The Later History of the Papacy
It is a blessing to both the Roman Catholic Church and the larger Christian community that the past fifty years or so have been marked by very good popes. The smiling face of Pope Francis, his openness to the poor and downtrodden of Buenos Aires, his affirmation that building walls is not Christian—all of this has made Francis a respected and beloved leader among Roman Catholics and non–Roman Catholics alike. And who can forget the well-traveled, slope-skiing Pope John Paul II, the vigorous traditionalist, who not only was one of the most important spiritual leaders of the twentieth century but also was instrumental in precipitating important political and social changes in his own native Poland and beyond. Indeed, some have claimed that it was the steady leadership of Gorbachev, Reagan, Thatcher, and Pope John Paul himself that led to the breakup of the Soviet Union.
These recent images of smiling, happy, effective leaders, popes who have all the markings of magnificent and generous people, fill the minds of contemporary Roman Catholic laity, who therefore so readily assume, especially in terms of the papal office, that all is well. It is not. Indeed, as historians and philosophers who think in terms of centuries, not decades, we are well acquainted with what can be described as “the dark side of the papacy.” Entire books have been written about this. To be sure, the pages of church history, its historical records and annals, are filled with the antics of evil and even wicked popes, some of whom would likely be judged today as insane. Although Roman Catholic apologists like to lift up one of the major faults of Protestantism, in terms of its apparent fissiparous nature, they should also be mindful of one of the major faults of Roman Catholicism: its hierarchical, docility-inducing, obedience-inculcating structure. Simply put, when things go wrong at the top, things go very wrong.
Given this history, some of which will be detailed below, and given human nature being what it is (the office does not change that), we are in a strong position to make an important prediction. However, before we make this judgment, understand that we are not trying to be polemical, just accurate; not argumentative, just realistic. Naïveté, precisely when it comes to the papacy, not only is unhelpful but also lacks the clarity of truth. At the very least, then, we need to speak truth to one another. And so with those caveats in place we can now make our prediction, which is informed by both historical understanding and anthropological, philosophical, and theological considerations: what once was will be again. It’s just a matter of time.
Forgery, Competing Claimants, and Post-1054 Pretensions
Holding the office of the bishop of Rome does not guarantee that one will be good, moral, or even orthodox. Things just don’t work that way. To illustrate, the Sixth Ecumenical Council, held in 680, had to set the theological record straight by posthumously condemning the likes of Pope Honorius I, who was a rank heretic, given his aberrant christological views. Confused in his theological reflections, which made him especially dangerous since he held a seat of authority, Honorius espoused the monothelite heresy (that Christ had only one will) and thereby failed to distinguish properly the two natures of Christ and what precisely pertained to each.1
Apart from the heresy of Pope Honorius, the subsequent history of the papacy is marked by the attempt to increase the power of this office, both spiritually and temporally. Thus when Pope Leo III on Christmas Day in 800 placed the crown on the head of Charlemagne, who was declared “Romanorum Imperator,” or Holy Roman emperor, the pope’s action suggested, in a way that he understood all too well, that he and he alone could confer such authority on the newly crowned emperor. During this same century, Pope Nicholas I insisted on the supremacy of the see of Rome throughout the entire church. Furthermore, this pope added to the ever-growing claims of the papacy by contending that he was the superior of every temporal ruler, even the emperor, in matters both spiritual and moral.2 Lording it over the church was no longer enough. Nicholas tried to buttress his authority even further by an appeal to two documents (The Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals and The Donation of Constantine) that subsequent scholarship has ably demonstrated were forgeries. By the way, this is the same pope who had declared the Eastern patriarch Photius deposed and who thereby despoiled an already sour relationship with the East. An Eastern synod, headed by Photius, returned the favor in kind and accused the Western church, once again, of heresy.3
In a pontificate characterized by insanity, Stephen VII (sometimes referred to as Stephen VI because of confusion in reckoning the Stephen popes) conducted what has become known as the “cadaver synod” in 896 and thereby took vengeance on the pitiful corpse of a prior pope (Formosus), whose very name represented a living, rival faction that Stephen detested. The gory details of this escapade are as follows:
Pope Stephen VII set in motion a solemn trial of the late Pope Formosus. . . . The act of judgment was no mere formality. The corpse itself was dragged from the tomb where it had rested for eight months and, dressed again in its sacerdotal robes, was brought into the council chamber. There it was propped up in the throne that it had occupied in life while, in a parody of legal form, the “trial” went its blasphemous way.4
There were few good popes from the time of this debacle to the middle of the eleventh century. Taking the papal office, then, did not necessarily increase one’s gifts or talents, though it did appear to engender in some men an inordinate desire to amass more: money, preferment, and titles. Furthermore, grasping for the office of the papacy got so out of hand among rival factions during the eleventh century, when it was viewed as something of a prize, that three men at one point all claimed to be the rightful bishop of Rome: Benedict IX, Sylvester III, and Gregory VI. Each of these claimants was eventually cast aside in favor of Clement II, who was appointed pope in 1046 by the Council of Sutri, an assembly held just north of Rome.
After Pope Leo IX and Patriarch Michael Cerularius split the church in 1054 over a squabble that, among other things, included the issue of papal authority, later popes, oddly enough, acted as if this Great Schism had not even occurred. They pretended that Rome itself had not really been a part of or responsible for any such schism (the fault lies with the “other,” with those who have separated from the Roman Catholic Church) and that therefore the pope’s supreme authority over the entire church remained undiminished and continued apace—again as if nothing had happened. Thus during this same schismatic century Pope Gregory VII insisted that the Roman pontiff yet had the right to be called “universal,” a title that Gregory I had repudiated earlier, as chapter 11 has already noted. Some have questioned whether the document from which this claim of universality is drawn, the Dictatus Papae, was actually written by Gregory VII himself. At any rate, it was indeed listed in his papal register in 1075, and as a consequence this artifact does appear to represent Gregory’s own views. Since the Dictatus Papae is a good window on the papacy (as an institution that was made up of numerous claims that slowly emerged and that were repeated over time), it will be cited at length. The relevant articles are as follows:
