The sacramental and administrative prerogatives of the episcopacy had been generally established by the year 1000, although debate con
tinued throughout the Middle Ages as to the relationship of those pre rogatives to the order itself.What was at issue for centuries was the confusion between episcopal authority and the exercise of episcopal power.
To some extent the two realities must always coexist, for authority is meaningless if one does not possess the power to make the authority operative. Yet there are many kinds of authority, each with its correla tive kind of power, and In the history of the Church a distorted under standing of the Christian community has come not only from mistaking power for authority, but also from misunderstanding what kind of authority and power is proper to a Church which is the sacramental means of establishing
2 the Kingdom of God.
1. We will consider this debate in the next chapter on episcopal identity. 2. A. Ecclestone, ’’The Bishop and His Relationship with God,” in Today’s Church and Today* s World, pp. 229-35
Although the discussion was moved into a church-state framework, the troubled relationship between secular rulers and the ecclesiasti cal establishment in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was heir to the patristic and medieval conflict of regnum and sacerdotium. The notion of a societas Christiana, which had the clergy as its ’’soul,” was fading quickly in those centuries. The two great symbols of this unified spiritual-temporal society, the papacy and the emperor, became increasingly less important for many portions of Europe; but the soci etas Christiana still remained as a confusing assumption and ideal.
In the attempt to free themselves from constraining secular power, first from the Byzantine rulers and then from the various rulers of med ieval Europe, the popes insisted on the superior authority of the sacer dotium and insisted that the functions of this sacerdotium did not fall under the judgment of the regnum. Unfortunately, this position, which could from one point of view be justified, ends up as the claim that all authority (civil and ecclesiastical) has been given to the pope as the head of the societas Christiana, and he delegates civil authority to secular rulers. Such a view served to intensify the notion of one soci ety, but it also gave the impression that civil and ecclesiastical au-
3 thority were quite similar in nature.
Because the implementation of ecclesiastical discipline, particularly the appointment and ordination of worthy bishops and priests, was in many instances hindered by secular rulers who illegitimately used various forms of power to accomplish a goal that lay outside their proper authority, 3. W. Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages (London, 1970), pp. 262-358
medieval bishops and popes countered with a use of power that was alien to the intrinsic authority of the episcopacy. By and large the medieval papacy and episcopacy sought objectives within the sphere of their own proper function and authority. These were objectives such as the dis semination of the gospel, the elevation of man’s moral behavior, the sincere practice of Christian virtue and worship, and the correction of erroneous understandings of the faith. However, in working towards these goals they saw themselves as rulers who should enforce the law of God by whatever means proved effective: by threatening damnation, by cutting men off from salvation through excommunication, by supporting those po
litical figures who in turn would enforce (particularly on the clergy in their territory) the papal legislation, or in extreme cases by attempting
A*
to depose secular rulers who were judged to be a scandal to the faithful. The episcopacy (and in growing measure the papacy) was armed with vast power: the power that flowed from possession of the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven and the social-moral power that gradually accrued to the episcopacy and papacy because of their central role in the development of medieval Europe. They could intervene most effectively in the world of
secular politics, and they did. This power was a means of obtaining from the secular ruler the freedom and autonomy of the Church. It was also a means of securing from the ruler the kind of personal and official behavior
that became a Christian prince, although this was more often an ideal than a reality. However, such power could be abused to further the personal prestige or wealth or secular influence of bishop or pope. Abuses of this 4. Ullmann, pp. 299-309
nature became particularly flagrant in the papacy of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and unquestionably provided an important emo tional element in the build-up to the Protestant Reformation and serious ly sapped the religious vitality of the pre-Reformation Church. Yet, in the last analysis, such abuses precisely because they were seen as abuses may have done less harm than the sincere but misguided employment of
secular power to enforce ecclesiastical decisions.
The danger of this course of action became very real for the Church in the pre-Reformation period. In its efforts to reassert its power in the face of conciliar theories of church authority, the papacy after the Council of Constance turned to diplomacy and to support from secular mon archs. The price it had to pay for the various concordats that guaran teed such support was to grant these secular princes a yet greater voice in church affairs, especially in appointments to rich benefices. In such dealings the pope was becoming more and more just another monarch among the monarchs of Europe. Linked with this was the ecclesiology developed by John of Torquemada in conjunction with the Council of Basel. His Summa de ecclesia, which had a normative effect on the sixteenth and seventeenth century Roman Catholic defense of the papacy, stressed as a basic premise
5
the monarchical character of authority in the Church. Thus the Roman Catholic Church, in the struggle between absolute monarchs and representa tive government which made up so much of the political history of modern Europe, was apparently situated quite clearly in the camp of monarchy.
But if the pope became, in the late medieval period, more and more a 5. E. Gratsch, Where Peter Is: A Survey of Ecclesiology (New York, 1975), pp. 102-03 ... . ... .. ...
temporal sovereign, he was not alone among the higher ecclesiastics. Throughout the Middle Ages they functioned as counselors and adminis
trators for secular rulers and in not a few instances (e.g., the prince- bishops of the German Imperial structure) bishops were themselves auto nomous secular princes. Given the unified view of European society as Christendom that prevailed in those centuries, it was logical for a king or prince to seek competent and trustworthy officials from among the better educated, and that generally meant the higher clergy. However, this clearly involved the bishops concerned in a conflict of interests, diverted them from the careful fulfillment of their episcopal function, and created in them an understanding of their episcopal authority and power which scar«cely flowed from evangelical principles. Wolsey and
g
Richelieu were worthy successors of this tradition.The bishops paid the price for their confusion in both Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Among the Protestants they either suffered to tal abolition (as in Scotland) or absorption into an Erastian state-church (as in England); and among the Romans the process towards total papal control was accelerated in spite of the decentralizing efforts of Galli- canism. We will now proceed to examine briefly the effect of the post Tridentine period on the Roman episcopate, and the effect of Erastianism upon the Anglicans.
6. See W. Wilkie, The Cardinal Protectors of England (London, 1974) for a study of Wolsey and the exercise of power politics, and D. O’Connell, Richelieu (London, 1968) for a sympathetic examination of the cardinal as a man who was wrestling with the dilemmas involved in “formulating the concept of the modern state as a necessary moral end.”