Ecclesiology
Yuri Koszarycz
The Church in Moral Crisis: Prelude
to the Reformation
Though most students would have some knowledge of the great schism
between East and West, few are aware of the historical rifts that occurred
within the Roman church between the 13th and 15th centuries. Religious life
suffered as a consequence of the schism, for "Christendom looked upon
the scandal helpless and depressed, and yet impotent to remove it. With
two sections of Christendom each declaring the other lost, each cursing
and denouncing the other, men soberly asked who was saved" (Flick,
1930: 293). Doubt and confusion caused many to question the legitimacy and
true holiness of the church as an institution. In the West, the excesses
that affected the church ultimately called for radical reform through that
movement which we now identify with the Protestant Reformation.
This period of moral decline was instrumental in leading to a Western
Schism within Christendom, in which three Popes and anti-Popes concurrently
contested control over the See of Peter. The popes refused to convene councils
to effect reform, and they failed to bring about reform themselves, rather
busying themselves with Italian politics and being patrons of the arts.
"Thus the papacy emerged as something between an Italian city-state
and a European power, without forgetting at the same time the claim to be
the vice-regent of Christ. The pope often could not make up his own mind
whether he was the successor of Peter or of Caesar. Such vacillation had
much to do with the rise and success... of the Reformation" (Bainton,
1952: 15). By the mid-fifteenth century the Church was in urgent need of
drastic reform which, when effected, would have lasting impact on the religious
and secular history of Europe.
At the death of Nicholas IV in 1292 there was a deadlock in the sacred
college of Cardinals which was to last for twenty-seven months before his
successor could be elected. The two ruling factions in Italian politics
were represented by the powerful Orsini and Colonna families who vied for
control of the Papacy. At this time there were only nine cardinals left
in that college, three giving their allegiance to the Orsinis, three to
the Colonna family, and three were seemingly independent. Pope Nicholas
had been an Orsini and they would not accept the loss of papal control.
The Colonnas were determined to take it away from them, and they put pressure
on the three remaining independent cardinals who were unwilling to offend
either family, both of whom had a history of murder and assassination throughout
the streets of Rome.
The cardinals squabbled over who should be elected Pope until the
plague came to Rome in early in 1294, forcing them to withdraw to the mountains
of Perugia in central Italy, still deadlocked. One of the non-partisan cardinals
was Cardinal Gaetani who was considered to be a great canon lawyer. He was
a cold, calculating, corpulent man with the determination of an assassin.
To break the deadlock in his own insidious way, Gaetani told the senior
cardinal present, Latino Malabranca, the Cardinal of Ostia that he had received
a prophetic letter from a holy eccentric hermit, Peter of Morone, which
predicted the punishment of God upon all of them if a Pope were not soon
elected.
Malabranca, who was intensely superstitious, took the forgery which
Gaetani had given to him with devout seriousness. On the 5th July 1294,
after prayful contemplation, he called the handful of cardinals together
and read them the letter which he believed had come from the holy hermit.
He became so carried away by his own eloquence and his own convictions that
he proposed that the hermit Peter of Morone be elected the next Pope. The
deadlock was broken by the logic of demonstrating to Colonna and Orsini
alike that neither of them needed to prevent the other from winning.
Neither the Colonnas nor the Orsinis bothered to journey to Abruzzi
to meet the new Pope, to kiss his feet as every tradition of the sacred
college required. However Cardinal Gaetani did pay his homage, taking with
him the King of Naples and an enormous following of ordinary people:
In a bleak cave in the Abruzzi mountains, Gaetani told the holy
hermit that he had been made Vicar of Christ on earth. The confused frightened
old man, who had never seen so many people in his life, nodded to the statement
because Gaetani had bellowed at him from that great height, in those rich
and beautiful scarlet robes covering the barrel chest and hogshead belly,
commanding that Peter now nod his head to signify his acceptance of God's
glory. Emaciated, hardly understanding Latin, much less the condition,
Peter accepted the rulership of Christendom filled with mortal terror because
he would have to leave his cave. He refused to go to Rome. He would rule
from Naples. At Gaetani's suggestion, he chose the name Celestine V. From
that day forward, Gaetani served the Pope as his lawyer and soothed him
by creating a replica of the hermit's mountain cell in the castle Nuovo,
which had become the Lateran palace of Naples (Condon, 1984: 24).
Cardinal Gaetani began systematically to ingratiate himself with Celestine
- and finally convinced the confused and befuddled pontiff that God really
wanted him to resign from the papacy. Fearing that unless he abdicated he
would lose his immortal soul, Celestine agreed, and announced his renunciation
to his cardinals. Gaetani was elected to the papacy ten days later as the
compromise candidate, consecrated and crowned at St. Peter's in Rome, taking
the name of Boniface VIII. His first act as Pope was to order the arrest
of Celestine, whom he sentenced to death.