1. That the Roman church was founded by God alone.
2. That the Roman pontiff alone can with right be called universal.
8. That he alone may use the imperial insignia.
9. That of the pope alone all princes shall kiss the feet.
10. That his name alone shall be spoken in the churches.
11. That this is the only name in the world.
12. That it may be permitted to him to depose emperors.
16. That no synod shall be called a general one without his order.
17. That no chapter and no book shall be considered canonical without his authority.
19. That he himself may be judged by no one.
22. That the Roman church has never erred; nor will it err to all eternity, the Scripture bearing witness.
26. That he who is not at peace with the Roman church shall not be considered catholic.5
Observe that the content of this document touches upon both temporal and spiritual matters. Thus the effects of the article that the pope would be permitted to depose emperors was fleshed out, in a certain sense, in 1077 at Canossa, where Gregory VII left Emperor Henry IV, along with his family, out in the snow for three days humbly seeking a papal audience and reconciliation, as we have noted in chapter 10. Such a humiliating action, ironically enough, led to the weakening of the papacy much later as the temporal powers of Europe, kings and queens among them, were eventually able to free themselves from the yoke of such power-grasping claims. However, until that time the course set by Gregory remained in place and constituted the mind-set of popes like Innocent III and Boniface VIII of the thirteenth century. Indeed, “by the end of the twelfth century,” as E. R. Chamberlin points out, “the emperor had become a shadow and the pope stepped forward to claim dominion over all the world.”6
Notice also that the final article cited above touched upon spiritual matters and essentially denied the Orthodox East the title of “catholic,” a judgment that once again failed to take into account, in a historically accurate and evenhanded way, Rome’s own complicity in the Great Schism. Indeed, the pretense that the (Roman) Catholic Church had remained undivided (though some “schismatic” traditions obviously separated from it) and that the very catholicity of the church had therefore been unaffected and uninterrupted by events like that of 1054 was a part of Gregory’s own misreading of the history of the church, views that he would pass along to other popes. From this point on, then, an air of unreality marks the papacy, especially as popes continue to pretend they are at the helm of a universal church. In short, they repeatedly forget about the East and its own well-substantiated claims to catholicity. The church henceforth exists not in one grand institution but in distinct theological traditions.
Expanding Papal Prerogatives and Political Power
Pope Innocent III reveled in the power and prerogatives of the papacy and brought them to their height. Claiming that he was “the Vicar of Christ,”7 with “supreme authority on earth,”8 in 1215 Innocent called the Fourth Lateran Council, which not only codified the obscure teaching of transubstantiation, with all its theological and sophistic missteps, but also issued a number of directives against the Jews, who, due to their relatively small numbers in Europe at the time, were increasingly being singled out for attention by a nearly exclusively gentile church. To illustrate, in a statement that no doubt caused anxiety among the Jewish community, canon 68 declares: “We decree that such Jews and Saracens of both sexes in every Christian province and at all times shall be marked off in the eyes of the public from other peoples through the character of their dress.”9
Hardly content with what spiritual power he had amassed, Innocent erroneously believed, in what looks like the beginnings of megalomania, that “God had given the successor of Peter the task of ‘ruling the whole world’ as well as the church.”10 Such papal claims, such pretenses, just kept on coming, with each pope trying to outdo the previous one, as each continually sought new and ever-widening forms of power, supposedly all laid out in Matthew 16:18. Never has a verse of the Bible been so fruitful for the discovery of ecclesiastical claims. Mindful of the earlier history of Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII, Innocent III was determined to exercise his will over King John of England and bring him into submission. Not liking very much Innocent’s own choice for the archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, the king refused to accept him. Such a refusal no doubt angered Innocent, who then turned around and effectively brought John Lackland (King John) into submission by excommunicating him and by placing England under an interdict (the normal sacramental life of the church was by and large disrupted). As part of the eventual settlement that was worked out between the Crown and the Vatican, John agreed, among other things, that henceforth he would rule his kingdom of England as “the feudal vassal of the pope.”11 This was the English Canossa (humiliation), and King John had been so put in his place that he even agreed to pay the bishop of Rome one thousand marks of very good English coin each year. This practice lasted until the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII, thinking very differently of the whole matter, finally put an end to this humiliating tax.
During this same thirteenth century, Pope Gregory IX vied with Emperor Frederick II for power throughout Europe in what became one of the normal and more tedious scripts of the later Middle Ages, competition fraught with considerable trouble. This was the same Gregory who in feeling his oats, so to speak, declared out of all sense of proportion that he was “the lord and master of the universe, things as well as people.”12 For the time being, however, Gregory would simply have to content himself with the far more mundane task of dealing with the Holy Roman emperor. At one point in their remarkably turbulent relationship, the pope even went so far as to excommunicate Frederick just as the emperor set out to regain Jerusalem from the Muslims. Wanting to add some muscle to his spiritual authority (beyond forcing all bishops to take an oath of obedience to him),13 especially as he looked toward his theological enemies, the Cathari among them, Gregory IX developed the papal inquisition in France and thereby enlisted the Dominicans and the Franciscans as his agents. The early phase of this troubled institution, however, is not to be confused with either the Spanish Inquisition in 1478 or the Roman Inquisition of the latter half of the sixteenth century, whose target was often Protestants, who, unlike the Cathari, were hardly heretics.
As with any phase of an inquisition, each manifestation of which always had connections with Rome, the inquisitors could investigate, but they could not punish. Thus, in the thirteenth century under Gregory IX, the spiritual estate in the form of these two inquisitorial religious orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, lacked the authority to execute their judgments, a task that was therefore left to the civil authorities. Sadly enough, it is one of the ironies of papal history that the very same pope who canonized the humble and peaceful Francis of Assisi in 1228 was also at the heart of the papal inquisition with all its mischief. For one thing, the humble and saintly Francis, who was kind even to animals, would almost certainly have taken issue with how the order he founded was used. Good things can indeed be put to bad uses. All that’s needed is the will to do so.
