Epilogue
The history of the papacy, let it be said again, is not the history of Catholicism. Constantine dominated the history of the church in the early fourth century, alongside whom Pope Silvester was no more than a shadow in the wings. From the tenth to the twelfth century, while the popes were trapped as pawns in the often sordid intrigues of their families, the astute and saintly abbots of Cluny strode across the stage of Western Europe and called its leaders to religious commitment. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux did the same in the early twelfth century, and he remains to this day far better known and far more important than any of his papal contemporaries. Pope Paul III successfully convoked the Council of Trent, crucial for the subsequent history of Catholicism, but in that very epoch missionaries to Latin America and Asia like Bartolomé de las Casas and Saint Francis Xavier laid the foundations for a truly world church. Who is more expressive of core Christian values—Francis of Assisi or his patron, Innocent III?
Nonetheless, there is no denying the popes their place in the history of the church and in the history of the West for the past two millennia. Among them were a few like Gregory the Great and Gregory VII who get star billing on the playbill of their own times and of all times. The vast majority of the popes, however, were men of lesser stature, usually no match for the political and intellectual leaders of their age. For that reason the history of the papacy as an ongoing institution is more important than the history of the popes considered as individuals. Yet, without popes, no papacy! It was those 265 (more or less) individuals who gave the institution its shape and substance.
As I hope the book makes clear, the shape and substance look different at different epochs. The papal job description shifted as over time the popes took on new responsibilities and sloughed off old ones, only to repeat the process a little later and repeat it again later still. Nonetheless, the institution has a strong identity, easily recognizable in every century. That identity is owed to the simple and unshakable conviction of every bishop of Rome that he was the successor of Saint Peter and that he therefore possessed an authority in the church altogether preeminent.
In the sphere of practical politics popes sometimes had to make concessions regarding their Petrine prerogatives and bow to pressure. Over the course of the centuries they exercised their leadership prerogatives in different styles and defined them in different ways. In principle, however, they clung to those prerogatives with unyielding tenacity. In so far as popes admitted change in their leadership role, it was change by way of increment. They glided easily from being vicars of Peter to being vicars of Christ. The sweep of the authority-claims of the popes of recent centuries dwarfs those of the popes of earlier times. No third-century pope ever entertained the idea that he was infallible or thought he had the right to appoint other bishops to their see. Yet, despite such diversity, the same principle has prevailed from the time for which we have reliable records up to the present: the other churches and their bishops owe special deference to the see of Blessed Peter and must heed the word that comes from it.
Just as interesting as charting how through the ages the popes never wavered in proclaiming the principle and seizing opportunities to make it prevail is charting the shifts in agenda the principle has admitted over the course of time. From the eleventh until the seventeenth century, for instance, popes assumed that a major responsibility was to rally European leaders to holy wars against the infidel. For five centuries they thought they had the duty of deposing erring monarchs and had the right to do so. From the eighth until the nineteenth century, popes not only assumed that governing the Papal States and preserving them intact was a sacred duty, but they devoted probably more time, energy, and resources to that task than to any other.
The loss of Rome and the Papal States was a precondition for the emergence of new job descriptions. The popes after 1870 had more time for the church. It is no coincidence that as the political fortunes of the papacy foundered, popes assumed more and more responsibilities for the well-being of their flock worldwide. For the past hundred and fifty years, writing encyclicals has surfaced as among the popes’ most characteristic undertakings. With the encyclicals the popes claimed teaching as a primary function, which enriched and expanded their more traditional function as judges in contested cases, and it gave them a new, not always happy, relationship to professional theologians. “The Magisterium,” by which today is almost inevitably meant the papal magisterium or teaching authority, now dominates the Catholic theological enterprise in ways and to a degree unknown in earlier centuries. In his Summa Theologiae, for example, Aquinas hardly mentions it.
Air, train, and auto travel have made the popes into leaders of great rallies. Every Wednesday the pope, amid shouts and cheers, addresses thousands upon thousands of pilgrims either in the great audience hall of the Vatican or in the piazza outside it. Since 1964 popes have traveled the globe to preside over even larger rallies and to inflame enthusiasm and support for the office they bear. Thanks to photography and television few indeed are the Catholics throughout the world today who do not recognize the visage of the reigning pontiff, and virtually every one of them knows his name. Fostering “loyalty to the pope” is now one of the popes’ principal responsibilities, just as taking such loyalty to heart now sometimes seems to be almost the core of Catholic self-definition.
Contemporary means of travel and communication have speeded up a process of centralization of decision-making in the papacy that had been under way for centuries. By far the most important development in the past century has been the total control the papacy has gained over the appointment of bishops. Although the “free election” of bishops, which was for centuries the ideal, never quite worked as envisaged, the selection process almost always entailed involving in it more than one person or entity—local clergy, local notables, kings and emperors, and even the popes. Now, for the first time in history the popes have not only gained control, but they exercise it through a process of their own devising that gives them untrammeled freedom in establishing criteria for the appointments.
Modern medicine, nutrition, and sanitation have also had an effect on the papacy. In times gone by a ten-year papacy was a long papacy. In the past hundred and fifty years the papacies have, despite a few notably short ones, been notably long—anywhere from fifteen to thirty-two years. Longer papacies give popes opportunities to influence the church’s course with a new consistency and allow them to leave an imprint on it stronger and deeper than was possible in the past.
Developments and changes in culture at large have thus had as much or even more impact on the papacy than initiatives taken by the popes themselves. This phenomenon is perhaps most discernible in political developments—the emergence of the Frankish monarchy in the eighth century, for instance, soon turned the popes into emperor-makers. But nonpolitical developments outside the strictly ecclesiastical sphere were just as important, as with the invention of printing, the airplane, and penicillin. The history of the papacy is incomprehensible apart from general history.
Nor is it a history without its ironies, as seeming catastrophes have in the long run made the institution stronger. Pius IX viewed with horror the unification of Italy in the mid-nineteenth century since it necessarily meant the end of the Papal States. However, as that unification brought an end also to the other political units in Italy, it delivered into the hands of the pope the appointment of bishops that previously had been in the hands of the rulers of those units. This was a great boon. Not so momentous but just as ironical has been the popes’ relationship to the city of Rome. Although they in 1870 lost the city and formally ratified the loss in 1929 with the Lateran Agreements, they today are still the biggest figures on the Roman landscape and can in a different key still call the city their own. “Rome” is today as much the center of Catholicism as it has ever been.
The popes, as well as most devout Catholics, viewed the French Revolution as a disaster for the church without parallel, yet by an ironical twist of fate it eliminated Gallicanism in France and its counterparts in other places. In so doing it provided impetus for the powerful Ultramontanist movement that exalted papal authority and prepared the way for the definitions of papal primacy and infallibility at Vatican Council I later in the century. Catholics today live in an essentially Ultramontanist church.
Explain it as you will, the papacy has proved to be a remarkably resilient institution. Often seemingly at death’s door, it has invariably risen again to striking vitality. One thing surely has helped keep it going: the unshakable conviction of the popes that it will keep going. “The gates of hell will not prevail against it.” Those words of Jesus apply to the church, not to the successors of Peter. But popes have a penchant for forgetting the distinction and identifying the two as one.