In 2000, Thomas Reese, S.J., then the editor in chief of America, asked me to put in writing an article on how the church differed between the primary millennium and the second. I discovered the project easy because one difference stood out like no other: a recent centrality of the popes within the church of the second millennium. In that millennium, the popes got here to wield an authority and play a job incomparably greater than in the primary.
I called this phenomenon the papalization of the church. I apologized for the neologism, but I felt then, and still feel now, that it so neatly hit the nail on the top that its novelty was justified. The church within the West became the papal church, and Catholics became papists. The event signified a more exclusively top-down and hierarchical mode of church, in contrast to the more synodal and collegial earlier mode. It went unchallenged until recent times, most notably by the Second Vatican Council and Pope Francis.
Within the second millennium, the church within the West became the papal church, and Catholics became papists.
The causes of the papalization process were multiple, complex and inextricably entangled with the final development of Western social, political and cultural history. Even such seemingly unrelated phenomena because the invention of radio, television and jet travel played a job.
Nonetheless, a few of crucial and symptomatic steps in the method were the outcomes of direct actions taken by the popes themselves. The popes were in reality the only most significant agents within the papalization process. I describe their actions as self-conferred upgrades. Three such papal actions in that regard are essentially the most obvious and essentially the most symptomatic of the nice change underway: the claim to have the facility to depose secular rulers, the claim to be vicar of Christ and the claim to own infallible teaching authority.
The authority to depose rulers
Early within the history of the church, popes argued that their authority was greater than that of secular rulers since it was a spiritual authority. The spiritual was in principle superior to the temporal. Yet irrespective of how often popes or bishops might invoke that principle as justification for a superior authority, it often didn’t carry the day, partially because kings and emperors also argued that their authority was spiritual.
In any case, the matter lay unresolved until the tumultuous pontificate of Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073-85) and the nice conflict generally known as the Investiture Controversy. That conflict was almost the inevitable end result of a feature of an intimately related phenomenon generally known as the Gregorian Reform, which had originated earlier within the mid-Eleventh century with a small group of Italian clerics intent on ensuring worthy candidates for the episcopacy. To attain that goal, the reform tried to limit the authority of secular rulers to decide on prelates.
Pope Gregory took that aspect of the reform to its ultimate limits by twice deposing Emperor Henry IV of the Holy Roman Empire; these actions resulted in bitter conflicts that finally drove the pope into exile from Rome and led to the worst sack of town in its history. Despite the pope’s defeat, his successors subscribed to the claim and started deposing kings and emperors. These measures reached a climax in 1570 with the deposition of Queen Elizabeth I of England by Pope Pius V (r. 1566-72), an motion that badly backfired. As almost a corollary to the precise to depose rulers, popes also claimed the precise to adjudicate political disputes amongst rulers.
Gregory had based his claim on a sprawling ideology that he articulated in a document generally known as the “Dictatus Papae” (“Memorandum Concerning the Pope”), composed in 1075. Although never promulgated, it revealed a mindset that, while it presumed to be based on tradition, was a radical departure from it. Listed below are three of its 27 headings: “That the pope could also be judged by nobody”; “That the pope is the just one whose feet could also be kissed by princes”; and, most significant, “The pope has the authority to depose emperors.” Although Gregory tried to search out precedents for that last claim, he was unconvincing. His motion against Emperor Henry IV constituted a serious self-conferred papal upgrade and gave subsequent popes an increased sense of the deference owed them within the church.
As almost a corollary to the precise to depose rulers, popes also claimed the precise to adjudicate political disputes amongst rulers.
Vicar of Christ
Pope Gregory VII consistently, almost obsessively, referred to himself because the vicar of Peter; in that regard, he was in keeping with the mainline tradition that originated with Pope Leo I (r. 440-61). Gregory saw himself invested with all of the authority Christ had conferred upon the prince of the Apostles. But in so doing, he imbued Peter with an authority recent in its force and in its far-reaching scope, a force and scope few of his contemporaries accepted. Yet even with Gregory’s extreme interpretation, it never occurred to him to take the momentous step of referring to himself as vicar of Christ.
Although the title Vicar of Christ appears within the tradition within the early centuries, it was not common, nor was it firmly affixed to any specific office within the church. It sometimes referred to bishops and occasionally even to the bishop of Rome, yet it gained no prominence. That is true though the Roman synod of 495 called Pope Gelasius (r. 492-96) Vicar of Christ. The term simply didn’t catch on.
Within the twelfth century, theologians and canonists brought the term right into a certain restricted prominence, but they didn’t consistently attach it to the papal office. That modified dramatically with Pope Innocent III (r. 1198-1216), who claimed the title for himself. He should be given credit for this major upgrade. Starting with him, the title got here into currency and have become standard. The move from vicar of Peter to vicar of Christ was not simply recent window dressing for the papal office, but a serious enhancement of its dignity. It appeared to imbue the papacy almost with divinity. Pope Innocent conferred this upgrade upon himself and, as an almost inevitable consequence, upon his successors for the centuries to return.
