

## Common Sense II

A Resource for Catholic Church Reform

Charles J. McMahon, Jr.

Copyright 2013 Charles McMahon  
Smashwords Edition

This pamphlet may be reproduced, copied, and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided it remains in its complete form.

The cover illustration "The Spirit of '76" by Archibald Willard is used courtesy of the Diplomatic Reception Rooms, U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C.

### Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 – The Origin of Israel

Chapter 2 – From Israel to Judaism

2.1 The Kingdoms

2.2 The Torah

2.3 The Prophets

2.4 The Second-Temple Period

Chapter 3 – Jesus of Nazareth

3.1 The Historical Jesus

3.2 Jesus as the Son of God

3.3 The Ministry of Jesus

Chapter 4 – Early Christianity

4.1 Getting Started

4.2 The Eucharist

4.3 The Status of Women

Chapter 5 – From Antiquity Through the Early Middle Ages

5.1 Christianity as a New Religion

5.2 The Papacy in Disorder

Chapter 6 – The Gregorian Reform and the Western Schism

6.1 The Papacy Becomes a Monarchy

6.2 The Western Schism

Chapter 7 – The Renaissance and the Reformation

7.1 The Renaissance Popes

7.2 The Church Breaks Apart

7.3 Trent and the Counter Reformation

7.4 Christians at War With Each Other

Chapter 8 – The Enlightenment and the Industrial Age

8.1 A Time of Relative Peace

8.2 The Napoleonic Wars

8.3 The Return of Papal Monarchy

Chapter 9 – Modern Times

9.1 Modernism and WW I

9.2 Fascism and WW II

9.3 Aggiornamento: Vatican II

9.4 Advances and Retreats

Chapter 10 – The Essential Reforms

10.1 The State of the Church Today

10.2 Compulsory Celibacy

10.3 The Election of Bishops

10.4 The Role of Women

10.5 Church Teaching

Bibliography

Introduction

The hierarchical governance of the Roman Catholic Church is under attack all over the world. Revelations about the cover-up of child molesters by bishops in country after country have exposed a universal policy of image-protection at the expense of child welfare. In the U. S., a third of baptized Catholics have already walked out the door. Those who remain have some serious questions to ask themselves. To be able to answer these questions intelligently, they need to reach a level of understanding greater that of the catechism they learned in school. This will be necessary if the errors of the past are to be avoided in the future. The infallibility syndrome in the present institution gets in the way of this. Past errors cannot be corrected, because in some minds they do not exist. The freedom to be wrong has been abrogated. It must be recovered if progress is to be made.

There are three major defects in the church in the U.S. that need to be corrected without delay if the vast good work of the church is to be preserved. Otherwise, the institution could continue to shrink and perhaps wind up as an ultra-conservative fundamentalist cult. These defects are:

The lack of accountability of bishops to the people in their dioceses.

The irrational suppression of the role of women in the church.

The compulsory celibacy imposed on most, but not all, Catholic priests.

All three are in fundamental conflict with the principles of a modern democratic country and are thus antithetical to the structure of our society.

The issue of selection of bishops has taken on crisis proportions in recent decades because of the behavior of the majority of U. S. bishops in covering up child abuse by their priests and their enabling it to continue by transferring the clerical molesters to unsuspecting parishes, one after another. This cannot help but continue until bishops become accountable to the people in their dioceses. This can only happen when the people refuse to accept any bishop not elected with their participation, and for a defined term. This will obviously require some organization on the part of the laity, but that's how "God Save the King" got replaced by "The Star Spangled Banner."

The suppression of the role of women in church leadership becomes increasingly ludicrous as more and more women assume leadership roles in government, business, academia, the professions, etc. The contrasts between the quality of leadership of such women and that of some male Catholic hierarchy are too obvious to continue to ignore. The latest outrage is the attempted take-over of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious – the LCWR – by the Vatican. They are accused of "radical feminism." Apparently, their work in hospitals, schools, orphanages, missionary outposts, soup kitchens, and homes for the indigent somehow falls short. This hierarchical behavior is a denial of the importance of women in the early church and is often justified by the statement that Jesus appointed only men as the "twelve apostles." It displays ignorance of the fact that The Twelve were only meant to be symbolic of the patriarchs of the twelve tribes of Israel; there is no conceivable connection between them and the present Roman Catholic priesthood.

Compulsory celibacy for priests was not formally decreed until the First Lateran Council in 1123. It has endured since then, with the recent exception that married Protestant ministers who want to cross over may become Catholic priests. Dozens of them have done so and with their wives and families are pastors of Catholic parishes today. This exception proves that there is no religious principle involved; compulsory celibacy is just an administrative rule. As with the two other defects, this is actually mainly about the power to control people. Obviously, bishops would lose their absolute control over the lives of priests if priests had wives. Apparently, the system is thought to be able to tolerate a few dozen crossover Protestant clergy without falling apart.

It is highly unlikely that these defects will be corrected anytime soon by action of the hierarchy, because such corrections would be in conflict with their own self-interests. In order for the corrections to be forced by the citizens of the church, Catholics will need to inform themselves about where Catholicism came from and how it developed. Since Jesus of Nazareth was sent to restore the house of Israel, we need to begin with the story of Israel and why it needed to be restored.

1. The Origin of Israel

The author of Matthew 15:24 has Jesus say: _"I have been sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel."_ In addition, the evangelists have Jesus speaking repeatedly about the _reign of God_ (usually poorly translated as the _kingdom_ of God.) What did he mean by the two expressions, house of Israel and the reign of God? They can be connected in a very simple way.

The first documented evidence of the use of the term _Israel_ was found inscribed on a commemorative black granite slab called a _stele_ in Thebes in Egypt in 1896. Most of the inscriptions are about victories over Libya by the Pharaoh Merneptah, who reigned from 1213 to 1203 BCE, but the last three lines deal with his victorious campaign in Canaan. Three of the victories were over Ashkelon, Gezer, and Yanoam, which are all given the hieroglyphic determinative of a _city_. However, an additional victory over a _people_ is recorded; the people are called "Israel": _Israel is laid waste and his seed is not._ This has been interpreted as a destruction of the crops of a collection of people thought to have been living in the central highlands of Canaan.

Now it is known that the term in the Canaanite language for the supreme God is _El_. There is no general agreement of the original meaning of Israel, but the _Jewish Study Bible_ of Oxford University Press says: "The scientific etymology of _Israel_ is uncertain, a good guess being '[The God] El rules.'" In this case, the people known as Israel would be ones who considered themselves to be subject to the rule, or reign, of God. To understand how this could have come about, we need only to turn to the story of the escape by enslaved Canaanite captives from Egypt led by a man called Moses. On their way back to Canaan, these people reportedly made an agreement with God, brokered by Moses, to be God's people, in return for God's having freed them from captivity. They agreed to carry out God's instructions on how they should live their lives.