As a cardinal Gaetani had acquired rich cities and adjoining territories
- and as Pontiff Boniface continued to amass wealth and power which was
to bring him into direct confrontation with the Colonnas, who ruled their
territory from the hilltop city of Palestrina, twenty-two miles east of
Rome. The Colonnas tried to instigate a revolt against the Pontiff by claiming
that Boniface's election was invalid as he had usurped power that rightly
belonged to Celestine. At the same time, Stephen Colonna attacked and plundered
the Pope's gold which was being sent to Caserta to buy yet another city
for the Gaetani dynasty. Boniface, blind with fury, threw two of the Colonna
cardinals into prison.
The Colonna offered to return the gold but Boniface wanted not only
revenge on Stephen Colonna but also the Colonnas' destruction by installing
garrisons inside the Colonna cities. This option was totally unacceptable
to the Colonna and the next day, Colonna messengers posted manifestos attacking
the legitimacy of Boniface's election all over Rome, leaving one tacked
to the high altar of St. Peter's. In response, Boniface issued a papal bull,
In Excelso Throno, which charged the two imprisoned Colonna cardinals with
heresy, excommunicated them and every member of the family. Boniface then
announced a religious crusade against the Colonna, using money from all
over Europe which had been intended to finance the Crusades in the Holy
Land to buy the Knights Templar to crush the Colonna strongholds. An order
went out that the Colonna women and children were to be killed or sold into
slavery. With the help of his mercenary army, by 1299 all the Colonna cities
had been captured. Palestrina was completely razed to the ground, and the
Colonna family went to France in exile where they were given refuge by French
nobility.
Boniface's fury turned against the French monarch and he forbade him
to tax the French clergy. The French king reacted vehemently, and he in
turn forbade the export of all money to the Pope. The king prohibited foreigners
from living in France, which excluded members of the curia:
Warming to his task, he called an estates-general to charge the
Pope with infidelity, loss of the Holy Land, the murder of Celestine V,
heresy, fornication, simony, sodomy, sorcery, and idolatry in a list of
twenty-nine charges - all of them the sort employed when some faction wants
to rid the Church of a Pope, many of them quite valid. The only weapon
Boniface had was the solemn excommunication of the King of France, which
would release the French people from their allegiance to the king. The
publication of this fatal bull was planned for 8 September, 1303 from Agnani,
the Pope's summer palace (Condon, 1984: 26).
The bull had to be stopped at any cost. The king sent 2000 troops
into Italy under the leadership of Sciarra Colonna into Italy to storm Agnani,
Boniface's family stronghold, with the orders to capture Boniface and bring
him to France for judgement. Under treachery, Colonna gained access with
his troops and with drawn sword, Colonna found the eighty year old pontiff
seated on his throne dressed in his pontifical regalia, with the three-tiered
tiara on his head, cross in one hand and keys to St. Peter's in the other.
Mockingly, Sciarra Colonna ordered his men to strip Boniface naked. Sciarra
pressed the tiara down Boniface's eyes, knocked him down, had his men drag
him by the feet across down a granite stairway. He was then thrown into
a narrow, dark prison where he was beaten, and as a final indignity Sciarra
ordered his soldiers to urinate on him. Two nights later, supporters of
the Pontiff were able to repel the French and rescued Boniface. But the
ill-treatment meted out to him was too much; in sick and debilitated health,
he commenced his journey back to the Vatican which he reached on 18 September.
There he was to die twenty-four days later.
One of the more important and telling pronouncements of Pope Boniface
VIII had been written to Philip IV of France in 1302. It was named Unam
Sanctam and is one of the most extreme and arrogant statements of papal
superiority over spiritual and temporal matters and gives us an significant
insight into the prevalent model of Church at this time of ecclesial history.
Read the following and fascinating extract from Unam Sanctam and reflect
on the paradigm of Church that existed at the turn of the 14th century :
We are compelled, our faith urging us, to believe and to hold
- and we do firmly believe and simply confess - that there is one holy
catholic and apostolic church, outside of which there is neither salvation
nor remission of sins; her Spouse proclaiming it in the canticles: "My
dove, my undefiled is but one, she is the choice one of her that bare her;"
which represents one mystic body, of which body the head is Christ; but
of Christ, God. In this church there is one Lord, one faith and one baptism.