After the abdication of Pope Celestine V in 1294, and with rumors flying, Benedetto Caetani was elected as Pope Boniface VIII. Declaring that he held both broad spiritual and temporal powers, Boniface eventually struggled with Philip IV of France, who thought otherwise on these matters. Indeed, in response to the alleged temporal power of Boniface, a pope who considered himself to be, for want of better language, a “papal monarch,” King Philip wryly declared: “Let your stupendous fatuity know that in temporal matters we are subject to no man.”14 Undeterred by this insult, Boniface retorted to the king: “Our predecessors have deposed three kings of France. Know—we can depose you like a stable boy if it prove necessary.”15
The ultimate response of Boniface to Philip and others came in the form of the papal bull Unam Sanctam, promulgated in 1302, which articulated the pope’s spiritual and temporal authority, at least according to the liking and vision of Caetani. In terms of the first set of claims, Boniface observed in the opening lines of the bull: “Urged by faith, we are obliged to believe and to maintain that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and also apostolic. We believe in her firmly and we confess with simplicity that outside of her there is neither salvation nor the remission of sins.”16 At this point the statement by itself is ambiguous and therefore open to different interpretations. Thus the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic” church may refer to all who, like Peter, confess that Jesus Christ is the Son of God (Matt. 16:16).
Boniface, however, made his meaning far clearer in a later declaration that not only focused on the Latin church as the center of all but also cast aspersions on Eastern Orthodoxy: “Therefore, if the Greeks or others should say that they are not confided to Peter and to his successors, they must confess not being the sheep of Christ, since Our Lord says in John ‘there is one sheepfold and one shepherd.’”17 Put another way, unless the Greek Orthodox view themselves as under the authority of the bishop of Rome (“to Peter and to his successors”), they are not part of the one sheepfold that Boniface clearly identifies with the Roman Catholic Church. Such a confused ecclesiological judgment, which once again mistakes the part for the whole and is based upon the considerable mistakes of the Petrine theory, would continue even into the nineteenth century, when its substance would be repeated by Pope Pius IX in 1863 in his encyclical Quanto Conficiamur.18
Not content with what spiritual authority over others he had cobbled together (and the Eastern Orthodox, by the way, remained resistant to his designs), Boniface broadened his privileges in Unam Sanctam to include temporal authority as well. This second move was accomplished concisely in the declaration that the “two swords” (both spiritual and temporal power) belonged to the church and preeminently to the pope as its head. In a move that would baffle competent exegetes today of whatever theological tradition, Boniface in commenting on Luke 22:38 reasoned as follows: “Certainly the one who denies that the temporal sword is in the power of Peter has not listened well to the word of the Lord commanding: ‘Put up thy sword into thy scabbard’ [Matt. 26:52]. Both, therefore, are in the power of the Church, that is to say, the spiritual and the material sword.”19
Interestingly enough, after making these sweeping temporal claims, the bull reverts to issues pertaining to spiritual authority in the closing line of the proclamation, which with the usual air of unreality so typical of the papacy at this time, will once again fail to take into account, in a realistic and judicious way, the ongoing vitality and catholicity of the Greek church. Boniface affirms: “Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”20 Dante thought so little of this power-grasping man, who had further alienated the Eastern church while he hid behind title and office, that the gifted Italian poet apparently reserved a place in the Inferno for him:
He [Pope Nicholas III] shouted: “Ha! already standest there?
Already standest there, O Boniface!
By many a year the writing play’d me false.
So early dost thou surfeit with the wealth,
For which thou fearedst not in guile to take
The lovely lady, and then mangle her?”21
Lines equally suited to Boniface are the following:
Were separate those, that with no hairy cowls
Are crown’d, both Popes and Cardinals,
o’er whom Av’rice dominion absolute maintains.22
A number of irregularities weakened the papacy’s status and authority in the common people’s eyes during the early fourteenth century. Troubles with the growing power of France (Boniface VIII had hardly been successful here) resulted in the papacy eventually being transferred to Avignon in 1309 by Clement V. Thus began the “Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy,” a period of dominance by French kings that lasted until 1377, when Catherine of Siena persuaded Gregory XI to return to Rome.23 Unfortunately Gregory, despite his good intentions, died the following year, setting the stage for a conflict between the people of Rome, who wanted the pope to remain in their city, and the college of cardinals, a body dominated by French interests.24 Nevertheless, due in part to pressure from the people of Rome, Urban VI was chosen pope, and he was determined to remain in the Eternal City. However, not all was well: the college of cardinals, not liking Urban very much, due to his inattention and contentious personality, proceeded to elect Clement VII as the pope. What was one of the first things that the newly elected Clement did? He moved the papacy to Avignon once more. Now there were two popes: one in Rome, the other in Avignon.
Three Concurrent Popes, a Lost Opportunity, and Machiavelli’s Inspiration
From the time of the election of Clement VII (whom Roman Catholics consider to be an antipope) to the Council of Constance, which began in 1414, papal history is downright chaotic, marked by a whirligig of claims and counterclaims, of Roman and French interests, of popes and antipopes, of struggles between the Roman populace and the college of cardinals, of papal machinations and conciliar misgivings—and all this dysfunction (which is a kind and gracious way of putting it) was served up in the preceding feckless Council of Pisa, which met in the spring of 1409. Ostensibly the work of this assembly was to resolve this morass, but it ended up aggravating matters by producing not two claimants to papal authority but three (Benedict XIII in Avignon, Gregory XII in Rome, and Alexander V, whom the council itself elected)! To be sure, when an office this powerful is created over time, increment by increment, claim on top of inordinate claim, it will eventually produce, given human nature with its sin and self-centered desires, precisely the kind of struggle, both political and ecclesiastical, that played out during this very troubled period.
But this dark hour in the history of the Western church was also one of enormous opportunity—if such opportunity could be seen for what it was and then seized. Earlier in the fourteenth century, in 1324 to be exact, Marsilius of Padua and John of Jandun had already envisioned the kind of problems that the Latin church would invariably stumble into, given its preference for a polity that was in effect (and often in practice) an absolute monarchy. The brilliance of Marsilius’s Defensor Pacis, whose counsels could be applied to the church as easily as to the state, consisted in its careful recommendations, which avoided all the excesses of an apex-driven hierarchy, a rule by Caesar, so to speak. It offered a way of thinking about polity and governance that was conciliar in nature and thus far more appropriate for the body of Christ, with its various members.25
No doubt aware of this earlier reforming literature, the Council of Constance, in resolving the multifarious and conflicting claims to the papacy, threw off the hierarchical yoke and put in place a conciliar polity, a gracious means of governance more in accord with the nature of the church militant. Thus in its decree Sacrosanct the Council of Constance tried to ensure that the Western church would henceforth be governed not by the wisdom of one but by that of many. It substituted “conciliar control of the Church of Rome for papal absolutism.”26 Indeed, this reforming council not only took the power of electing the pope away from the college of cardinals, placing it in a general council, but also provided for the ongoing conciliar governance of the Western church in its decree Frequens.27
The Council of Constance, then, not only rightly diagnosed the ills that had so plagued the Latin church for centuries due in large measure to the misbehavior of its popes but also chartered a suitable way forward. Unfortunately the conciliar governance of the church, despite the best efforts at Constance, lasted for only a brief time. When Pius II became pope, he continued in the well-worked papal habit of making excessive, unrealistic claims for his own office as well as engaging in denunciations in terms of the power of others. After only two years on the papal chair, he issued the bull Execrabilis in 1460, which undid all the conciliar work of the Council of Constance in one fell swoop. As one scholar put it, “The papacy reverted to the system of papal despotism that it had followed for so many centuries.”28 The great opportunity for the Western church was simply squandered away.