As interpreted by George Mendenhall (see the bibliography at the end), the form of the covenant was that of ancient treaties, which would have been generally familiar to peoples of the Ancient Near East. However, this was a unique form of covenant that would link a community of individuals to Yahweh, as opposed to linking one political entity to another. Thus, it was to be a new community based on religious principles that would define the requirements of human integrity as commitments to Yahweh, rather than the usual set of laws set up by rulers of a society. The commitment entailed only the avoidance of evil behavior: no idol worship, false swearing, murder, adultery, stealing, etc. The people accepted this and became the People of God.

2. From Israel to Judaism

**2.1 The Kingdoms** During their first two centuries back in Canaan, the Israelites multiplied dramatically and became settled agriculturalists, living in a network of small villages scattered about in the hill country. This was the time of the "judges," who served as tribal leaders in various capacities. As they accumulated more and more assets, the villages attracted the hostile attentions of "kings" of the region, and around the year 1030 BC the Israelites decided that they needed a king of their own. The prophet Samuel very reluctantly gave in to their pleas and anointed Saul as their first king. However, Saul transgressed by the unauthorized offering of a sacrifice, so Samuel anointed David to replace him. Thus began the monarchy over the twelve tribes.

David's son Solomon followed him, but he alienated the ten northern tribes by extracting forced labor from them, and Solomon's son Jeroboam did the same. This caused the northern part of the kingdom to split off and call itself the Kingdom of Israel, leaving the two remaining tribes to be the Kingdom of Judah, centered in Jerusalem. The northern kingdom went through 19 kings from about 930 to 722 BCE, all of whom were judged negatively in the books of Kings. In 722, the northern kingdom was overrun by the Assyrians, who destroyed the capital city of Samaria and deported a significant portion of the population, bringing in people from elsewhere to replace the "ten lost tribes." Some of the remaining Israelites managed to escape into the southern kingdom.

**2.2 The Torah** The library of books known as the Hebrew Bible contains most of what we know about ancient Israel. It consists of three parts: the Torah, or Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. The Torah contains what used to be called the Five Books of Moses (based on the belief that Moses was their author): Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Associated with Deuteronomy is the Deuteronomic history: Joshua, Judges, and the books of Samuel and Kings.

These books were assembled in more or less their final form during the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE. The first four books of the Torah were compiled by splicing together scrolls from several sources. The earliest versions of these scrolls were produced after the split of the united kingdom of the Israelites following the death of King Solomon, the builder of the first temple, around 930-920 BCE. One set of scrolls, presumably written by priests from the northern kingdom, which called itself Israel, referred to God as Elohim and is called the E source. Another set, presumably written by priests in Jerusalem in the southern kingdom called Judah, referred to God as Yahweh, which in German is written Jahweh and is called the J source. The way that the different scrolls were spliced together can be seen in an appendix to _Who Wrote the Bible_ by Richard Elliott Friedman In his _The Bible With Sources Revealed_ , Friedman shows, using different type faces, how the redactor during the exile spliced together the scrolls from the several sources. Since each source had its own constituency, the final redactor simply cut them up and sewed the pieces back together to make one combined scroll. This is how, for example, we have two different and conflicting creation stories in the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis: 1.1-2.3 comes from P, and 2.4b-25 comes from J.

Friedman has shown in another book, _The Hidden Book in the Bible,_ that the collected J material actually would comprise a complete work. This J material is found in much of Genesis and some of Exodus and Numbers. The E material is found in much of Genesis and Exodus. The remainder of Genesis and Exodus came from what is known as the Priestly, or P, source. The P material is found in much of Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers and virtually all of Leviticus. Friedman makes a strong argument that P was written by temple priests in Jerusalem during the reign of King Hezekiah (727-697 BCE), but conventional wisdom has it written during the 6th-century exile.

The gap of at least four centuries between the earliest known writing about the exodus and the actual event should be noted. Studies of Egyptian records and by archeologists have shown that the events as recounted in Exodus are completely unsupported by any evidence, so we are left to try to imagine what actually happened in the Sinai, as recounted earlier.

The last of the five books is Deuteronomy, written in Jerusalem during the reign of King Josiah (641-609 BCE), and revised during the Babylonian exile. It was written as if it were a series of sermons by Moses recounting the journey across the Sinai and the promise of the land of Canaan to Israel, as well as the ten commandments and the law code that governed religious and social activities. It also contains Moses' blessings and curses for those who keep and break the law, and it ends with Moses' death and burial, praise of Moses as the greatest of prophets, and the insistence that the worship of Yahweh is the only permissible religion.

The Deutonomic history starts with the book of Joshua on the conquest of the Promised Land (shown by archeologists to disagree with most physical evidence) and its division among the twelve tribes. The book of Judges covers the two centuries or so before the establishment of a kingdom. Local governance was carried out by "judges," who provided religious, civil, and military leadership. The kingdom led initially by Saul and then David, is described in the books of Samuel. The first book of Kings starts with the final days of King David and continues with the reign of Solomon, the builder of the first temple, and follows with the division of the kingdom into Israel and Judah. It then describes the initial reigns of the 19 kings of Israel and the 20 kings of Judah and tells the stories of the prophets Elijah and Elisha. The second book of Kings finishes the stories of Elijah and Elisha and the rest of the kings. The story of Israel ends with its destruction by the Assyrians in 722 BCE and the exile of its ten tribes. The Kingdom of Judah endured until 586 BCE when Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar and the leading citizens were taken into exile in Babylonia.

**2.3 The Prophets** The best sources for understanding what was going on during this first-temple period are the stories and books of the prophets. They probably would have formed the core of what Jesus would have absorbed from the Bible before his ministry. The main problems that the prophets of ancient Israel campaigned against were worship of the old Canaanite gods and various kinds of unethical behavior. The former must have been widespread, judging from the constant condemnation by the prophets over several centuries. Excavations of the ruins of Israelite houses dating from those times have revealed numerous figurines that represent these deities.

The important prophets active in the northern kingdom of Israel during the first half of the 8th century were Amos and Hosea. **Amos** originally came from rural Judah, but he was sent by God to admonish the people of Israel for their sins. He found a society that was focused mainly on wealth and prosperity, rather than on the worship of God. **Hosea** was a native northerner and a younger contemporary of Amos. He was active from about 745 to at least 722, the year of the destruction of the northern kingdom. Like Amos, he criticized the people for their lack of fidelity to Yahweh and for their swearing oaths, lying, killing, stealing, and adultery. However, much more so than Amos he brought out the loving compassion of Yahweh and his sorrow at having to punish Israel for its sins. He had strong words against kings, nobles, priests, and other prophets and against the insincere practice of religion.

