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 Helping San Diego, California and beyond since 1997.
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Helping San Diego, California and beyond since 1997.
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{pay' - puh - see}
General Information
The papacy denotes the office of the pope, or bishop of Rome, and the system of central ecclesiastical government of the Roman Catholic Church over which he presides. Believed by Roman Catholics to be the successor of the apostle Peter, the pope grounds his claim to jurisdictional primacy in the church in the so - called Petrine theory. According to that theory, affirmed by the Council of Florence in 1439, defined as a matter of faith by the First Vatican Council in 1870, and endorsed by the Second Vatican Council in 1964, Jesus Christ conferred the position of primacy in the church upon Peter alone. In solemnly defining the Petrine primacy, the First Vatican Council cited the three classical New Testament texts long associated with it: John 1:42, John 21:15 ff., and, above all, Matthew 16:18 ff.
Although the pope's priestly powers as bishop come from the sacramental act of ordination, the pope derives his papal authority from an act of election, which since 1179 has been the right of the Sacred College of Cardinals. It is by virtue of their decision that each new pope inherits his official titles, ancient and modern, secular and sacred: bishop of Rome, vicar of Jesus Christ, successor of 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.
During the 4th and 5th centuries, after the Roman emperor Constantine's grant of toleration to Christianity (the Edict of Milan, 313) and its rise to the status of an official religion, a series of popes, most notably Leo I (r. 440 - 61), translated that claim into a primacy of jurisdiction over the church. That claim was matched, however, by the rival claim of the church at Constantinople to a jurisdictional primacy in the East equal to that of Rome in the West. In fact, for at least another century, it was the Byzantine emperor of Constantinople who could actually claim to be functioning as the supreme leader of Christendom in spiritual as well as temporal matters.
In the 8th century, after the rise of Islam had weakened the Byzantine Empire and the Lombards had renewed their pressure in Italy, the popes finally sought support from the Frankish rulers of the West and received (754) from the Frankish king Pepin The Short the Italian territory later known as the Papal States. With the crowning (800) by Leo III of Charlemagne, first of the Carolingian emperors, the papacy also gained his protection.
By the late 9th century, however, the Carolingian empire had disintegrated, the imperial government in Italy was powerless, and the bishopric of Rome had fallen under the domination of the nobles. Once again the papacy sought aid from the north, and in 962, Pope John XII crowned the German king Otto I emperor. In this revived empire, soon called the Holy Roman Empire, the pope theoretically was the spiritual head, and the emperor the temporal head. The relationship between temporal and spiritual authority, however, was to be a continuing arena of contention. Initially, the emperors were dominant and the papacy stagnated. The emperors themselves, however, set the papacy on the road to recovery. In 1046, Emperor Henry III deposed three rival claimants to the papal office and proceeded to appoint, in turn, three successors. With the appointment in 1049 of Leo IX, the third of these, the movement of church reform, which had been gathering momentum in Burgundy and Lorraine, finally came to Rome. It found there in Leo and in a series of distinguished successors the type of unified central leadership it had previously lacked.
With the papacy taking the leadership in reform, the second great phase in the process of its rise to prominence began, one that extended from the mid 11th to the mid 13th century. It was distinguished, first, by Gregory VII's bold attack after 1075 on the traditional practices whereby the emperor had controlled appointments to the higher church offices, an attack that spawned the protracted civil and ecclesiastical strife in Germany and Italy known as the Investiture Controversy. It was distinguished, second, by Urban II's launching in 1095 of the Crusades, which, in an attempt to liberate the Holy Land from Muslim domination, marshaled under papal leadership the aggressive energies of the European nobility. Both these efforts, although ultimately unsuccessful, greatly enhanced papal prestige in the 12th and 13th centuries. Such powerful popes as Alexander III (r. 1159 - 81), Innocent III (r. 1198 - 1216), Gregory IX (r. 1227 - 41), and Innocent IV (r. 1243 - 54) wielded a primacy over the church that attempted to vindicate a jurisdictional supremacy over emperors and kings in temporal and spiritual affairs.
This last attempt proved to be abortive. If Innocent IV triumphed over Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, a mere half - century later Boniface VIII (r. 1294 - 1303) fell victim to the hostility of the French king Philip IV. In 1309, Pope Clement V left Rome and took up residence in Avignon, the beginning of the so - called Babylonian Captivity (1309 - 78), during which all the popes were French, lived in Avignon, and were subject to French influence, until Gregory XI returned the papacy to Rome. During the 13th and 14th centuries, therefore, papal authority over the universal church was exercised increasingly at the sufferance of national rulers and local princes of Europe. This fact became dismally clear during the Great Schism of the West (1378 - 1418), when two, and later three, rival claimants disputed for the papal office, dividing the church into rival "obediences"; in their desperate attempts to win support, the claimants opened the way to the exploitation of ecclesiastical resources for dynastic and political ends.