Pope Sixtus IV, a member of the Franciscan order, enmeshed himself in the political troubles of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain during the fifteenth century as they targeted their enemies: among them were heretics, Jews, and Muslims, the usual suspects. Though in many respects the Spanish Inquisition was conducted by the Spanish Crown with many political ends in mind, nevertheless Sixtus aided in its founding in November 1478 and therefore gave it the papal seal of approval. Moreover, support for this institution was further strengthened when Sixtus issued a bull in October 1483 that put the soon-to-be-feared Torquemada in place as the inquisitor general of “Aragon, Valencia and Catalonia.”29 This proclamation of the pope, then, not only renewed the earlier ecclesiastical approval but also helped to place “the Inquisitions of the Spanish crown under a single head,”30 thereby making this enterprise more unified and efficient in the cause of persecution. This was hardly the proper work of any supposed Vicar of Christ.
It was not until the following pontificate of Innocent VIII in 1484, however, that the two German Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Kram and James Sprenger rose to power—the latter known as the “Apostle of the Rosary”31—who together produced the ungodly Malleus Maleficarum (The witches’ hammer), which, according to some, “led to more misery and deaths than any other book.”32 One of the early questions of this oddly composed manual is as follows: “By which Devils are the Operations of Incubus and Succubus Practised?”33 It’s very much downhill all the way after such a troubled start; indeed, the book is steeped in ignorance and superstition. What Kram and Sprenger in their witch-hunting, evil-seeking zeal failed to realize, and what a world-class sociologist like Stanley Cohen understood all too well, is that the instrument employed to ferret out witches may actually lead to their very feigned creation.34 Such tools spawn an artfully constructed fantasy, driven by the fearful imaginations of the powerful as they lord it over the weak and innocent. In a real sense these instruments are a function of the phobias and the “moral panic” of their creators. Here women, now perceived as an ongoing sexual threat by a celibate male clergy, evoke deep-seated, ongoing anxieties, and they therefore emerge as targets.35 If the precepts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, promulgated in 1948, were applied to the likes of the Malleus Maleficarum, this Dominican creation during the pontificate of Innocent VIII could only be deemed an engine for crimes against humanity. Though popes have boasted that they could be judged by no one but God alone, nevertheless even the very secular minded today are competent enough to make a proper judgment in this area.
After Innocent, Vatican politics continued their descent with the election of Rodrigo Borgia as Pope Alexander VI by the college of cardinals. The British historian Edward Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, referred to this Borgia pope as “the Tiberius of Rome.”36 To prepare the way for his election, which with its ugly politics seemed to have little to do with the Holy Spirit, Rodrigo approached the cardinal of Venice and quickly bought him off to the tune of five thousand ducats. Upon ascending to the papacy, Rodrigo boisterously proclaimed, “‘I am pope, I am pope,’ . . . and hastened to robe himself in the gorgeous vestments.”37 Not liking the promise of celibacy very much, Pope Alexander VI had several mistresses and fathered numerous children, whom he preferred in blatant acts of nepotism.38 His favorite sexual partner was the aristocratic Roman Vannozza Catanei,39 who gave birth to Juan, Lucrezia, Goffredo, and the infamous Cesare Borgia, the last of whom served as an exemplar for the wily statesmanship displayed in Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince.40
Living peacefully in his native Florence, in which he was both a respected spiritual and civic leader, Girolamo Savonarola was well apprised of the moral turpitude into which the papacy had sunk under Alexander VI. Preaching prophetically, marked by the Holy Spirit, and pointing out several papal abuses, Savonarola soon attracted the attention of Alexander VI—but it was the wrong kind of attention. After a period of widening disagreement, Savonarola was eventually excommunicated by the pope in 1497, though the Florentine was clearly no heretic. His chief crime in this morally inverted world of the Borgia papacy was that he had the audacity to point out the very real evils well ensconced at the Vatican. For his efforts, Savonarola was tortured in the midst of a rigorous examination and then finally executed the following year. Alexander VI would simply not tolerate any criticism. In his own estimation, perhaps mindful of the pretentions of the earlier Dictatus Papae, the pope considered himself to be, once again, above it all.
Fortunately, there have been some rumblings in the Roman Catholic Church of late in terms of repairing the reputation of Savonarola. In 1998 the archbishop of Florence appointed a commission to look into the possible beatification of this godly man.41 While this is certainly a step in the right direction, it is clearly not enough to set the record straight. Not only must the good name of this prophetic and gifted preacher be restored, but the church must also acknowledge the evil perpetrated by Alexander VI in a full and forthright way. The Holy Spirit, after all, is the Spirit of Truth, as Scripture so clearly attests. Indeed, to falter in this last task, to fail to recognize the egregious wrong done in Florence and at the Vatican during the fifteenth century is to remain morally complicit. In short, the evil that you don’t confess (and that the rest of the church so clearly sees) is one that’s still to your debit.42
Leo, Luther, and Rejecting the Reformation
As a member of a powerful family situated in Florence, Giovanni de Medici was elected Pope Leo X in 1513. With a page out of the playbook of Alexander VI, upon his election as the bishop of Rome, Leo exclaimed in a letter to his brother: “God has given us the Papacy—let us enjoy it.”43 Again, like Alexander, Leo succumbed to the siren song of nepotism in quickly appointing his cousin Giulio a cardinal.44 Considered to be a Renaissance pope, Leo X was an avid patron of the arts and liked to surround himself with beautiful things. Due to his ever-expanding tastes and with a desire to acquire some of the best art in the world for the Latin church, Leo was constantly in need of money. His grand design was the continued construction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and he had the good judgment to enlist no one less than Raphael to take over its construction.