A bit later, two important prophets were active in the southern kingdom: Isaiah and Micah, the former being by far the more important. The Book of Isaiah is actually a composite book of several different prophets. The first 39 chapters contain the writings of the one called **First Isaiah** or **Isaiah of Jerusalem**. He was active between about 740 and 687 BCE. Some of his oracles are condemnations of the sinful behavior and corruption of Israel (both northern and southern kingdoms), especially of its rulers, and they tell of the punishments to come. The NT evangelists used quotes from this book to tell their stories. The prophet **Micah** came from a rural town about 25 miles southwest of Jerusalem. He was apparently one of the "people of the land," an independent farmer and part of a class that was being exploited by the ruling classes, who were self-serving and corrupt. He castigated them vehemently (Micah 3:2-3):

_You who hate good and love evil; who tear the skin from my people and the flesh from their bones;_ _who eat my people's flesh, strip off their skin and break their bones in pieces; who chop them up like meat for the pan, like flesh for the pot._

In the 7th and 6th centuries, the most important prophet was Jeremiah, a descendent of the Levitical priest Abiathar, one of the two chief priests of King David, who was later banished by King Solomon. Jeremiah was a relentless critic of the leaders, priests, and temple prophets for their injustice and tolerance of idolatry among the people. He made enemies of the temple authorities for publically predicting the destruction of the temple during what has been called his "temple sermon" (Jer 7). In his oracles, he condemned the oppression of the poor and powerless, the widespread adultery and fornication, the worship of pagan statues and idols, and the failure to observe the covenant.

From the book of Jeremiah, the youthful Jesus would have seen that the Israelites had adopted the pagan practice of sacrificing animals as a way of worship, even sometimes including their own children. He would also have seen that, even then, the temple priests had been successful in establishing a monopoly on worship in a way that provided food and income for themselves. Presumably, the heroism of Jeremiah in publically condemning the temple authorities for their corruption and exploitation of the people would have had an impact on him. Jeremiah's charge that they had made God's house a den of robbers was still the case in his own time. Jesus could have had Jeremiah's example in mind when he journeyed south to Jerusalem to confront the temple authorities as the final action of his ministry.

**2.4 The Second-Temple Period** The exile lasted until 537 when the Persians, who had defeated the Babylonians, started to release Israelites back to the now-Persian province of Judea, formerly Judah. This motivated the author of chapters 40-55 of the Book of Isaiah (so-called Second Isaiah) to refer to the Persian King Cyrus as the "anointed" (i.e., "messiah") of Israel. In Judea, what became Judaism carried on as a strictly monotheistic religion, with no further archeological evidence of the veneration of pagan idols found in first-temple-period Israelite houses.

The Achaemenid Persian Empire lasted from about 550 to 331 BCE, when it was conquered by Alexander the Great. This began the Hellenization of the Ancient Near East. When Alexander died in 323 BCE, most of his empire was divided between the Seleucids based in Syria and the Ptolemies in Egypt, and control of Judea was contested by these two dynasties on and off for the next century.

Around 175 BC, an uprising against the Seleucid King Antiochus IV broke out, led by a priest named Mattathias and his five sons, Judah Maccabee and his brothers. Their ultimate victory led to a new dynasty of Jewish kings: the Hasmoneans. It took a quarter-century for them to achieve independence for Judea, the first fourteen years of which were spent in warfare against the Seleucids. Through the Hasmonean era (142-37 BCE), Hellenistic influences continued to permeate every facet of the Judean society.

When the Hasmonian dynasty finally began to fall apart, it was replaced by Roman domination under the general Pompey in 63 BCE. Later, Julius Caesar in 47 BCE made Antipater from Idumea (south of Judea) the procurator (literally "caretaker") of Judea. Antipater was assassinated by a rival, and his son Herod later became the procurator. In 40 BCE, Judea was invaded by Parthians from the east, and Herod fled to Rome and convinced the Senate that he could restore Roman rule in Judea. With Roman support, he returned to Judea and, after some intense fighting, re-conquered Jerusalem and ruled as king from 37 to 4 BCE. He is best known as the builder of the massive second temple in Jerusalem. Current thinking is that Jesus of Nazareth was born a year or two before the death of this Herod the Great.

Herod's taxes and extravagance had impoverished the population, and after his death riots broke out. These led to an extended period of chaos and social disorder in Judea and Galilee that included brigandage as well as a movement for independence. The latter would finally come to a head with the rebellion against Rome in 66 CE. During this time the temple high priests were being appointed, and sometimes deposed, by whichever Roman prefect was in control in Jerusalem. During this time, the conduct of religion was subject to the interests of the Roman governors.

This was the historical context within which the mission of Jesus of Nazareth took place. It was obviously a time in which the concept of _Yisra-El_ , the being ruled by God, had largely become submerged in a very foreign environment. Jesus' challenge would be to return the Jews back to their Israelite heritage.

3. Jesus of Nazareth

**3.1 The Historical Jesus** The two-millennia-old international religion known as Christianity evolved from a Jewish movement originally known as the Way that formed after the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The mission of Jesus was the reconstitution of the people of God, called Israel. The aim of the people of the Way was to continue his mission and to spread the good news that God had raised Jesus from the dead and thus ratified his teachings.

Scholars have been searching for the historical Jesus for generations, but this has been frustrating because of the limited reliability of the sources, which comprise mainly the first three Gospels. Jesus died around the year 30 CE, but the first Gospel was written around the year 70. The actual author is unknown, but the name Mark was assigned to it in the 2nd century. It was written in Greek based mainly on oral accounts that had been handed down over the four decades since the death of Jesus, who presumably spoke in Aramaic, the common language of the people. The Gospel of Mark has a form that would be appropriate for a 90-minute oral presentation that tells the story of Jesus as an itinerant teacher in the Galilee region, his journey down to Jerusalem, and finally the events in the temple that led to his execution.

The next two Gospels were written, again anonymously and in Greek, during the period of the 80's. The authors were later assigned the names Matthew and Luke. They both used Mark as a basis, along with material called Q, presumably a now- lost collection of sayings of Jesus, as well as other material unique to each of the two authors. The designation Q comes from _Quelle,_ the German word for "source". It can be constructed out of Matthew and Luke by taking the sayings of Jesus used by both of them, but not used in Mark. These three Gospels can be compared by viewing them together, as in parallel columns, and are therefore known as the _Synoptic_ Gospels.

The Synoptic Gospels are essentially literary portrayals of the ministry of Jesus, along with two infancy narratives that conflict with each other in most respects. Overall, they appear to be literary analogs of religious paintings. The writers were obviously more interested in theological exposition than in historical accuracy. The Gospels were used for pastoral purposes to suit local needs, and the contexts of events and discourses were so arranged. The attempts to extract the teachings of the true Jesus from the Gospel stories are hindered by the fact that the teachings have been processed by elaboration and supplemental invention in the post-Resurrection communities over the five-plus decades following his death.

This is not to say that we cannot get an adequate understanding of the message of Jesus from the Gospels. It is pretty clear that Jesus extracted from the Hebrew Bible the two great love commandments: from Deuteronomy 6:4,5: _Listen, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is One. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might_ , and from Leviticus 19:18: _You shall love your neighbor as yourself_. He defined who is included in "your neighbor" (even your perceived enemies!) and what loving your neighbor actually entails (feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, etc). With this teaching, he was encouraging the people to become the reconstituted Israel, the people ruled by God. Also, it is widely accepted among biblical scholars that many, if not most, of the short, pithy, memorable sayings and the parables ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels have a high probability of being authentic. That is, he has been accurately portrayed as a teacher of wisdom.

