Keys of This Blood

by Malachi Martin

  The centerpiece of it all was the man who sat on the throne of Simon Peter in that Holy See of Rome. Among the major players at the Round Table of international politics, no ruler could take command, no government could govern, no commerce could function, without the spiritual blessing and the imperial nod of the Roman Pope.

  Moreover, whatever overlordship this man, the Roman Pontiff, exercised—whatever armies or fleets he commanded or could assemble; whatever binding laws he laid down governing civil, political, artistic and personal life throughout Europe—ultimately his right and claim to do so was based on his possession of Peter’s Keys of supreme spiritual authority.

  Alien though the thought may be for our timid modern minds—and no matter how secular the business in hand might have been, or how this-worldly the practical means adopted to deal with it; and no matter what the turmoil within the Church itself—ultimately and sincerely, the authority of those Keys was taken as guaranteed by the actual life’s blood shed by Christ in his bodily sufferings and death on a Roman cross.

  Catherine of Siena reflected this widely and firmly held religious conviction when in the very teeth of deep Church turmoils—the problem of two claimants, Gregory XI and Urban VI, to the See of Peter—she recounted a conversation she had during one of her many ecstatic visions.

  God the Father: Whose is this blood?

  Catherine: The blood of Our Lord, Your divine Son.

  God the Father: To whom did My Son give the Keys of this blood?

  Catherine: To Peter the Apostle.

  God the Father: Yes. And to all Peter’s successors up to this day. And to all Peter’s successors until the end of time. That is why the authority of these Keys will never be weakened, because the strength of this blood can never be diluted.

  The men and women who were Catherine’s contemporaries in the 1300s surely nodded in acquiescence at this special affirmation of their own belief in the unending validity and power of Christ’s mandate to the Apostles, and to Peter as their leader.

  The problems confronted by Catherine and the Church of her day were by no means the first or the last of the upheavals that tested the right and power of Peter’s successors to possess those Keys. Indeed, the first truly massive defection by believers from the Petrine authority symbolized in those Keys had come some three hundred years before Catherine’s day. In the year 1054, the Greek and Russian portions of Christianity severed all relationship with the Roman Pope.

  But it was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the religious unity of Europe itself was shattered by the Protestant revolt against papal authority; by the high winds of sociopolitical change and economic development; and by a rising insistence that science, as the self-proclaimed and exciting engine of progress, must sever all connection with revelation.

  Throughout its ancient heartland of Europe, the Roman Church was reduced steadily and drastically in its raw sociopolitical power and in its exclusive religious dominance. With stunning effectiveness, Martin Luther—himself a priest married to a former nun, Katherine von Bora—exhorted all priests and nuns to marry, and to go forth and win the whole world for Christ, leaving behind them forever “those cruikshank Roman celibates.”

  The surprise for everyone in this seeming new calamity for Rome was that even as the Roman Church lost whole populations through the breakup of religious unity in Europe, “those cruikshank Roman celibates” gained vast new populations in Africa, Asia and the Americas. Over the next four hundred years, armies of selfless—and, yes, celibate—priests, nuns and religious proceeded to gather a membership of faithful adherents that no other church has ever equaled. A membership unparalleled not only in its size but in its national, racial, cultural and linguistic diversity.

  Increasingly shorn of its territories, and liberated from that political imperialism borrowed like a regal but ill-fitting cloak from the ancient Romans, the Catholic Church began to display its innate georeligious capacity. It developed a diplomatic style that relied principally on moral status, not on political weight, or even on its financial clout. It developed to a high degree the Catholic sense of the papacy as the ultimate arbiter for problems and dilemmas affecting nations all over the globe. It entered public contentions—political, scientific, cultural—with no strength behind it beyond its storehouse of experience, its independent judgment, and those Keys of Christ’s blood, to which more than one pope and many a “cruikshank” missionary was willing to add his own blood.

  By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Roman Catholic presence was everywhere. With each decade, its membership increased still further. The centralizing authority of the Roman papacy developed more and more absolute rules tying local communities to Rome. Devotion to the papacy and ecclesiastical unity between Pope and bishops, priest and laity, was widespread and normative.

  It was, in a certain true sense, a Catholic high renaissance so singular that it did not end even with the signal conclusion of the Church’s once grandiose sociopolitical power base, upon which Rome had for so long thought its influence rested. In 1929, the territorial holdings of the Roman Pontiff were legally defined as a 110-acre estate called Vatican Hill, on the left bank of the Tiber River. Technically speaking, even that scrap of territorial integrity persisted only thanks to the good will of nations that, many of them, neither shared the Roman Catholic faith nor had any great love for the institutional Church that housed it.

  By that time, however, even testy nations had other reasons for being at least benign in their relations with the now physically defenseless Vatican City State. Shorn of its territories, liberated from the limiting factor of its own political imperialism, the Church in and of itself was recognized as a potent force in the affairs of nations of every stripe. A force that could neither be dismissed as negligible nor commandeered at will.

