PAPAL MONARCHY

As the papal conclave gets ready to meet and elect a new Pope, I have nearly finished R.W.Southern's excellent book "Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages". The rise and eventual near-collapse of the papacy under the pressures of the Reformation is one of the key developments of the mediæval age. It's interesting to see why the Popes became pre-eminent, and why that pre-eminence eventually led to their downfall. The answer lies in the concept of papal monarchy.

For much of the first 1,000 years of the church, the Popes were merely one of many bishops. True, a very important bishop, since they were Bishop of Rome, the place where St. Peter had been martyred and was buried. But by around the middle of the eleventh century, a series of energetic and reforming Popes had sketched out a theory of papal monarchy; By virtue of their position as Vicars of Christ on earth, they had inherited a "plenitude of power", which gave them both spiritual and temporal supreme authority.

On the spiritual side, this was not a problem, at least at first. Kings had before this period had a sort of priestly function, epitomised by their being anointed with oil at their coronation. But the Carolingian empire which best embodied this ideal had broken up, and people were looking for an alternative spiritual leader. Kings were happy to let this leadership pass to the papacy, not least because they did well out of the ecclesiastical system as a whole. Henry III of England was happy for the Pope to get his way eventually in his choice of Bishop of Winchester, probably the richest diocese in the country. But that was because the case dragged on for five years, during which time the see was vacant and the king got to spend the revenues as he pleased.  

However, on the temporal side, the idea was a failure. "He who denies that the secular sword is in the power of Peter does not understand the words of the Lord" said Boniface VIII in 1302. The problem was that the idea was so absurd that nobody had to deny it. Unlike on the spiritual side, where the Pope could intervene in a myriad of ways, and where the Curia had become the leading judicial court in Europe, the Papacy lacked the usual ultimate weapon of decision-making (armed force), and so had to rely on agents to do its bidding. If those agents, notably the Emperor, disagreed with him (and he often did), then the Pope was powerless on the international stage. Within Italy, where the Popes controlled the Papal States as their own mini-kingdom, they were one out of many territorial magnates. As such, they were involved in the normal fights and squabbles which territorial magnates of the time carried out on, and with, each other.

Seeing the Pope as a feudal lord behaving badly eventually came to undermine the spiritual side of the equation. Men started to question whether there was really a need for a Pope at all, and whether a more personal relationship with God that bypassed the ecclesiastical structure might be the way forward. This was a potentially explosive idea, that still needed a spark to ignite it, and a man to light the fuse. The spark was the question of indulgences, a sort of spiritual currency that eventually incurred severe inflation; the man was Martin Luther.

The Reformation nearly destroyed the established church; in the end, it merely divided it. Forceful men, not all of them Popes, rescued it in its hour of need, and gave it a resilience, which it still has today. In some parts of the world, Catholicism is a declining force; in others, notably Africa, it is thriving.

Yet although we live in 2013, the question that floored the Papacy in the Middle Ages still exists. Is the Pope a leader in spiritual matters alone, or is he someone who should also lead/meddle (take your pick) in temporal matters as well? Those temporal matters  - abortion, stem cell research, contraception, gay marriage - are not the same as the ones that exercised the Popes of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the Pope that is shortly to be chosen needs to think carefully about his role in trying to decide them.

Walter Blotscher