**3.2 Jesus as the Son of God** The earliest surviving reference in the NT that Jesus was the Son of God is found in Paul's epistle to the Romans (1.3), dating from 56/57 CE: Jesus was _descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead ..._ Thus, Jesus is said to become the Son of God at the time of his resurrection.

The next reference comes in the Gospel of Mark (1.9-11) in which a voice came from heaven after Jesus was baptized by John in the River Jordan saying _"You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased."_ This could be taken to indicate that God had adopted Jesus as His Son at that moment, and it would imply that the status of the Jew as the first-born son of God (Ex 4.22) had been individualized in the very personhood of Jesus.

A fundamental development came later when the authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke reported, apparently independently, a different understanding of the divinity of Jesus. Their infancy narratives comprise the first two chapters of both Gospels. Both authors seek to establish that, through the medium of the Holy Spirit, Jesus was the Son of God from the time of his conception. In their details, these two narratives tell very different stories, but they both assert that Jesus was, in effect, the biological Son of God. We can question how this tradition arose and why the two evangelists found it important, independently, to begin their Gospels in this manner. Some clues can be found in the Gospels.

In Matthew 1.18 it is reported that Mary was found to be with child after she was betrothed to Joseph but before they lived together. Matthew 1.19 has Joseph wanting to protect Mary from public disgrace. From Mark, who wrote earlier than Matthew, the people in the synagogue in Nazareth called Jesus the son of Mary, rather than the son of Joseph as would have been customary. Assuming Joseph was a righteous man, Mary would have been considered a wanton woman, and someone other than Joseph would have been considered the father of Jesus.

Given the belief in the divinity of Jesus and the possibility of Mary's reputation being tainted, by the time of the two evangelists this issue had to be confronted from the outset in their Gospels. The idea of a virginal conception by the Holy Spirit could have been part of the tradition by then. We must keep in mind that when these narratives were written, it was considered an article of faith that God had raised Jesus from the dead. In that light, a virginal conception might not seem so extraordinary. Moreover, the evangelists would have known that in Greek mythology gods had been impregnating mortal women for centuries, so the story would not have seemed so far-fetched at that time.

**3.3 The Ministry of Jesus** One could reasonably imagine what the life of Jesus could have been like prior to his ministry. In the Jewish culture, the religious education of children was important, and it would be expected that the mother of Jesus felt an especially great obligation to educate her divine son. (Divine meaning "of or from God.") At some point, she would have had to explain his origin to him and why some people in the village were looking askance at the circumstances of his birth. After exhausting her own resources as a teacher, she would have put him under the tutelage of the rabbis in the local synagogue.

When he became old enough to do a day's work as a _tekton_ (a builder or craftsman) with his putative father, he would have been able to get further instruction in the synagogues at Sepphorus. This was an important Greek city about four miles from Nazareth, where more construction work would presumably have been available than at home. The reading of scrolls at Sepphorus over the next couple of decades could have made him an expert scholar and interpreter of the Bible and the tradition. To get his people to understand that they were supposed to be part of Israel, the people ruled by God, he would have based his teaching on the essential core of the Bible. It appears that he did not convey that ritual practices in and of themselves were the criteria for salvation.

The end of the mission of Jesus came as a consequence of his words and actions when he went down to Jerusalem during the week of the festival of the Passover. He went into the part of the temple area where pilgrims were buying the temple-approved coinage in order to purchase especially pure animals to be sacrificed for them by the priests. It is written that Jesus overturned the tables of the money-changers and used a quote from Jeremiah to say that they had made the temple into a den of robbers.

The Synoptics also say that Jesus predicted his own death to his disciples on the way down to Jerusalem. This would indicate that he knew what would result from his public attack on temple activities. The temple leaders were collaborating with the Roman occupiers, who had actually installed them and who were counting on them to keep the peace in the city. The authorities would have been concerned that an uprising could break out when a prophet who had a following, and preached that the reign of God is coming soon, entered the temple and disrupted public order while hundreds of people were gathering. The high priest apparently had no trouble in getting the Roman procurator to arrest him in the night and execute him as an insurrectionist.

The temple priests would have been telling the people that God resided in the holy of holies and that only the high priest could have access to Him. The animals to be sacrificed as offerings were to atone to God for the sins of the person who had bought the animal. There was nothing here about love of God or love of neighbor. One could see this temple event as the precursor to the great transformation from the temple-based Judaism of the Sadducees to Torah-based Rabbinic Judaism of the Pharisees, and later to Christianity as a separate religion that began to evolve several decades later.

The reports in the Gospels have Jesus reappearing in bodily form after his death. He is reported to have materialized out of nowhere. Thus, the Resurrection does not mean that God re-vivified the original body of Jesus. Rather, it seems to mean that a body could be constructed for him, on demand. This should not cause a problem for the author of the Big Bang. Why the bodily appearances out of nothing? They were the essential demonstrations that Jesus was in fact a divine person. The experience of the resurrection appearances energized the disciples of Jesus to continue his mission. They shared their experiences among themselves and communicated them to increasing numbers of others. This led to the formation and spread of a messianic Jewish movement that later became Christianity.

4. Early Christianity

**4.1 Getting Started** It was not long after the death of Jesus before friction developed between the Greek-speaking and Aramaic-speaking Jewish followers of the _Way_ of Jesus in Jerusalem. The so-called Hellenists were less respectful of the temple cult, and this culminated in the martyrdom of Stephen for denouncing it as idolatry. After that, the Hellenists tended to move away into the diaspora, e.g., to Antioch in Syria, where they proselytized not only diaspora Jews in the synagogues but also gentiles. They baptized gentiles into the Way without requiring them to be circumcised and become Jews. This led to a serious controversy with the conservative followers of Jesus in Jerusalem. It was settled at a kind of summit conference in 47/48 CE between the more liberal apostles Paul and Barnabas, who had been missionaries of the church in Antioch, and Peter and James, the leaders of the church in Jerusalem. From this came the historic decision that gentiles could be invited into the people of God, formerly occupied only by Jews, as long as they followed the prohibitions against adultery and fornication and eating of meat with blood or from improperly slaughtered animals. Thus, the second component of the good news became that God had opened up the Way to the gentiles.

We should recognize the effects of mixing the Hellenistic mentality with that of Judaism, which emphasized mainly how one should behave. In contrast, Hellenism emphasized how one should think, what one should believe. This produced in the newly forming church a plethora of theological speculation, starting with Gnosticism and then on to movements like Marcionism, Montanism, Monarchianism, Donatism, Arianism, Nestorianism, etc., none of which ever made it into orthodox Christainity.

The apostle Paul was the first theologian of what became Christianity that we know of. He, along with his contemporaries, took the Genesis story of the Garden of Eden literally, and this laid the groundwork for the later development of the doctrine of original sin by Augustine. Paul apparently put together the concept of temple sacrifice as a sin offering, coupled with the fact that Jesus was killed at Passover, to give an explanation of his death as atonement to God for the sins of humankind since the sin of Adam. Paul's idea would fit in with his belief that his era was about to end and that Jesus, now the Messiah, the Christ, would soon return to judge the living and the dead. The theology of atonement was later greatly elaborated by Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109). It is difficult to imagine that a loving God would demand the sacrifice of His only Son to assuage His anger over the sins of humankind.