  Owing in no small part to the caliber of the first four popes of the twentieth century—Pius X, Benedict XIV, Pius XI and Pius XII—no one tried to identify that force with any divisive secular system, or with any single nation, or, for that matter, with any international organization. By the time Pius XII died, in October 1958—twenty years to the month before John Paul II took his own place in the Apostolic Chair—the Holy See and its Church were seen as a single, supranational entity, one that had attained a georeligious status and stature eliciting from the world a geopolitical recognition that was unique.

  From the outside—from the point of view of those who hold and wield significant secular power in the world arena—the Roman Catholic Church in its unequaled maturity as a georeligious institution is analyzed in hard and practical terms. Such leaders entertain no romantic illusions. If the visions and the faith of Catherine of Siena were no more than bits of a hateful fairy tale for Joseph Stalin, the hard reality he was forced to face was that the geopolitical influence of Pius XII had to be courted in the effort to save his Soviet hide and the Allied cause in World War II.

  For the secular world, there are just two facts about the Holy See that are convincing: the fact that, in his person, the Roman Pontiff is the embodiment of the Holy See; and the fact that the organization he heads came at last, and alone, to fulfill all the prerequisites of a georeligious institution. These are the tangible truths that provide the Pope in secular eyes with the unique capability to act in and for the world community—to serve and tend mankind as one family—as it gropes its own way toward the borderless international plane on which he already—and prior to anyone else—stands.

  The first prerequisite for that unique, supranational capability of the Pope is that the aim of the institution he heads must be exclusively directed to the good of the international community it comprises, as a community. And in parallel fashion, the community he heads, as it is enlarged and vindicated and propagated by his institution, must itself share that supranational aim directed to the good of all.

  The second prerequisite flows directly from the first. In order for the greatest good of all to be served, the institution headed by th
e Roman Pontiff must not be bound by anything that is merely ethnic or national or nationalistic; or by anything regionally or racially or culturally particularized. Such attributes must be accommodated, but only to the degree that they neither shatter the unity and harmony enjoyed by the supranational community, nor deflect the global aim of the universal institution.

  The third prerequisite for capability on the georeligious plane is one of structure. The institution must have arms and hands and legs that carry out and reinforce its aims for the common good of the global community, in all of the many nations and situations where the parts of that community may find themselves. Like the institution itself, and like the community it serves, the organizational structures must accommodate the differences of the various parts of the community, but always within the unity, harmony and aim of the institution.

  The final prerequisite for georeligious capability is authority. The institution, in its organizational structures and undertakings, must have unique authority: an authority that is centralized; an authority that is autonomous vis-à-vis all other authority on the supranational plane; an authority that carries with it such sanctions as are effective in maintaining the unity and the aims of the institution as it goes about its business of serving the greatest good of the community as a whole and in its every part.

  Even shorn of its former imperial and territorial trappings—or, more probably, especially shorn of those things—the Roman Catholic institution in the twentieth century has fulfilled all of those prerequisites. And its compelling status for the secular powers of the world lies primarily in its two greatest attributes: first, its independent and religiously based moral imperative both as embodied in the faith and dogma of the Roman Church and as defended and propagated by the Roman Pope; and, second, its unrivaled position—unique among all the world's religious, ethical and political units and groupings—as a truly borderless, truly global and totally independent institution whose terrain, as Maksim Litvinov remarked so pointedly, “is the world of nations.”

  If the political elements essential for georeligious success were rooted in something other than the global prerequisites fulfilled by the Roman Church—in something other than universal aim, community, structure and authority—then the world would have any number of competitors to look to, and the Catholic Church would have some tough competition on the supranational plane.

  If, for instance, longevity alone were enough to assure georeligious capability, then at least four religions and ethical units would surpass Rome. Judaism, Hinduism, the Zoroastrianism of the modern Parsis and Shintoism are all of older origin than the institutional organization of the Catholic Church. But each came into being within a once dominant political system; and in its essential religious traits, each is characterized by a specific racial, geographically located and culturally conditioned tradition. Moreover, for any of these systems to renounce its tradition, still rooted in those same racial and cultural characteristics, would be to abandon its soul. Yet it is just those specifics—those limiting factors—that preclude these systems from developing supranational institutions.

  Among these four ancient systems, a distinction has to be made between religion—Judaism, say, or Islam—and the ancient ethical systems whose very beginnings and essence were defined exclusively by race and culture and localized ways of living. Over countless centuries, such systems have seemed to sing a siren song of religious “neutrality” for many with an international mind-set, but who hold religious faith to be of little or no account.

  Buddhism, for example, which is fundamentally atheistic, arose under the stimulus of its legendary founder, Gautama Buddha, as a human response to the unmitigated hardship and hopelessness of Gautama's social and political surroundings in the fifth and sixth centuries before Christ. Buddhism was never a religion, and it never developed any supranational clout.