Around the same time that Leo was forming his plans for St. Peter’s, Archbishop Albert, a prince of the House of Hohenzollern—who already, by the way, held two episcopal sees—set his eyes upon yet another, the bishopric of Mainz in Germany.45 Holding three bishoprics at the same time was exceptional, to be sure, but not impossible if the proper fees for a dispensation were paid to the Vatican. Albert negotiated with Leo, and they finally came to an agreement. The archbishop would pay the pope ten thousand ducats for the exception he desired. The problem was that the sum of money involved was simply astronomical, far beyond the resources even of a well-situated and prominent archbishop. At this juncture the pope suggested a plan that would involve the banking efforts of the Fuggers, a Jewish financial powerhouse, which would float the loan to Albert. So that he would be able to repay the debt, the archbishop was given permission by Leo to announce the sale of indulgences in his territories. A portion of the funds raised would go to the Fuggers, the rest to Pope Leo, and some no doubt found its way into the stones of St. Peter’s.
This issue of Albert’s indulgence selling, though hardly anyone realized it at the time, represented a clash of values between those on the one hand who equated the splendor of the church with remarkably expensive things in the form of extravagantly constructed basilicas, a theology of glory, if you will—and those on the other hand who saw true splendor in a far more humble and realistic fashion, in the grace and wonderful mercy of God abounding in the forgiveness of sins and in the renewal of the heart, a theology of the cross. Just imagine for a moment the lowly, no-place-to-lay-his-head Jesus in the midst of St. Peter’s in order to get a sense of the enormous difference, the considerable contrast, here. In that opulent building Jesus, the donkey-riding Savior, would be lost.
Now, in terms of the theology of indulgences, there is a significant difference between the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church in the fifteenth century and the folk theology that emerged around this theologically disruptive issue. To illustrate, Tetzel, the Dominican monk who was put in charge of selling indulgences in Germany (though the elector Frederick the Wise would not allow him to do so in Wittenberg), conducted the sale by departing from the doctrine of the Western church in his excessive and ill-founded claims. Justo Gonzalez points out one of the more troubling claims: “Those who wished to buy an indulgence for a loved one who was deceased were promised that ‘as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs’ (Wenn das Geld im Kasten klingt, die Seele aus dem Fegefeur springt!).”46 Again, Tetzel sallied forth with yet another harangue that played upon the fears of the people: “I have here the passports . . . to lead the human soul into Paradise. . . . Who, for the sake of a quarter of a florin, would hesitate to secure one of these letters which will admit your divine, immortal soul to the celestial joys of Paradise?”47
In promulgating his Ninety-Five Theses, Martin Luther, the overly serious and even scrupulous Augustinian monk, took on both forms of theology, the popular and the official (official teaching linked indulgences with a treasury of merits that included those of the saints),48 and reminded the hierarchy, who really did need to listen to this earnest scholar from Wittenberg, that “the true treasure of the church is the most holy gospel of the glory and grace of God.”49 Pope Leo and the curia, however, thought little of what they perceived to be simply a German upstart. The pope, in breathing the thin air of the hierarchy, which kept him at a distance from the shifting realities on the ground, bellowed at one point in exasperation: “Luther is a drunken German. He will feel different when he is sober.”50 Despite the fears and misgivings expressed in his ad hominem forays, Leo had to proceed with caution, since Frederick the Wise, who was, after all, an elector, protected his rising star at the newly founded university. Luther’s fate, then, would not be the usual Roman way (remember Savonarola and Jan Hus). Excommunication by Pope Leo X in 1521 (his bull Exsurge Domine in 1520 helped to prepare the way) and banishment by the emperor, Charles V, would simply have to do.
The papacy tried to stem the tide of the Reformation that had finally come to the Western church through the good graces of Luther and others, who were prompted by the gracious leading of the Holy Spirit, but this anxious and fearful design of the popes proved to be impossible. Indeed, the reform of the church—not simply in terms of its troubled moral life (priestly immorality, nepotism, and simony, for instance) but also with respect to the theological difficulties and dead ends that had accreted over time in the Latin tradition—manifested itself not only in vibrant German expressions of renewal but also in Swiss, English, and Anabaptist ones as well.
Ascending to the papacy in 1534, Pope Paul III issued the bull Licet ab initio eight years later in response to all that had occurred since 1517. The language of this declaration indicates that this pope was determined not to dialogue with the Protestants at all but simply to denounce them from afar, and he therefore inaccurately referred to them as “heretics.” However, to call the good members of the body of Christ “evil” or “heretical,” especially if they have been raised up by none other than the Holy Spirit in the Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, and Anabaptist traditions, is serious business indeed. This point must not be missed or misprized; it remains an important window on the papacy and its beclouded theological vision, a vision that is repeatedly self-referential and therefore continually mistakes “the Christian other.” Thinking that Protestants were akin to the likes of Arians, Sabellians, or the Cathari of old, Paul III set up the Roman Inquisition by means of this oddly drawn bull and revealed his intent in its opening lines: “From the beginning of our assumption of the apostolic office we have been concerned for the flourishing of the [Roman] Catholic faith and the purging of heresy. Those seduced by diabolical wiles should then return to the fold and unity of the church.”51 Was the work of the Protestant Reformers, then, of the devil, “diabolical” as the pope put it? And what is the consequence of calling that which is good none other than “evil”? Indeed, what are the implications of that?
For his part, Pope Paul IV, elected in 1555, continued in the dialogue-repudiating ways of his predecessor Paul III and created yet another tool to cut off knowledge and to stifle expression: the Index librorum prohibitorum, quite literally an Index of Prohibited Books, which reads like a Who’s Who of Protestant authors. To illustrate, among the leaders whose works were banned in the 1559 edition of this guide are all the following: Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, Henry Bullinger, Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer, and Nicholas Ridley. Even the name of Erasmus was thrown in to boot,52 not because he was a Protestant, for he obviously was not, but simply because he had the temerity to criticize the papacy in his writings (shades of Savonarola), as is evident in the following selection drawn from his classic Praise of Folly: “Then the supreme pontiffs, who are the vicars of Christ: if they made an attempt to imitate his life of poverty, . . . who would want to spend all his resources on the purchase of their position, which once bought has to be protected by the sword, by poison, by violence of every kind? Think of all the advantages they would lose if they ever showed a sign of wisdom!”53
The most significant reason the popes ultimately failed in their censoring efforts was technology. A new world was already in place by the sixteenth century, and the papacy was simply reluctant to acknowledge it. The printing press, operative a century before these turbulent times, aided the Reformers by spreading their message far and wide.54 The popes of this period naturally lost some of the power that earlier pontiffs had enjoyed, especially in terms of control of the message. By now that was gone, except among the docile, ever-compliant faithful, and it would never be fully recovered.