The years of schism, then, and the related efforts of the general councils of Constance and Basel to limit the papal authority, saw the onset of the process whereby the papacy was reduced to the status of an Italian principality. Its supreme authority over the universal church had come to be no more than theoretical, the power over the national and territorial churches having passed to kings, princes, and rulers of such city - states as Venice.
Not until the election (1534) of Paul III, who placed the papacy itself at the head of a movement for churchwide reform, did the Counter - Reformation begin. Paul established a reform commission, appointed several leading reformers to the College of Cardinals, initiated reform of the central administrative apparatus at Rome, authorized the founding of the Jesuits, the order that was later to prove so loyal to the papacy, and convoked the Council of Trent, which met intermittently from 1545 to 1563. The council succeeded in initiating a far - ranging moral and administrative reform, including the reform of the papacy itself, that was destined to define the shape and set the tone of Roman Catholicism into the mid - 20th century. The 16th century also saw the development of foreign missions, which were encouraged by the popes and enhanced their prestige.
What this event actually foreshadowed was the demise of the papal temporal power. Although in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars the Congress of Vienna (1815) restored the Papal States, they were forcibly annexed to the new Kingdom of Italy in 1870, and not until 1929 with the Lateran Treaty was the "Roman Question" - the problem of nonnational status for the pope - solved. The treaty, which created in the heart of Rome a tiny, sovereign Vatican state, restored to the papacy a measure of temporal independence but left it with political influence rather than actual political power.
Paradoxically, the eclipse of papal temporal power during the 19th century was accompanied by a recovery of papal prestige. The monarchist reaction in the wake of the French Revolution and the later emergence of constitutional governments served alike, though in different ways, to sponsor that development. The reinstated monarchs of Catholic Europe saw in the papacy a conservative ally rather than a jurisdictional rival. Later, when the institution of constitutional governments broke the ties binding the clergy to the policies of royal regimes, Catholics were freed to respond to the renewed spiritual authority of the pope.
The popes of the 19th and 20th centuries have come to exercise that authority with increasing vigor and in every aspect of religious life. By the crucial pontificate of Pius IX (r. 1846 - 78), for example, papal control over worldwide Catholic missionary activity was firmly established for the first time in history. The solemn definition of the papal primacy by the First Vatican Council gave clear theoretical underpinnings to Pius IX's own commitment to an intensified centralization of ecclesiastical government in Rome. The council's companion definition of papal infallibility strengthened the energetic exercise of the papal magisterial power that was so marked a feature of the years between Vatican I and the assembly of the Second Vatican Council in 1962.
The continuing strength of the forces within the church favoring theological innovation and energetic reform became unmistakably evident at the Second Vatican Council, convened by John XXIII (r. 1958 - 63), and found expression especially in its decrees on ecumenism, religious liberty, the liturgy, and the nature of the church. The ambivalence of some of those decrees, however, and the disciplinary turmoil and doctrinal dissension following the ending of the council, brought about new challenges to papal authority. The establishment of national conferences of bishops tended to erode it to some degree, and Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968), reaffirming the prohibition of artificial birth control, was met with both evasion and defiance. By the late 1970s papal authority itself had become a bone of contention.
Paul VI (r. 1963 - 78), however, continued the ecumenical efforts of John XXIII in his contacts with Protestant and Orthodox churches, as in his attempt to make discreet moves in the direction of pragmatic accommodation with the communist regimes of eastern Europe, a policy that would have been unthinkable during the reigns of Pius XI and Pius XII. Paul also reorganized the curia and spoke strongly for peace and social justice. With the accession of the Polish John Paul II (1978 - ) the church had, for the first time since Adrian VI in the 16th century, a non - Italian pope.
Francis Oakley
Bibliography
N Cheetham, Keepers of the Keys: A History
of the Popes from Saint Peter to John Paul II (1983); J A Corbett,
The Papacy: A Brief History (1956); C Falconi, The
Popes in the Twentieth Century (1967); M Guarducci, The
Tradition of Peter in the Vatican (1965); P Hebblethwaite,
The Year of Three Popes (1979); L Hertling, Communio:
Church and Papacy in Early Christianity (1972); E John, ed., The
Popes: A Concise Biographical History
(1964); H Kung, The Papal Ministry in the Church (1971);
P J McCord, ed., A Pope for All Christians? An Inquiry into
the Role of Peter in the Modern Church (1976); P Nichols, The
Politics of the Vatican (1968); M M O'Dwyer, The Papacy in the Age
of Napoleon and the Restoration: Pius VII, 1800 - 1823 (1985);
L Pastor, A History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages(1886 - 1933); Y Renouard, The Avignon Papacy, 1305 - 1403 (1970); J M C Toynbee, and J B Ward - Perkins, The Shrine of Saint Peter and the Vatican Excavations (1956); W Ullman, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages (1970); K O Von Aretin, The Papacy and the Modern World (1970).
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