If not an atonement for the sins of humankind, then what could we mean by the redemption carried out by Jesus? We could think of the redemption in the sense of a rescue from the corruption of the culture in which the descendants of the Israelites found themselves. This rescue came from Jesus' call for the positive actions involved in loving one's neighbor that he added on to the prohibitions of bad behavior contained in the Decalogue. For those who followed his teachings, he would have been "taking away the sins of the(ir) world." Jesus' self-sacrificial confrontation with the Roman collaborators in the temple, and then the defeat of his execution by his being raised from the dead, could be seen as the most effective way to perpetuate his teachings.

**4.2 The Eucharist** The people of the Way met often in small groups to remember Jesus in a Eucharistic, or thanksgiving, gathering. The early Eucharists were modeled on the "table fellowship" of Jesus and were in anticipation of the eschatological banquet to be celebrated with Jesus upon his imminent return. It was in the form of a family meal. Of course, there was no priest in attendance, but rather a presider who came out of the group and led the prayers. Since households were normally organized by women, it would be hard to imagine that women did not preside at the Eucharist meals on many occasions. In any case, the presider was not acting as a surrogate for Jesus at the Last Supper, so the gender of the presider would not have been an issue. In no sense was the Lord's Supper meant to be a replay of the self-sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.

It is believed that this form of Eucharist celebration persisted through the years when Christian rites had to be carried out in private to avoid persecution. After Christianity was made legal by Constantine's Edict of Milan in 313, the rites could become public in places of worship that could accommodate larger numbers of people. The communal meal began to fall into disuse. Public worship evolved from Roman pagan rites into something like the modern Mass. It was conducted by a priest, not the gathered people, and the theme of a sacrifice was added, echoing the form of an ancient religious ceremony.

George Mendenhall gives an interpretation of the Eucharistic meal as a new covenant bound by an oath, as in ancient times, that saw the use of a ritual consumption of bread and wine to ratify a binding agreement. The idea of the Eucharist as equivalent to the taking of an oath comes from the fact that the word "remembrance" (the Greek _anamnesis_ ) would have been spoken in Hebrew as _zakar_ ( _dakar_ in Aramaic), which commonly means remembrance, but in those days could also mean "to swear an oath." Mendenhall gives examples of this second meaning in the Hebrew Bible.

Thus, if Jesus had used _zakar_ in this archaic sense, he would have meant that the ritual eating and drinking represented a covenant oath of fidelity to himself. Mendenhall notes that in the description by Pliny the Younger, writing to the Roman emperor Trajan about the ritual of the Christians, he used the word _sacramentum_ , which was normally used to refer to the soldier's oath of loyalty to the emperor. This alternative meaning of "remembrance" as "swearing" is characteristic of the Semitic languages, but not of Greek, so it is easy to see how it would have been overlooked by the writers of the NT.

**4.3 The Status of Women** A defining characteristic of the Greco-Roman culture was social stratification and a strong sense of order. In the society of imperial Rome, harmony in the state and in civil society was connected directly to harmony and order in each household. In this society, slaves, women, and children were placed at the bottom of the social order, and the public domain was generally reserved for men, with women relegated to domestic affairs. Present-day scholars refer to this as the "household code," and in those days it was considered to be essential for the stability of the Empire.

In the last third of the 1st century CE the Church began to receive wider public notice. At the same time, proto-Christians were forming communities separate from the synagogues. Thus they began to lose the "cover" that had been provided by Judaism. As practitioners of an ancient and respected religion, Jews were dispensed from the pagan practices of the Empire. As Christianity emerged as a new religion, it was subject to criticism from the gentile communities on the grounds that the Christians met in secret and were rumored to be cannibals, eating flesh and drinking blood. Because they referred to each other as "brother" and "sister," they were rumored to be involved in incestuous relationships. Therefore, it is not surprising that Christians felt it necessary to be seen as respecting the traditions of the Greco-Roman society in which they were embedded and in which they wanted to expand. The prominent role of women in the Church, as evidenced in the final chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Romans where he greets and honors several women and calls Mary and Junia apostles. This all became a casualty of the assimilation process.

5. From Antiquity Through the Early Middle Ages

**5.1 Christianity as a New Religion** Some scholars say that the term _Christian_ arose in Antioch during the last few decades of the 1st century. It was applied to the mixture of Jews and gentiles who followed the Way and considered Jesus to be the Messiah, the Christ, leading them back into the reign of God. As this movement spread, it found itself in competition with the unconverted Jews, especially with regard to the "God fearers," the gentiles who had associated themselves with the synagogues but had not become Jews. They were prime candidates for conversion to the Way, and the loss of their support was a problem for the synagogues. As the converts were increasingly separated from the synagogues in some cities, it was inevitable that the Way, formally a Jewish sect, would eventually separate from Judaism.

As the number and size of the Christian communities grew, they found it necessary to become organized, first using elders – presbyters – as done in the synagogues. Then, some elders became overseers as well – _episkopos_ – and this evolved into the separate office called _bishop_ that was separate from a presbyter and higher in rank. Bishops gradually expanded their authority over multiple assemblies, and then over entire cities. By the early 2nd century, a man named Ignatius was being called the bishop of Antioch. Over the next few centuries, the bishop of Rome was gradually accorded leadership over the other bishops, presumably because of his location in the capital city of the Empire. In particular, he acted more and more in an appellate role, settling disagreements that arose between other bishops.

During this time, Christianity was not a legally recognized religion in the Roman Empire, and there were occasional local outbreaks of persecution, along with empire-wide persecutions around the years 250 and 300. This was also a time of theological speculation having to do with the nature of Christ and his relationship with God. Two contradictory ideas in particular were to cause great trouble for both the church and the Roman Empire. Arius (250-336), a presbyter in Alexandria, saw Jesus as a created being and thus subordinate to the Father, although of similar substance – _homoiousias_. This was opposed by Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, who claimed that Jesus was of the same substance – _homoousias –_ as the Father. These two competing views became a source of disorder in the Empire, to the point where the Emperor Constantine felt it necessary to convene the Council of Nicea in 325. Here, Arianism was declared heretical and the _homoousias_ view was built into the first official Creed.

In 381 the Emperor Theodosius summoned the first Council of Constantinople, which outlawed Arianism and made Christianity the state religion. It also defined the doctrine of the Trinity comprising three equal personae sharing the same substance, and it formulated the creed used in the Mass today, which really should be called the Niceno-Constantinopolitian Creed.

The office of the Bishop of Rome became predominant in 440, when **Leo I** **(440-61)** became Pope. He emphasized his unique role as bearer of the authority of Peter and asserted his universal jurisdiction over the Christian church. Leo adopted the title of Pontifex Maximus, which had been held by the high priest of the College of Pontiffs, the main priesthood in ancient Rome. The pontiffs of Rome had been responsible for providing the bridge between the gods and men. Probably the most notable pontifex maximus was Julius Caesar, who was elected to the office in 63 BC and held it until his death in 44 BC. Caesar Augustus held it from 12 BC until his death in 14 AD, and after that it was held by whomever was emperor at the time.