The popes had good reason to fear scholarship and the dissemination of knowledge, as Pascal noted in the seventeenth century: “The Pope hates and fears the learned, who do not submit to him at will.”55 Though the doctrine of papal infallibility was not propounded until the nineteenth century, Pope Paul IV, during the polemical context of the Reformation of the Western church, employed the Index as a conversation-restricting tool, the very antithesis of critical thinking and truth seeking. Ushering in an era of official censorship, the Index put Roman Catholics at a distinct intellectual disadvantage, especially in terms of the early phases of the scientific revolution. By the seventeenth century the works of both Copernicus and Kepler found their way onto this infamous register (because the church was pontificating in areas well beyond its competence), though these writings were eventually removed in the early nineteenth century.56 If the Roman church does, after all, think in terms of centuries, then this was overdue for two centuries. The Index represents a distinct mind-set and was not abolished until 1966, by Pope Paul VI.
The Question of Papal Infallibility and Its Aftermath
As with Germany under Bismarck, a political and social movement that would unite the separate states and principalities in Italy during the nineteenth century emerged under the early leadership of Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi but was soon taken over by Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour. The result of this movement for unification, known as the Risorgimento (rising again), was that the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861 under King Victor Emmanuel.57 This reunification movement proceeded in stages, and the pope during this period, Pius IX, along with the papal states he governed (supported in the past by the forgery The Donation of Constantine), yet remained a problem. The Italian king therefore sent his emissary Conte Gustavo Ponza di San Martino to the pontiff in September 1870 to work out an agreement in which Rome would revert back to the Italian people. Sensing the impending loss of a significant swath of his temporal power, the pope responded in a way that upset the king’s representative. Raffaele De Cesare recounts the episode:
The Pope’s reception of San Martino was unfriendly. Pius IX allowed violent outbursts to escape him. Throwing the King’s letter upon a table, he exclaimed, “Fine loyalty! You are all a set of vipers, of whited sepulchres, and wanting in faith.” He was perhaps alluding to other letters received from the King. After, growing calmer, he exclaimed: “I am no prophet, nor son of a prophet, but I tell you, you will never enter Rome!” San Martino was so mortified that he left the next day.58
Despite the protests and fulmination of Pius IX, the Italian armies entered Rome, and by the following year the pope had been reduced to the few acres that make up Vatican City today. The democratic movement of the Italian people had been a success. Chaffing under this turn of events, Pius called the new state “illegitimate”59 and forbade Roman Catholics to participate in Italian elections “under the pain of excommunication.”60 By now the list of things that could get one excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church was quite long. And, of course, Victor Emmanuel was excommunicated, for to offend the pope was deemed one of the worst sins of all.61
Sensing that his temporal stock had fallen considerably from 1861 forward during the Italian Risorgimento, and determined to rebalance his overall portfolio, Pius had invested in his own spiritual power once more by promulgating the doctrine of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council in July 1870. Though the idea of papal infallibility in some form or another had surfaced in the life of the church from the Middle Ages forward, it took Pius IX and Vatican I to give it a formal, dogmatic declaration, by which it was henceforth required to be affirmed by all the faithful. Indeed, denying this very doctrine could also get one excommunicated. Vatican I declared:
We [furthermore] teach and define that it is a dogma divinely revealed: that the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when in discharge of the office of pastor and doctor (i.e., teacher) of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine regarding faith and morals to be held by the universal Church, . . . is possessed of that infallibility with which the Redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed for defining doctrine regarding faith and morals; and that therefore such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are irreformable of themselves and not from the consent of the Church. But if anyone—which may God avert—presume to contradict this our definition: let him be anathema.62
Before assessing what elements could possibly ground such an assertion of infallibility, we must identify several oddities in the council’s declaration. To begin with, notice in this particular context the well-worn anachronistic papal habit of placing later, ever-further-reaching claims on the lips of Jesus, in which Christ is appealed to as supposedly “willing” the very thing that popes, centuries later, so eagerly desire. Even Cardinal Avery Dulles has explained the difficulties entailed in this largely ahistorical, dogmatic approach by describing what he called the “regressive method” employed by some Roman Catholic scholars: “As it became increasingly clear that scholarly criticism could not demonstrate that all these offices, beliefs, and rites were instituted by Christ, theologians were urged to study the original sources using what is called the ‘regressive method’—i.e., utilizing the latest teaching of the magisterium as an indication of what must have been present from the beginning.”63 Second, notice also that the council was not content in simply propounding this teaching but felt compelled to condemn or anathematize all those of whatever theological stripe who disagree. Such a condemnation naturally included Eastern Orthodox believers, Protestants, and even some Roman Catholics, like Johann Dollinger, who in 1869 published The Pope and the Council, in which he took issue with the very notion of infallibility.64 For his scholarly efforts the German church historian was condemned and excommunicated.
Today the Catechism expresses papal infallibility in the following way: “To fulfill this service, Christ endowed the Church’s shepherds with the charism of infallibility in matters of faith and morals.”65 Such an approach has by now become formulaic: take a much later development in the life of the church (in this case from the nineteenth century) and then attribute it to Jesus. What then grounds infallibility? Well, in light of the history of the popes displayed in this current chapter, it obviously cannot be either the lives or the character of these very flawed men. Indeed, several Roman pontiffs throughout history have given little evidence of being marked by a special charism, a gift that should have made them, if anything, at least moral. As a class of human beings, several popes have simply fallen far short in terms of their basic ethics, deflected as these bishops of Rome sometimes were by a self-concerned spirit that was ever assessing shifting configurations of power and interests. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the kind of environment that apex-focused hierarchies can create, an environment held in place by the repetition of a brew of superlatives that can quickly go to one’s head, given the deceitfulness of human sin.
