumble, that the First Vatican Council proclaimed the dogma of papal infallibility—the belief that when the Pope speaks ex cathedra on an issue of faith or morals, he is protected from error by the grace of the Holy Spirit. In spite of some opposition among bishops and intellectuals, this dogma was extremely popular among the rank and file of the church in all regions, and most of the bishops voted for it enthusiastically.

Attitudes toward the papacy in the newly independent United States were affected by all these developments. The Thirteen Colonies were, with one or two exceptions, heirs to the anti-Catholicism of British Protestantism, where the pope was burned in effigy every year on Guy Fawkes Day. The coming of independence brought religious freedom but also brought the feeling that papal power, even in purely religious matters, was incompatible with democracy, and that loyalty to the pope constituted "allegiance to a European prince"—which he was, at the time—and was in conflict with American patriotism. American Catholics had to walk a mental tightrope, insisting on their democratic spirit and on the compatibility of Catholicism with democracy while also remaining loyal to papal supremacy. Under pressure from the widespread Protestant version of medieval and Reformation history, they had to insist that they did not recognize any papal right to order Catholic Americans how to vote, or to interfere in their political life, while also insisting that there was no danger of such a thing occurring. At the same time, loyalty to the pope became all the more a sign of true Catholicism in that Catholics felt like a beleaguered minority that had to rally around the focal point of Catholic unity while insisting on their unimpeachable American patriotism. Mainstream Americans, however, remained deeply suspicious of the genuine Americanism of their Catholic fellow citizens, and these suspicions became especially odious in the 1928 presidential campaign, when Democratic candidate Alfred E. Smith's potential subordination to papal authority on political issues was hotly debated and contributed to his defeat by Herbert Hoover. The same fears were raised again in the campaign of 1960, but in the papacy of John XXIII they carried significantly less credibility and could not keep John F. Kennedy from the White House.

The Roman authorities in turn were ambivalent toward the American ethos. On the one hand, the new nation's religious freedom allowed the church to grow unimpeded, while the old Catholic nations of Europe often followed anticlerical policies and hindered papal governance of the local churches. Because of this, the beleaguered popes of the nineteenth century often expressed a sense of consolation at the sight of the American church when compared to the situation of the church in Europe. On the other hand, the democratic ideas prevalent in the United States could not but create discomfort in a Roman milieu that was still that of a princely court, and separation of church and state was a principle that Rome could tolerate in practice but could not—as more and more American Catholics were coming to do—accept as an ideal. A book that presented the American situation as a model to be imitated by Catholics under the French Republic caused such a scandal among conservative monarchists that Leo XIII felt the need to issue the apostolic letter Testem Benevolentiae (1899), which warned against a number of tendencies in American Catholicism. The discomfort surfaced again in Rome during the 1940s when John Courtney Murray, S.J., published studies on church-and-state issues that presented the American experience as ideal rather than tolerable. Murray was silenced by the Holy Office in 1954 but was later brought by Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York as a peritus (expert) to the Second Vatican Council, where he wrote the draft for the Decree on Religious Freedom.

Mainstream American attitudes toward the papacy improved significantly after World War II, when the ascetic and imposing figure of Pius XII came to be seen as a bulwark against communism and thus a major moral force allied to the American effort to save the "free world" from atheistic Marxism. American Catholics, too, were enthusiastic about him, since he was conservative enough to be in tune with the spirit of the 1950s but had made a number of changes in liturgy and discipline that gave hope to the liberals and that in fact prepared the way for the Second Vatican Council.

The pontificate of John XXIII, however, was a watershed in the liberalizing of Catholicism. The new pope's personality charmed both Catholics and Protestants, and his encouragement of ecumenism, as well as his social encyclicals Mater et Magistra and Pacem in Terris, created a totally new climate in relations between Catholicism and other religions. The obvious freedom of debate that the non-Catholic observers discovered at the Second Vatican Council also eroded the centuries-old distrust of a monolithic papal church. Catholics, too, were excited by the heady new climate in which loyalty to the pope suddenly was equated with freedom to present bold new insights on belief and practice. If Pius XII had been in harmony with the spirit of the 1950s, John XXIII was one of the creators of the spirit of the 1960s. At his death in 1962 both Catholics and Protestants felt equally bereaved.

Initially Paul VI inherited the goodwill that John had elicited, since Paul was openly committed to continuing the process of the council and its reforms. But Paul's personality could not catch the imagination of the world as John's had, and events showed that Paul was of two minds about the brave new world that progressive Catholics had expected from the council. When, after convoking a blue-ribbon panel of experts to advise him, he ignored their almost unanimous counsel and reaffirmed the prohibition of artificial birth control in the encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968), he became extremely unpopular among American Catholics, who began to explore the legitimacy of dissent from the noninfallible magisterium (teaching authority of the church). The changes in the liturgy managed to displease both conservatives and progressives, vocations to the priesthood and religious life decreased drastically, and priests resigned from the ministry in unprecedented numbers. These developments cast a pall of gloom over the last years of Paul's pontificate.

After the brief pontificate of John Paul I, the cardinals broke precedent by electing a Polish cardinal, who took the name of John Paul II. He has combined great personal dynamism and charm with positions even more conservative than those of his Paul's last years, thus producing the anomaly of a pope who is personally extremely popular though his policies are widely questioned, opposed, or ignored. It is significant, however, that even in the circles that most oppose his theological and disciplinary positions, American Catholics still are not willing to consider any kind of separation from the papacy, only a redefinition of what constitutes due loyalty and permissible dissent.