As the 5th century wore on, the western half of the Roman Empire gradually lost control of its territory in its struggles against the Germanic tribes along its long northern border. The last Western emperor was finally deposed by the Germanic warrior Odoacer in September 476. During this time, the bishops in the Roman administrative districts called dioceses gradually took on more and more of a secular governing role. The only Roman Emperor left standing was in Constantinople in the East, so there was a vacancy to be filled in the former Western Empire. This job went by default to the sitting bishop of Rome.

**5.2 The Papacy in Disorder** The Church functioned as the unifying institution that guided Western Europe through the Middle Ages, roughly the 5th to the 15th centuries, in what became known as _Christendom_. It was the primary source of education, mainly in theology, law, and medicine. Through all that time, popes contested with kings and emperors for political dominance. A document known as the Donation of Constantine, probably written in the 8th century, played a major role in the power of the papacy. It was supposedly an imperial decree by which Constantine gave to the pope authority over Rome and the western part of the Roman Empire. It was not until 1439-40 that a philological analysis by Lorenzo Valla in Italy proved conclusively that the document was a forgery. A high point in medieval papal power was probably the coronation of Charlemagne as the first Holy Roman Emperor by Pope **Leo III (795-816)** on Christmas day in the year 800 in Rome.

The papacy during the Middle Ages had become a tool for political power in Rome, and it was a highly contested position. Things began to turn ugly with the assassination of Pope **John VIII (872-82)**. Of the next 23 popes, eight served for one year or less. Of the total, six are thought or known to have been murdered; three were deposed and imprisoned. After Pope **Formosus (891-96)** died in his bed of supposedly natural causes, Pope **Stephen VI (896-97)** had Formosus' body exhumed and put on trial for perjury and for having left his post as bishop of his former diocese to become Pope. After the corpse was found guilty, it was thrown into the Tiber (but later hauled out and returned to its tomb). Later, Pope Stephen was deposed and thrown into prison, where he was eventually strangled.

From 897 to 903 there were five popes, ending with **Leo V (903)** , who lasted only a month before being deposed and thrown into prison by an antipope called Christopher. The latter was deposed and imprisoned a year later by the Roman aristocrat Pope **Sergius III (904-11)** , who disposed of both Leo and Christopher by having them strangled.

The story as told by J. J. Norwich in _Absolute Monarchs, A History of the Papacy,_ gets steadily more bizarre. The next period has been call the "pornocracy," the central character of which was Marozia, born around 890, and alleged to have been the mistress of Pope Sergius III. This period extended through the papacy of **John XII (955-63)** , who, according to Norwich, became renowned for his almost spectacular debauchery.

After John XII, the Emperor, Otto I, chose **Leo VII (963-64)** , who was not accepted by the people of Rome. **Benedict V (964)** was then elected but was forced to abdicate and was replaced with **John XIII (965-72)** by Emperor Otto. Of the next 17 popes, eight were chosen by successive German Emperors Otto I, Otto II, Otto III, and Henry III. The Crescentii family of Rome chose four popes and two antipopes, and the Tusculum family, rivals of the Crescentii, chose three popes.

The papacy of the last of these, the reformist Pope **Leo IX (1049-54)** , chosen by Emperor Henry III, ended as the Great Schism was getting underway. There had long been cultural differences between the Greek East, which conferred ecclesiastical authority on ecumenical councils, and the Latin West, which placed all authority in the pope. An underlying issue was the famous _Filioque_ controversy. In the Latin-rite form of the Nicene Creed, the Holy Spirit was said to proceed from the Father and the Son, whereas in the original Greek text used in the East the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father only.

The final dispute between Pope Leo and the new Patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius, was over whether Latin-rite services should be allowed in the East and Greek-rite services be allowed in the West. Before his death, Pope Leo sent a trio of prelates to Constantinople to negotiate the impasse, but, after Leo had died, they formally excommunicated Cerularius with an unauthorized Bull laid upon the altar of Hagia Sophia. This was the final act in the drama that culminated in the final East-West schism of 1054.

6. The Gregorian Reform and the Western Schism

**6.1 The Papacy Becomes a Monarchy** For the next quarter century the dominant figure in Church history was a former monk, Hildebrand, the Cardinal Archdeacon of Rome. He became the _de facto_ leader of the reform-minded Roman cardinals and the effective power behind the papacy. These cardinals were intent on taking over the election of popes, as opposed to control by the German imperial court on the one hand and the Roman aristocracy on the other. Pope **Nicholas II (1058-61)** had decreed that thenceforth only cardinal bishops could elect a new pope. This was the procedure followed for the election of Pope **Alexander II (1061-73)**.

After Alexander died, Hildebrand was elected as Pope **Gregory VII (1073-85)** after being hastily ordained a priest. In his _Dictatus Papae_ , published in 1075, were listed the prerogatives of the papacy in twenty-seven propositions. These included the claim that no one could judge the pope and that "the Roman Church has never erred and never will err to all eternity according to the testimony of holy scripture," based on Matthew 16:18-19: _And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, ... whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven._ Another claim was that the pope could depose emperors. It was also declared that a duly elected pope is automatically a saint by the merits of St. Peter. He asserted that the Church must be supreme upon Earth, and the pope must be supreme in the Church. A pope's word was divine law, and popes must be obeyed under pain of serious sin. Popes became what Eamon Duffy calls in his _Saints and Sinners_ the supreme court of Christendom, and legal decisions, called decretals, became common in the 12th Century. This all brought stability and order to Western Europe.

As Richard McBrien writes in _Lives of the Popes_ , Gregory turned the Church into a temporal power in the form of a legalistic monarchy. He ruled against clerical marriage and simony (the purchase of an ecclesial office), as well as the investiture of a bishop or abbot with the symbols of office (the pastoral ring and staff) by any lay person. He also required an oath of allegiance to the pope by every appointed bishop. He ruled that henceforth only the Bishop of Rome could be referred to as a _pope_. (The title "Pope" was from the early 3rd century an honorific designation used for _any_ bishop in the West. From the early 6th century, it began to be confined in the West to the Bishop of Rome.)

After Gregory condemned investiture of bishops by laymen, he was declared deposed at a Council at Worms by Henry IV, who was then king of the Germans. Gregory retaliated by excommunicating Henry, thereby endangering Henry's right to rule. The excommunication was lifted only after Henry met Gregory in Canossa in January 1077 to beg forgiveness. This rapprochement lasted only until 1080 when Gregory again excommunicated Henry and backed Rudolf of Swabia as king. Unfortunately for Gregory, Rudolph then died, and Henry again declared Gregory to be deposed and appointed the Archbishop of Ravenna as (anti)pope Clement III.

In 1084 Henry's forces occupied Rome after a two-year siege, and anti-pope Clement III was installed in the Lateran Palace. Pope Gregory took refuge in Castel Sant'Angelo. Clement then crowned Henry as the Holy Roman Emperor. However, Normans from southern Italy under Robert Guiscard came to the rescue and freed Gregory, and Henry departed north with Clement in the face of superior forces. Unfortunately, the Normans then proceeded to sack Rome, thereby completely losing the loyalty of the surviving people. This necessitated Gregory's leaving the city along with the Normans upon their return south. Thus, the Pope who would be remembered as one of the most powerful of all time spent the rest of his days in exile in a palace in Salerno.