The Catechism’s claim to infallibility just displayed above, then, is fictive (in the eyes of both Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestantism) in that it needs a sanitized papacy, not the real one that we actually have. The pages of church history are replete with examples of morally questionable, deeply troubled, very unholy pontiffs. Moreover, in some cases popes, such as Julius II, even went so far as to be at the helm of armies that were quite literally battling and dying for the provincial papal interests then in play. Here the behavior of popes reveals itself to be not a cut above the common lot but to be all too human, in other words, nothing very special. Viewed another way, the actual history of popes is nothing like what one would expect if Jesus Christ himself had established the papacy. Several popes did not even evidence the qualifications laid out for elders in 1 Timothy 3:1–7 or for deacons in 1 Timothy 3:8–10. To be sure, the average layperson during some of the more troubled pontificates lived far better Christian lives than the supposed “Vicar of Christ” of the time. Despoiled by sin, several of the bishops of Rome quite simply lived in such a way as to strain the credibility of these Roman claims to the breaking point. Accordingly, infallibility would be the very last thing that one would expect from such a class of people. Remember the counsel of Jesus, so necessary for proper discernment: “By their fruit you will recognize them” (Matt. 7:16). So then, if there is any grounding of papal infallibility, we will simply need to look elsewhere.
Conclusion: The Ultimate Grounding of Papal Claims
How can all the evils of the historical papacy, its sin and debauchery, often to the detriment of innocent others, be swept aside in one grand stroke as if they were nothing? How can infallibility be established on other, more suitable grounds? All of this would be something akin to a miracle if it could be accomplished. However, notice what can emerge in a rambling, presumptuous, and ultimately specious argument: Make the claim that infallibility is grounded not upon the person or character of any pope, hardly a suitable basis for anything, given the historical record, but upon the office that he holds. Argue that it is none other than the office itself that supposedly sanctifies the holder with a special charism regardless of how the popes in fact live. Or simply claim that the office itself is holy regardless of any other consideration. Either form will do. With such a judgment in place, the entirety of the evils perpetrated by several popes, even to the lowest depths of turpitude, can suddenly be rendered utterly irrelevant, of no consequence at all. Thus, when the Roman Catholic faithful are directed toward the papal office, they see only goodness and light, but this is surely an abstraction from a much larger and more deeply troubled whole. Such misdirection to the abstracted holiness of the office, overlooking the actual lives of popes, arises from learning the wrong lessons, once again, from church history in general and from the Donatist controversy in particular, as chapter 10 on the priesthood has already demonstrated. However, for the sake of space we will not repeat those arguments here even though they are very appropriate. At any rate, the Catechism grounds papal infallibility on a special, distinct office supposedly held only by the bishop of Rome (even if that office is understood in concert with his bishops, the “living Magisterium”).66 The Catechism states: “The Roman Pontiff, head of the college of bishops, enjoys this infallibility in virtue of his office.”67
But what is that office, and by whom was it established? The answer here cannot be that Peter was supposedly made the first pope and installed in that office by none other than Jesus Christ. Such a declaration can be too easily disproved, once again, by the details of church history; it cannot walk the gauntlet of the kinds of criticisms that can be leveled against it by competent historians. Let’s review: First, Peter was associated largely with Jerusalem and Antioch, was an apostle and not a monarchical bishop, and certainly was not of Rome, the place where he was murdered. Second, the apostolic succession (since it needed the monarchical episcopacy to be in place first) necessarily appeared sometime in the second century at the earliest, not the first century, where Rome needed it for the establishment of its papal office in Peter. In other words, the apostolic period was clearly over before the rise of the monarchical bishop. This gap is exceedingly troubling to Rome, given its historiography, but is one that, try as it may, it is unable to fill in. This leaves so many of the polity claims of the Roman Catholic Church in general and of the papacy in particular dangling in the air. Third, the whole Petrine theory, dependent as it is on a distinct interpretation of Matthew 16:16–18, is undermined by other assessments that cohere far better not only with the person and work of Christ but also with the nature of his body, the church. Thus the office of the papacy, implying infallibility and hailing from the first century with the blessing of Jesus, is undoubtedly a myth. Neither Eastern Orthodoxy nor Protestantism affirms it. Such an office is therefore hardly a suitable basis for the unity of the church, as Rome so often insists, but is actually and quite ironically an emblem of its ongoing division.68
A far better candidate for the grounding of the papal office upon which infallibility supposedly rests may be some of the writings of the early church fathers, such as Cyprian and Jerome, as noted earlier. Yet the best choice of all—with such significant evidence to support it, and with so many throughout the centuries of the church adding their clear voices in solemn agreement and in lengthy energetic pronouncements—is none other than the popes themselves! In short, the papal office, along with its supposed infallibility, represents little more than a self-fulfilling claim, the repetition of which unfortunately has proved to be intoxicating.69
1. The reputation of the bishop of Rome had already been sullied earlier, in the fourth century, due to the well-known cowardice of Marcellinus. Fearing the personal consequences he would suffer in the throes of the Diocletian persecution, Marcellinus not only handed over what Scriptures he had to the pagan Roman authorities but also sacrificed to the gods. As Eamon Duffy puts it, “He died a year later in disgrace, and the Roman church set about forgetting him.” Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 20.
2. Earle E. Cairns, Christianity through the Centuries: A History of the Christian Church, 3rd rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), 202.
3. Ibid.
4. E. R. Chamberlin, The Bad Popes (New York: Dorset, 1969), 19–20.
5. Ernest F. Henderson, Select Documents of the Middle Ages (London: George Bell & Sons, 1910), 366–67.
6. Chamberlin, Bad Popes, 74.
7. William H. W. Fanning, “The Vicar of Christ,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church, ed. Charles G. Herbermann (London: Catholic Way, 2014), Kindle edition, locations 673035–36.
8. Cairns, Christianity through the Centuries, 213.
9. The Canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215, in Internet Medieval Source Book, part of the Internet History Sourcebooks Project, ed. Paul Halsall, Fordham University Center for Medieval Studies, text excerpted from H. J. Schroeder, Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils: Text, Translation, and Commentary (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1937), 236–96, http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/lateran4.asp.