There was one ark of Noah, indeed, at the time of the flood, symbolizing
one church; and this being finished in one cubit had, namely, one Noah
as helmsman and commander. And, with the exception of this ark, all things
existing upon the earth were, as we read, destroyed. This church, moreover,
we venerate as the only one, the Lord saying through His prophet: "Deliver
my soul from the sword, my darling from the power of the dog." He
prayed at the same time for His soul - that is, for Himself the Head -
and for His body - which body, namely, he called the one and only church
on account of the unity of the faith promised, of the sacraments, and of
the love of the church. She is that seamless garment of the Lord which
was not cut but which fell by lot. Therefore of this one and only church
there is one body and one head - not two heads as if it were a monster:
- Christ, namely, and the vicar of Christ, St. Peter, and the successor
of Peter. For the Lord Himself said to Peter, Feed my sheep. My sheep,
He said, using a general term, and not designating these or those particular
sheep; from which it is plain that He committed to Him all His sheep. If,
then, the Greeks or others say that they were not committed to the care
of Peter and his successors, they necessarily confess that they are not
of the sheep of Christ; for the Lord says, in John, that there is one fold,
one shepherd and one only. We are told by the word of the gospel that in
this His fold there are two swords, - a spiritual, namely, and a temporal.
For when the apostles said "Behold here are two swords" - when,
namely, the apostles were speaking in the church - the Lord did not reply
that this was too much, but enough. Surely he who denies that the temporal
sword is in the power of Peter wrongly interprets the word of the Lord
when He says: "Put up thy sword in its scabbard." Both swords,
the spiritual and the material, therefore, are in the power of the church;
the one, indeed, to be wielded for the church, the other by the church;
the one by the hand of the priest, the other by the hand of kings and knights,
but at the will and sufferance of the priest. One sword, moreover, ought
to be under the other, and the temporal authority to be subjected to the
spiritual. For when the apostle says "there is no power but God, and
the powers that are of God are ordained," they would not be ordained
unless sword were under sword and the lesser one, as it were, were led
by the other to great deeds. Whoever, therefore, resists this power thus
ordained by God, resists the ordination of God, unless he makes believe,
like the Manichean, that there are two beginnings. This we consider false
and heretical, since by the testimony of Moses, not "in the beginnings,"
but "in the beginning" God created the Heavens and the earth.
Indeed we declare, announce and define, that it is altogther necessary
to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff.
The Lateran, Nov. 14, in our 8th year. As a perpetual memorial of this
matter. (Ernest F. Henderson, 1912: 435-37).
After Boniface's death, the new Pope, Benedict X, did not last long,
dying within ten months of his election. After many months of intense bargaining
Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux and a confidant of the king of France,
was elected. This Frenchman, who took the name Clement V, was never to set
his foot on Italian soil; he was crowned in Lyons in November 1305 and finally
in 1309 settled in Avignon which became the papal court from which the Pope
and his Curia ruled. Clement was to be succeeded by six French Popes who,
at the resolution of the French king, remained in France. For the next sixty-eight
years the seat of ecclesial power was to remain in Avignon, not returning
to Rome till 1377 during the pontificate of Gregory VI, who died through
apparent poisoning.
The Italians were desperate to retain the papacy within Italy, and
threatened the lives of the sixteen cardinals gathered in Rome to elect
Gregory's successor. Italy had become impoverished since the papacy had
moved to Avignon, with monies from about two million tourists going to the
French since Clement's election. Feeling under pressure the conclave chose
the safest Pope - Archbishop Bartolomeo Prigano of Bari, a Neapolitan who
had been vice chancellor at the University of Avignon. Prigano took the
name of Urban VI.
His autocratic manner coupled with an unbalanced personality was to
lead to his downfall. He proved himself to be highly unpopular and the cardinals,
now in safe territory, met and declared the election to be null and void
on the ground that they had been coerced into electing him in fear of the
violence of the Roman mob:
It seems hard to believe but they elected in his place a brute
named Robert, Cardinal of Geneva - he who was called the Butcher of Cesena
because he had ordered his troops to put 3000 women and children to the
sword when they objected to the rape of sixty women by his transient soldiers.
The Butcher took the name of Clement VII, whereupon Urban VI excommunicated
him; then he excommunicated Urban, and the great schism of the Church had
begun. There were two Popes who ruled Christendom simultaneously: Urban
in Rome, Clement at Avignon. The Cossa family's advocate, Piero Tomacelli,
succeeded Urban as Boniface IX (Condon, 1984: 29).
It took considerable monies to keep the bureaucracy of the Church
functioning, so Boniface tried to strengthen the Roman Church by selling
various ecclesial offices and benefices, particularly special indulgences
during Jubilee years. He gained enormous wealth from the Jubilees of 1390
and 1400, and under his pontificate simony reached its great climax through
the sale of indulgences. Boniface rapaciously piled tax upon tax, graft
upon graft, simony upon simony, taxing the patrons, papal states and properties,
and requiring substantial fees from those elected to political or ecclesial
office. Everything that was secular or religious was for sale, and ultimately
it was out of this worldly environment that urgent calls came for reformation
and church renewal.
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