The investiture controversy continued to fester until the fifth pope after Gregory VII, Pope **Callistus II (1119-24)** , managed to negotiate the Concordat of Worms in 1122 with Henry V. Here, the Emperor renounced his authority to invest bishops with their church-related authority, as distinct from the assets that went along with the office. This unified the international control of the church in the pope and it enabled church reforms to be enforced by popes. Emperors continued to have control over assets of bishops, like titles, incomes, properties, etc.

The first of the holy wars known as the Crusades, aimed at restoring Christian access to the holy places in and around Jerusalem, was called by Pope Urban II in 1095. It started prematurely with the People's Crusade, comprising mainly peasants. They began with a massacre of Jews in the Rhineland in the spring of 1096, and most of them were killed when they were ambushed by the Turks near Nicea. The peasants were followed by an army of nobles who managed to capture Jerusalem, where they massacred the Jewish and Muslim defenders in 1099, having massacred the Muslim inhabitants of Antioch along the way. After that, there were a total of eight more crusades with varying results, ending with the last major attempt to take the Holy Land in 1270, which ended in failure.

A total of 13 popes followed Callistus II before the twelfth century ended with the reign of Duke Lothar of Segni, as Pope **Innocent III (1198-1216)** , one of the most dominant popes of the Middle Ages. He was a Roman nobleman educated in theology in Paris and law at Bologna who came to see himself as the 'vicar of Jesus Christ,' and he undertook extensive church reforms. Duffy writes that he had an exalted view of the supremacy of a pope over an emperor, and he believed that Christ left to Peter 'the government not only of the Church but of the whole world.' He believed that the Pope was 'lower than God, but higher than man: one who judges all, but is judged by no one.'

Innocent's international activities included the excommunication of the Emperor Otto of Brunswick and the crowning as Emperor of Frederick II, who accommodated Innocent's wishes. He also supported King John of England in his domestic struggles by declaring the Magna Carta null and void. He undertook a number of pastoral and doctrinal reforms at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, including the definition of the doctrine of Transubstantiation. He strongly promoted orthodoxy and encouraged the crusade against the Albigensian heresy, which led to the massacre of the Cathars in 1209, as well as the Fourth Crusade, which was intended to retake Jerusalem, but instead wound up with the sack of Constantinople in 1204 and the final break between the Eastern and Western churches.

For much of the 13th century, popes, a number of whom were Bologna-trained lawyers, became increasingly involved in international politics. **Honorius III (1216-27)** was notable for approving the Dominican Order in 1216. His successor, **Gregory IX (1227-41)** , promulgated a collection of papal decretals that served as the basis of canon law for the next seven centuries, and he made the burning of heretics by secular authorities part of canon law in 1231. In the 1230's he established the papal Inquisition, which became the international tribunal aimed at stamping out heresy.

Fourteen popes reigned between Gregory IX and **Boniface VIII (1294-1303),** who is noted for imprisoning his predecessor, Clement V (1294), a reluctant Benedictine hermit, for having resigned the papacy after five months. Boniface is also noted for his bull _Unam Sanctam_ , which stated: "...There is one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, outside of which there is neither salvation nor remission of sins..." "...Indeed we declare, say, pronounce, and define that it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff."

**6.2 The Western Schism** The ensuing 14th century was the time not only of the Hundred-Years War and the Black Death, but also of a near-death experience for the church. In 1305, a Frenchman was elected pope as **Clement V (1305-14)** and, under pressure from King Philip IV of France, moved the papacy to Avignon in 1309. This caused Clement to lose the income from the Papal States, so to support the running of the church he had to raise funds by taxation, selling of church offices, and other means. This all antagonized the faithful and made the church appear greedy and materialistic. The fifth pope after him, **Urban V (1362-70)** , moved the papacy back to Rome in 1367, but then returned it to Avignon in 1370 under pressure from French cardinals. His successor, **Gregory XI (1371-78)** , moved it back to Rome again, but he died in 1378. An Italian, **Urban VI (1378-89)** , was then elected in haste in the face of popular pressure. The French cardinals declared his election to have been invalid and elected a Frenchman as Pope Clement VII, who went back to Avignon in 1379. With two popes, one in Rome and the other in Avignon, the _Western Schism_ had begun, and it lasted until 1417.

The Council of Pisa tried to settle this in 1409 by deposing both Benedict XIII in Avignon and Gergory XII in Rome and electing in their place Alexander V, but the other two refused to step down. Finally, the Council of Constance in 1415-18 elected still another pope, **Martin V (1417-1431),** and the other three agreed to give up. The bishops at Constance got Martin to agree to hold a council regularly and also that a council would be the ultimate authority in the church. However, Martin reneged, and by making deals with European rulers, giving them control of church properties and appointments, he gathered enough support to be recognized all over Europe as the ruler of the church.

7. The Renaissance and the Reformation

**7.1 The Renaissance Popes** By the 15th century, ancient Rome was an overgrown collection of ruins. The city was rebuilt by a succession of popes, starting with Martin V, who restored the Lateran basilica in 1425 using materials salvaged from old churches. His successor, **Eugenius IV (1431-47)** , had a stormy papacy in conflicts with several European kings as well as towns in the Papal States and with the people of the city of Rome, from which he was banished for nine years until 1443. He also engaged in a long conflict with the Council of Basel, which had been called by Martin V just before he died. Eugenius condemned it in 1437, and it finally disbanded in 1449.

Eugenius' successor **Nicholas V (1447-55)** was seen as a great Humanist pope. He founded the Vatican library and was devoted to the rebuilding of Rome. He restored the Vatican finances with the great pilgrimage of 1450-1, to which pilgrims flocked from all over Europe. Duffy has characterized his work as laying the program for the Renaissance papacy. Not so salutary, however, are his bulls that effectively gave the Portuguese the rights to acquire slaves along the African coast by force or trade. The following 16 years saw three popes, who mainly tried to organize crusades against the Turks and recover Constantinople, but there was no support for this.

The patronage of the arts was carried forward by Francesco de Rovere, who became Pope **Sixtus IV (1471-84)** and, surprisingly for a Franciscan theologian, turned out to be a lavish spender and builder. His greatest contribution was the commissioning the Sistine Chapel. Sixtus engaged in the nepotism that was common in the day, making six of his nephews cardinals, each of which was blessed with valuable benefices. One of them was a leader of the failed "Pazzi conspiracy," which tried to assassinate Lorenzo Medici and his brother Giuliano and take over Florence. Lorenzo was wounded but survived; Giuliano did not. After the hanging of the Archbishop of Pisa, a main organizer of the plot, Sixtus followed with an interdict and a two-year war against Florence.