10. Cairns, Christianity through the Centuries, 214.
11. Ibid., 215.
12. Peter De Rosa, Vicars of Christ: The Dark Side of the Papacy (New York: Crown, 1988), 74 (emphasis original).
13. Paul Enns, Moody Handbook of Theology (Grand Rapids: Moody Press, 1989), 530.
14. Chamberlin, Bad Popes, 118.
15. Ibid.
16. Boniface VIII, Unam Sanctam, 1302, translated in a doctoral dissertation written in the Department of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America, published by Catholic University of America Press, 1927, here quoted from Halsall, Internet Medieval Sourcebook, http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/source/B8-unam.asp.
17. Ibid.
18. Cairns, Christianity through the Centuries, 217.
19. Boniface VIII, Unam Sanctam, 1302, in Halsall, Internet Medieval Sourcebook, http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/source/B8-unam.asp.
20. Ibid.
21. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy by Dante, Illustrated, Hell, Complete, trans. H. F. Cary (Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2011), Kindle edition, locations 1183–85.
22. Ibid., Kindle ed., locations 448–49.
23. Cairns, Christianity through the Centuries, 247.
24. Ibid.
25. For a helpful and informative examination of this classic, see Ephraim Emerton, The Defensor Pacis of Marsiglio of Padua (Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2012), Kindle ed.; first published as The Defensor Pacis of Marsiglio of Padua: A Critical Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920).
26. Cairns, Christianity through the Centuries, 256.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition (London: Folio Society, 1998), 52.
30. Ibid.
31. De Rosa, Vicars of Christ, 184.
32. Ibid.
33. Kram and Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, ed. Wicasta Lovelace, trans. Montague Summers, Internet Sacred Text Archive, accessed December 27, 2016, http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/mm.
34. See the treatment of Cohen’s analysis in terms of the European witch craze in Ian Marsh and Gaynor Melville, Crime, Justice and the Media (New York: Routledge, 2009), 61. See also Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (New York: Routledge, 2002).
35. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, xix–xx. Cohen’s context is obviously affected by time and place, but some of the dynamics that pertain to “moral panic” appear to suit different contexts as well.
36. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. Hans Friedrich Mueller (New York: Modern Library, 2003), quoted in De Rosa, Vicars of Christ, 105.
37. Chamberlin, Bad Popes, 171.
38. In his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, John Henry Newman believed he had discerned in the annals of church history a “divinely bestowed” institution in the papacy. However, this abstracted reading of the history of the church, in which the considerable evil of the popes is either minimized or repudiated, from Damasus I in the fourth century to Stephen VII in the ninth and to Alexander VI in the fifteenth, is hardly what one expects of a divine establishment. John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1968), 153–54.
39. J. N. D Kelly, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 253.
40. Machiavelli writes: “Of each of these methods of becoming a Prince, namely, by merit and by good fortune, I shall select an instance from times within my own recollection, and shall take the cases of Francesco Sforza and Cesare Borgia.” See Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1992), 15.
41. Francis X. Rocca, “Saint Savonarola?,” Wall Street Journal, last updated July 10, 1998, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB89986872420390000.
42. Matthew Levering, well aware of the troubled history of the papacy, observes: “Given that there have been many bad popes (and even a period when three rivals each claimed to be pope), can anyone hold that the Church, in its definitive teaching, has continued to be the ‘pillar and bulwark of the truth’?” Levering, Engaging the Doctrine of Revelation: The Mediation of the Gospel through Church and Scripture (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014), 293.
43. Chamberlin, Bad Popes, 210.
44. Ibid., 228.
45. Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity, vol. 2 (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2010), Kindle edition, locations 521–22.
46. Ibid., Kindle ed., locations 530–34.
47. Chamberlin, Bad Popes, 241.
48. Such is the case even today in Roman Catholic teaching. See Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1994), 371.
49. Martin Luther, Career of the Reformer I, LW 31:31.
50. Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther, repr. ed. (Nashville: Abingdon, 2013), 72.
51. Denis Janz, ed., A Reformation Reader: Primary Texts with Introductions (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), 347.
52. Index librorum prohibitorum, Michael Scheifler’s Bible Light Homepage, accessed December 27, 2016, http://www.aloha.net/~mikesch/ILP-1559.htm.
53. Desiderius Erasmus, Praise of Folly (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004), Kindle edition, locations 2057–61.
54. For an excellent work that shows how technology and an uncontrollable flow of information helped Martin Luther in his reforming efforts, see Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation (New York: Penguin, 2016).
55. Blaise Pascal, Pascal’s Pensées (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958; repr., Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2012), 229, number 872.
56. “The Congregation of the Index,” The Galileo Project, Rice University, last updated 1995, http://galileo.rice.edu/chr/congregation.html.
57. De Cesare, The Last Days of Papal Rome (London: Archibald Constable, 1909), Kindle edition, locations 4640–42.
58. Ibid., Kindle ed., locations 5436–40.
59. Garry Wills, Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 33.
60. Ibid.
61. The pope eventually lifted the excommunication, though it was rejected by the king. See Alister McGrath, Christian History: An Introduction (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 247–48.
62. “Vatican Council I: On Papal Jurisdiction and Infallibility,” available at http://www.intratext.com/x/eng0063.htm.
63. Dulles, Models of the Church (New York: Random House, 2002), 40.
64. See Dollinger, The Pope and the Council (Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2014).
65. Catechism, par. 890.
66. Ibid., par. 889.
67. Ibid., par. 891 (emphasis added).
68. David F. Wells has argued that at Vatican II the progressives tried to bring about a broader and more inclusive form of polity (e.g., focusing on the college of bishops) that would assist and even guide the pope in a more vigorous way, but Pope Paul VI would have none of it. Wells characterizes the tension as follows: “What really alarmed him [Paul VI] was the notion that his authority was not separate from that of any other bishop. He decided to append a Note to the Constitution of the Church which would explain the real meaning of the passages by which he felt he was threatened. The Note was added after the Council had completed its work on the Constitution, so no vote was taken and no official comment was made.” Wells, Revolution in Rome (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1972), 110.
69. For a critique of infallibility maintaining that this theological move on the part of the Roman Catholic Church represents a shift from canon to criterion, a shift that elevates epistemological concerns in a displacing way over the canons of the church, see Mark E. Powell’s treatment of William Abraham’s thesis in Papal Infallibility: A Protestant Evaluation of an Ecumenical Issue (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 8–10, 12–14. See also William J. Abraham, Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).