It might probably be argued that in “Pastor Aeternus” the First Vatican Council confirmed the authority the pope had already claimed for himself.
Infallible teacher of doctrine
As Catholics know, the First Vatican Council (1869-70) defined that the pope was infallible when under certain conditions he taught that a teaching was of divine and apostolic origin and thus an important element within the deposit of religion. Some Catholics inside and outdoors the council challenged the definition, but to no avail. “Pastor Aeternus,” the council’s decree on papal primacy and infallibility, carried the day.
Rarely can we hear much about Pope Pius IX’s (r. 1846-78) role within the matter; indeed, when the council opened he seemed relatively indifferent to the opportunity of a definition of infallibility. As pressure inside the council mounted in favor of 1, he began to advertise, sometimes openly, sometimes covertly, but ever more unrelentingly. He gave every encouragement to the prelates pressing for the definition and did just the alternative for those opposing it. Nonetheless, we cannot on that rating lay credit for the passage of the definition exclusively at his door. Others within the council were powerfully at work in that regard.
Yet one more motion by Pius allows us to see infallibility as a papal self-conferred upgrade. In 1854, well before the council opened, Pius, within the apostolic structure “Ineffabilis Deus,” infallibly defined as a divinely revealed dogma that the Blessed Virgin Mary was immaculately conceived. No pope had ever before defined a dogma. In this fashion, the pope anticipated the council’s definition by 16 years. It might probably be argued, due to this fact, that in “Pastor Aeternus” the council confirmed the authority the pope had already claimed for himself.
As early because the patristic era, the axiom that “the Roman church doesn’t err” had taken hold, especially within the West.
It’s true that starting in 1849, Pius consulted the bishops of the world about defining the Immaculate Conception, but nowhere in “Ineffabilis Deus” is there any suggestion that the pope’s motion was in any way influenced by it. In line with “Ineffabilis Deus,” the definition was a papal motion pure and easy, with the consultation seemingly irrelevant. Sixteen years later, “Pastor Aeternus” left little doubt on the matter when it pointedly specified that papal infallibility had no dependency on “the consent of the church.” Pius himself was the creator of that clarifying clause and was answerable for its insertion within the decree. Critics of the expression claimed that it severed the top of the church from the body, as if the religion of the church at large were irrelevant.
The dogma of infallibility didn’t come hurtling out of nowhere. The peculiar political conditions in Europe within the nineteenth century after the French Revolution gave rise to the powerful ultramontane movement, by which papal infallibility consistently lurked beneath the surface as a crucial plank in its program; but there was a long-standing doctrinal tradition that arguably supported it. As early because the patristic era, the axiom that “the Roman church doesn’t err” had taken hold, especially within the West. The axiom meant that the Roman church, through the person of its bishop, could possibly be counted on to return down on the orthodox side in major disputes over doctrine.
The inerrancy of the Roman church differed, nonetheless, from papal infallibility in a subtle but crucial way. Inerrancy rested on the principle that the pope acted as judge, as the ultimate court of appeal in disputed doctrinal questions. He was thus a witness to the religion of the church but not a proactive and seemingly independent teacher of it.
The difference between judge and teacher had radical implications. By the early years of the twentieth century, the offices of the Roman Curia began issuing instructions at a newly regular pace. Furthermore, popes themselves began issuing encyclicals and similar documents with much greater frequency than before and attributing to them ever greater authority. Theologians in turn began more explicitly and ceaselessly basing their arguments on papal documents relatively than on a wider range of authoritative sources.
In our own day, Pope Francis has tried to hold forward the teaching of Vatican II by stressing the legitimacy of “consulting the faithful in matters of doctrine.”
Hierarchy over collegiality
This papal self-conferred upgrade was the culmination of the papalization of the church, which reached its most robust form in the primary half of the twentieth century. By then it had sidelined and almost obliterated the synodal and collegial aspect of the church’s structure in favor of the hierarchical, top-down aspect. This development was not simply an interesting historical fact but a force that deeply affected how we predict and behave as Catholics.
Just after the center of the last century got here Vatican II. In its deliberations and decrees, the council consistently and sometimes valiantly tried to redress the balance between the authority of the middle and the periphery by empowering the latter. It did so in several ways, most notably by teaching the collegial relationship between the school of bishops and the bishop of Rome and its description of the church as “the people of God.”
In our own day, Pope Francis has tried to hold forward the council’s teaching by stressing the legitimacy of “consulting the faithful in matters of doctrine.” He has given this principle practical force within the synodal process he has set in motion. The method is actually collegial and, as Francis specifies it, radically rooted within the teaching that the church is the entire people of God.
Francis has meanwhile modified the curia’s style from authoritarian to collegial. Curial officials now ask bishops how they may help them relatively than telling them what to do. The change implicitly empowers the periphery. In his recent and memorable apostolic structure on the reform of the curia, “Praedicate Evangelium” (“Preach the Gospel”), Francis gives institutional form to this and similar changes—signs he seeks to reverse the papalization trajectory of recent history.
Correction: An earlier version of this text stated that Pius IX released the apostolic structure “Ineffabilis Deus” in 1864. It was released in 1854.