When the cardinals gather in Rome to elect Pope Francis’s successor, two issues will weigh on their decision: the Catholic Church’s relation to the broader world and the internal governance of the church itself.
Those issues are, in many respects, as old as the papacy. The controversies they have repeatedly provoked have not only shaped and reshaped the church; they have played a fundamental, if poorly appreciated, role in the development of Western freedom.
Never were the problems greater than at the outset of the church’s history. In the West, the bishops of Rome were confronted by heathens or recently converted pagans who, by the fifth century, were forming kingdoms. Meanwhile, in the East, an emerging Eastern Christianity, backed by the powerful Byzantine Empire, claimed spiritual supremacy.
Yet the Roman bishops had no political authority to support them; and to make things worse, their own bid for primacy lacked a strong doctrinal base.
In responding to those challenges, the early popes vaunted their position as the direct heirs of Saint Peter, the first bishop of Rome, to whom Christ himself had given “the keys to the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 16: 18-19). To highlight that fact’s implications, they cited a letter (that ultimately proved to be a forgery) in which Pope Clement described how Peter had, in the presence of the Roman community, symbolically handed those keys to his successors.
Peter’s merits, said Pope Leo I (440-460), were unique; but the Petrine powers could be and had been transmitted, accruing to the Roman church as a matter of grace. As a result, added Pope Gelasius (492-496), only the pope possessed auctoritas: that is, the moral authority to shape things in a manner that was binding on all, including secular rulers.
“You must piously bow your neck to those who have charge of divine affairs,” Gelasius exhorted the Eastern Roman emperor Anastasius I, “and seek from them the means of your salvation.” Byzantium cavalierly ignored Gelasius’s pronouncement. So did the West’s emerging Christian kingdoms, in which monarchs typically claimed the right to appoint bishops, enforce clerical discipline and promulgate religious doctrine. But as the church underwent a sweeping renewal in the 11th century, it vigorously reasserted its prerogatives.
In 1059 Pope Nicholas II for the first time forbade lay investiture and established a procedure for the pope’s election by cardinals, eliminating the monarchs’ role in making papal appointments. Then, in 1075 Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand) threw down the gauntlet in his Dictates of the Pope, which stated that the pope was the only true sovereign, having authority to judge all secular rulers.
Nor was that authority limited to spiritual matters: writing to Emperor Henry IV, Gregory made it clear that kings could, at the pope’s discretion, be deposed.
Henry’s reaction was vitriolic. Beginning with “Henry, king not through usurpation but through the holy ordination of God, to Hildebrand, at present not pope but false monk”, his reply culminated in “You are therefore damned”.
It would, unfortunately, take too long to trace the subsequent developments, which involved a conflict that raged for more than a century. Two points are nonetheless essential.
The first is that the papacy, in attempting to justify its position, encouraged the period’s finest minds, including Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, John of Salisbury and Jean Gerson, to elaborate doctrines that narrowly limited the secular power. As well as setting out a delineation between the secular and the spiritual spheres, those doctrines enunciated a notion of rights that proved immensely influential in the eventual emergence of liberalism.
Second and related, because Gregory’s wildly ambitious bid for power failed, with Boniface VIII (1294-1303) being forced into a messy compromise, the West avoided becoming a theocracy. But nor were the Western monarchs ever truly successful in claiming legitimacy by divine right, as those claims jarred against the papacy’s continuing spiritual dominance.
That made political legitimacy in the West highly precarious, quite unlike the situation elsewhere; and it impelled a search for more secure sources of legitimation – a search that, in the end, led to popular sovereignty.
Here too, the doctrines developed by the church proved crucial. In effect, the church, as Gregory reformed it, was the first modern Western state, with a complex legal system, a professional judiciary, a treasury and a chancery. But its organisation rested on two, somewhat inconsistent, concepts of church unity: a unity maintained by the subordination of all its members to a sovereign head, and a unity assured through those members’ free association, co-operating under the guidance of the Spirit.
The first of those concepts gave rise to theories of papal absolutism; the second, later formalised in the decree Haec Sancta, adopted by the council of Constance in 1415, embodied the seeds of modern constitutionalism.
That constitutionalism’s essence was that the pope was “maior singulis minor universis” – greater than each member of the church taken individually but less than all those members deciding together. It also enshrined the principle that “ut quod omnes similiter tangit ab omnibus comprobetur” – anything that affects all similarly must be approved by all. And it stipulated that the pope could not enact a law prejudicial to the church’s established character and general welfare or retain office having committed a crime.
Writing more than a century ago, great British historian John Neville Figgis called Haec Sancta “the most revolutionary official document in the history of the world”, because it “expressed the arguments for constitutional government in a form in which they could readily be applied to politics”, thus supporting the transition to freedom under law.
In the end, the church itself adopted a relatively authoritarian image of the papacy, notably in the 19th century. However, the recognition that its governance must also rest on the express consensus of its members was never lost, despite the tensions it often created.
Those issues – how the church carves out its space in a world dominated by hostile rulers, and how it adapts while maintaining its unity – have recurred periodically ever since.
Clearly, its claims to power over secular matters are far weaker than centuries ago. But in stark contrast to other religious organisations, its leadership remains of global significance. The pope can, as John XXIII showed, lead a far-reaching renewal; as John Paul II showed, shake authoritarian regimes, and; as Benedict XVI showed, reach intellectual pinnacles.
How Francis compared to those predecessors will be debated for decades. But it is reasonable to note that Francis’ acquiescence to the Chinese regime’s demand that it have the right to oversee the appointment of Catholic bishops reversed the church’s long held position that it preferred persecution to complicity with a policy starkly inconsistent with religious freedom. Nor is it unfair to suggest that he proved better at raising controversial issues, such as the ordination of women, than at resolving them.
His successor will inherit those issues. Even more important, he will also inherit the mantle of an institution that, for all of its terrible failings, helped forge Western freedom. Living up to that legacy is surely the greatest challenge of all.
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