  Confucianism, meanwhile, was the measured response of a mind jaded by a hollow and animistic paganism that had been outlived by a sophisticated society. Confucianism is one of the noblest human failures ever to attempt to provide a life ethic of virtue and humanly beneficial works divorced from any particular belief, pagan or otherwise.

  That ethical siren song has continued with a renewed potency into the era of rationalist rejection by many of any notion of revealed truth.

  The most notable ethical invention of the nineteenth century, perhaps, was the Baha'i teaching. Designed as a system of social ethics that would suit all races of mankind—would be a geo-ethic, in fact—Baha'i excluded any and all religious content. Consequently, lacking that specific energy—that aim and passionate purpose—it has remained in the status of a localized way of life followed by a restricted number of people.

  In an effort to correct that fault—to borrow such passion and transplant it—some ethical systems, particularly in the twentieth century, have attempted to mingle variations of Buddhism, Confucianism and the Baha'i with Western religious contexts. Predictably, however, the bland result of such continual borrowings and adaptations and retrofits has generally been a dilution both of the ethical system and of religious belief.

  On the religious side of the supranational ledger, Judaism professedly and explicitly claims to be the religion and faith of the physical descendants of Abraham. It does and always has been willing to accept converts from all other religions. It does and always has maintained the universality of its great moral laws. But, properly speaking, ethnicity is endemic to Judaism. This of itself precludes a genuine georeligious note from Judaism.

  When Islam, with its special brand of religious fervor, burst upon the Middle Eastern scene, it was nothing if not a firebrand of international aim and ambition. In its spread, however, it became an international assemblage of local communities. And though those communities were marked by a close similarity in religious faith and in principles of moral behavior, there has been no unique, central authority—a lack clearly understood by the late Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. Furthermore, even in its heyday of European conquest, Islam has never surpassed the cultural roots of its origins. Supranational and georeligious are not terms that suit Islam.

  Still, if neither age, nor experiments and adaptations, nor religious fervor are enough in themselves to provide supranational capability, what about all those breakaway creations that have derived from Catholicism itself? Cannot at least some of them be looked to for the same supranational capabilities as the Roman institution? After all, the Orthodox Russian and Greek churches did accept the ancient councils that defined the basics of Christian dogma, faith and practice. What more of a beating heart could be needed?

  Here again, however, those same limiting factors first faced by Peter and the early Apostles repeatedly raised their heads. For nationalist and racial themes have rarely been absent from the religion of Eastern Christianity in all its branches.

  The two patriarchal sees of Constantinople and Moscow are the focal points of churches whose Christianity is steeped by now in the racial, cultural and linguistic characteristics of Greek and Slav respectively. And each is based on its own tradition of nationalism.

  In his autobiography of 1988, Archbishop Iakovos, Greek Primate of North and South America, essentially joined his voice to that of the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople when he exulted in “the Orthodox [Greek and Russian] oikumene”—the lands and peoples who share the Eastern Orthodox faith. On the Greek side of that Orthodox oikumene, however, stand no fewer than thirteen independent (or “autocephalous”) churches, plus four semi-independent (or “autonomous”) churches, plus two monasteries, one on the Greek island of Patmos and one in the Sinai Peninsula. As to authority, the Patriarch of Constantinople is the titular head of this assemblage of churches, but only as the “first among equals.” As in any federation, decisions are reached by a vote of consensus. One code of law governs all members; but enforcement and, to a degree, even interpretation of that code is left to each individual church or monastery.

  In the Russian equation, meanwhile, Pi
men, the late Patriarch of Moscow, did not seem to share Archbishop Iakovos's sense of ecumenism. Instead, he joined his predecessors in that patriarchate in speaking of a stubbornly separatist view—of “Mother Russia” and of the “Holy Church of Mother Russia” as the focus of Church unity and the locus of its community.

  Once such limiting factors as land and people take on a dominant role, things seem to splinter still further. Vasken I, the eighty-year-old Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians—a population of about 6.5 million worldwide—declared on February 5, 1989, in New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine, that “we [Armenians] are one people with one mother Church, with one fatherland, with one destiny and one future.” That one fatherland is Armenia. And that one mother Church is not composed of Eastern Orthodoxy's oikumene; or even of “Mother Russia.” It is specifically defined as the fourth-century cathedral at Etchmiadzin near Yerevan, the capital of Soviet Armenia.

  One way or another, that separatist pattern has been repeated by the many churches and splinter sects—sometimes calculated to be nearly three thousand in number—that resulted from the sixteenth-century Protestant revolt against the papacy.

  Some have achieved an impressive growth. The Anglican community, though relatively small in membership, is a worldwide organization. But it, too, remains a federation of local churches, in which membership and principles of behavior and communal action are determined by consensus. No obloquy or disrepute attaches to those who secede from these associations; and no unique authority binds the community as a single unit.

  Whatever the size of their membership or the structure they employ, few of the churches that trace their existence to the Roman Church of earlier centuries have escaped a more or less continual splintering into ever-smaller communities, whose aims, institutional organizations and authority all shrink with every new branch torn from each transplanted tree.