Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition

by Eamon Duffy

  But Gregory died in March 1378, and the Conclave which elected his successor was mobbed by the Roman crowds, terrified that the French cardinals might elect a French pope who would return to Avignon. Under this pressure, the cardinals elected an Italian, though not a Roman, Bartolommeo Prignano, absentee Archbishop of Bari. He took the name UrbanVI (1378–89). Urban as a cardinal had been a leading administrator, regent of the papal chancery at Avignon, and was much respected. As pope, however, he turned out to be violent, overbearing and probably clinically paranoid. Unable to manage or even to cope with him, the cardinals repudiated him. Less than six months after electing Urban, they fled Rome, declared Urban’s election invalid because conducted under duress, and elected the Cardinal Bishop of Geneva as Pope Clement VII. The Great Schism had begun.

  Clement made his way, with the entire Curia, back to Avignon, while Urban created a new curia by appointing twenty-nine cardinals from all over Europe. There were now two popes, two papal administrations, two self-contained legal systems. The countries of Europe would have to choose which Pope they would obey. It was an agonising dilemma. There had often been antipopes before, but the rivals had usually been elected or appointed by rival groups. Here, the very same cardinals who had by due process chosen the Pope, had by due process declared him no pope at all, and had solemnly elected his successor. Even saints were confused about the rights and wrongs of the situation. St Catherine of Siena supported Urban, St Vincent Ferrar supported Clement. Nations tended to choose their allegiance along dynastic and political lines. France, Burgundy, Savoy, Naples and Scotland submitted to Clement and the Avignon papal administration, while England, Germany, north and central Italy and central Europe obeyed Urban. The great religious orders divided on the issue. The popes excommunicated each other and placed their rivals’ supporters under interdict.

  In the long perspective of history, the Roman Catholic Church has accepted that the ‘real’ popes were Urban and the successors elected by his cardinals and their successors. At the time, however, and throughout the thirty-nine years during which the schism persisted, this sort of clarity was hard to come by. Certainly, there is no getting round Urban’s near insanity, and his brutal treatment of opponents – at one point he had six cardinals under torture, five of whom eventually simply disappeared. Successive popes (five in all) and antipopes (four in all) expressed a wish to see the schism end, but in practice both sides put all their energies into consolidating their own support and undermining that of their rivals.

  For the Church at large it was a trauma. The practical effects of the Great Schism were disastrous, for the rival popes created rival colleges of cardinals, and appointed competing bishops and abbots to the same sees and monasteries. The spiralling expenses of the papacy had now to be met from a divided constituency, rival popes scrambling for contested revenues. Here, ironically, the Roman obedience fared badly. The Avignon regime had never been fully dismantled, and had three generations of administrative machinery – and archives – behind it. The new Avignon popes managed to sustain much of the old jurisdictional and financial structures. By contrast the internal finances, administration and record-keeping of the Roman papacy seem to have collapsed under the strain, and as a result we know next to nothing about its running during the schism.

  Yet the Pope was more than an administrative head. He was Christ’s own Vicar, holding the keys of heaven. In him alone was the power to dispense in hundreds of complex spiritual difficulties, in his hands was the power to give or to withhold the precious indulgences which would speed the believer through the pains of purgatory. The source of the right of archbishops and bishops to exercise their spiritual powers, the final court of appeal in doctrinal uncertainty, the Pope was necessary for the life of the Church, and obedience to the false Pope would deliver the deluded individual or community into the hands of the devil. As year followed year and the schism became a permanence, men began to ask themselves how it could be ended. Could it be that Christ had left his Church with no means of solving the problem of being a body with two heads?

  It was out of this agonised questioning that the movement known as Conciliarism was born. Great popes of the high Middle Ages, like Innocent III, had regularly used synods and general councils as a means of promoting reform and addressing the needs of the Church. Could a council put an end to the schism, by calling on both popes to resign, and choosing a new pope who would thus be the choice not of this group of cardinals or that rival group, but of the whole Church? These were attractive ideas, a way out. But if a council could do this, what became of papal supremacy, of the doctrine taught by Gregory, by Innocent, by Boniface and their successors, that the Pope judges all, and is judged by none?

  The Conciliar solution was tried in 1409, when a group of disillusioned cardinals of both obediences, despairing of a negotiated solution between the rival popes, summoned a council. This call received wide support, and the Council, meeting at Pisa, deposed Pope Gregory XII (1406–15) (the Roman Pope) and Pope Benedict XIII (1394–1417) (the Avignon Pope). The Council then elected a new pope, Alexander V (1409–10). Neither of the old popes accepted their deposition, however, and so the Church now had three popes. The situation was finally resolved by the Council of Constance, which deposed John XXIII and Benedict XIII, and offered Gregory XII the face-saving gesture of a dignified abdication. An electoral body composed of the cardinals and thirty representatives of the Council elected Cardinal Odo Colonna as Pope Martin V (1417–31). Benedict XIII held out against the decision, and his cardinals elected a successor in due course, but they had virtually no support, and to all intents and purposes the schism was over.

  The high papal prestige and unchallenged papalist theory of the era of Innocent III, however, was gone for ever. There was now an important body of opinion in the Church which held that in emergencies even the Pope was answerable to the Church in council, and the Council of Constance solemnly decreed as much. At one level, this was merely a formalising of what had long been believed, that a heretical pope could be deposed by the cardinals or by a council, not because they possessed an authority above that of the Pope, but because by virtue of his heresy he automatically ceased to be pope: a council might therefore exercise authority over the person of an individual pope, leaving the office itself untouched. Even the theorists of the Gregorian papacy, like Humbert of Silva Candida, had conceded as much. But there were those who went further, and saw the decrees of Constance not as formulating emergency measures for dealing with papal apostasy, but as spelling out the underlying realities of authority and power in the Church. Taking their lead from the political theories of Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham, they taught that true religious authority rested not in the Pope or even the college of bishops, but in the Church as a whole, which might delegate it to anyone at all. A general council was thus like a parliament, the nearest approach to a perfect expression of the authority of the whole Church, and popes and bishops, who held their power only derivatively, must obey a council, and could be deposed by a council at will.

  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 undermin
e 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.