After Sixtus came Pope **Innocent VIII (1484-92)** , whose illegitimate children lived with him in the Vatican. He arranged to have his son marry a daughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent and thus to ally himself with the Medicis. Innocent was guilty of flagrant simony, raising money to finance his opulent lifestyle by selling offices in the Curia. He was also noted for his condemnation of witchcraft in 1484 and his support for the execution of "witches" in Germany.

Innocent's Spanish successor, Roderigo Borgia, Pope **Alexander VI (1492-1503)** , carried on the tradition of nepotism in grand style. He is said to have had nine illegitimate children by at least three women, and he married his daughters off to various princes. As Pope, he is believed to have had a number of cardinals poisoned so that he could take over their assets. Also, as Pope, when he was in his sixties, he lived openly with his latest mistress, Giulia Farnese. In 1503, Alexander VI granted to the rulers of Castille the same rights to conquer and enslave in the New World that Nicholas V had earlier granted to the rulers of Portugal for their conquests in Africa.

**Julius II (1503-1513)** , who followed Alexander VI, was an even more lavish patron of the arts than his uncle Sixtus and is the one who began the building of the new St. Peter's basilica on the site of the original church built by Constantine. In addition, Julius, who had fathered three daughters as a cardinal, is characterized by Duffy as a 'ferocious and enthusiastic warrior' who personally led his troops against rebellious towns. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was his commissioning of Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. However, he is perhaps most remembered for his aggressive selling of indulgences to finance his patronage of the arts.

One of the most consequential of this line of popes was the successor to Julius, Pope **Leo X (1513-21)** , son of Lorenzo de Medici, who became a cardinal at age thirteen and who secured his place in history by continuing the sale of indulgences to help pay for the construction of St. Peter's basilica and other extravagant spending. The consequences of his fundraising efforts helped lay the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation.

**7.2 The Church Breaks Apart** The most famous reformer, of course, was the Augustinian monk, Martin Luther, who started his campaign against indulgences, calling them an ecclesiastical hoax. This gradually turned into a wholesale attack on the pope and the clerical system. Aided by the newly invented printing press and his translation of the Bible into German, he turned much of Northern Europe against the medieval church. Pope Leo condemned Luther's preaching and excommunicated him, but he failed to comprehend the seriousness of the growing schism. His successor, Pope **Hadrian VI (1522-3)** , a devout reformer from Utrecht who had been the Grand Inquisitor of Spain, did recognize the problem but underestimated the impact of Luther's message. His admonitions and threats of reprisals failed to deter the new reform movement.

Hadrian's successor was Giulio de Medici, the bastard son of Guiliano de Medici, who was accepted by Lorenzo the Magnificent as his grandson and was made a cardinal. He was an able advisor to his uncle Leo X, but as Pope **Clement VII (1523-34)** he was less successful. He was indecisive and shifted back and forth between Emperor Charles V and Francis I of France. After German troops sacked Rome and the Pope wound up as a prisoner in the Castel Sant' Angelo, he came to terms with Charles V and actually crowned him Emperor in 1530, but Protestantism marched on. It reached England in 1533 when King Henry VIII was excommunicated over his divorce of Catherine of Aragon, who happened to be the devoted aunt of Charles V, and his remarriage to Anne Boleyn.

The successor to Clement VII, Alessandro Farnese (the brother of Alexander VI's last mistress) as Pope **Paul III (1534-49)** was a study in extreme contrasts. This Roman nobleman was an urbane and accomplished diplomat in the court of Clement VII, but with his mistress he fathered four children, to whom he later provided properties in the Papal States. He built himself an art-filled opulent palace in Rome and made his two teenage grandsons his first cardinals. He also provided lavish entertainments for the people in Rome.

**7.3 Trent and the Counter Reformation** On the other side of the ledger, Pope Paul authorized the formation of the Society of Jesus in 1540, and he was committed to church reform and took the decrees of the Fifth Lateran Council seriously. He had parted company with his mistress in 1513 and, contrary to the practice of many curial cardinals, actually presented himself for ordination to the priesthood in 1519. He called the Council of Trent in 1545, which, by the time it ended in 1563 had reformed the church in terms of both doctrine and practice. It called for proper education and formation of clergy in seminaries and revised the organization of the church administration. This set the process of church reform on an unstoppable path.

Paul's successor was Giovanni del Monte as **Julius III (1550-5)** , who reconvened the Council in 1551 but suspended it in 1552 in the face of political and religious chaos in Europe. He was followed by the dreaded 79-year-old Cardinal Caraffa, who had previously been allowed to set up a Roman Inquisition, as Pope **Paul IV (1555-9)**. Duffy characterizes him as the most hated pope of the century. He refused to reconvene the Council of Trent and stepped up the Roman Inquisition, which went so far as to arrest and imprison the Cardinal Primate of Spain, and he later went to war with Spain. He introduced the Index of Forbidden Books in 1557. It banned an extraordinarily wide range of books – anything that he thought was insufficiently Catholic. He herded the Jews of Rome into ghettos, forcing them to sell their properties to Christians, requiring them to wear yellow headgear. He ordered the burning all the copies of the Talmud that could be rounded up. When he died, Rome erupted in a riot of celebration, and mobs destroyed the offices of the Inquisition.

The next Pope was an affable lawyer from Bologna, **Pius IV (1559-65)** , who had fathered three illegitimate sons and who practiced nepotism like the best of them. He was fortunate in that one of his nephews was the distinguished Carlo Borromeo, an able and committed reformer, who became his closest advisor. Pius reconvened the Council of Trent in January 1562, and confirmed its decrees after it adjourned in December 1564. He restricted the power of the Inquisition and cut the Index down to size. He also carried on the Renaissance tradition of supporting artists and scholars and enriching Rome with more fine buildings.

After Pius IV came a Dominican, Michele Ghislieri, **Pius V (1566-72)** , a dedicated reformer who emulated the behavior of Paul IV. He toughened the Inquisition and was unusually harsh in his treatment of Jews, banning them from the Papal States except for the Roman ghetto and another in Ancona for commercial reasons. He declared Elizabeth I of England illegitimate in 1570 and attempted to depose her. In 1568 Pius V added to the list of condemnations for crimes against the church such actions as calling for a general council against the Pope, the banishment by a ruler of any cardinal, bishop, legate, or nuncio, and the institution of criminal proceedings against a member of the clergy. He advocated and lived a simple personal life and he tried to eliminate things like adultery, prostitution, sodomy, and nudes in paintings, for example. His white Dominican habit became the standard dress for subsequent popes.

Next came another lawyer, **Gregory XIII (1572-85)**. He enlarged and endowed the Jesuit College in Rome, which was later renamed the Gregorian University, and he founded other colleges and seminaries. These institutions produced priests who then went out as missionaries to re-evangelize Europe for Catholicism. He also promoted the decrees of the Council of Trent and general church reform. Gregory supported the French Wars of Religion financially, and he celebrated the massacre of thousands of Calvinist Huguenots in 1572 by ordering a solemn _Te Deum_ in thanksgiving.

Gregory XIII is most remembered for his revision of the Julian calendar in 1582. The new Gregorian calendar was welcomed by astronomers and scientists, but was bitterly opposed by Protestants, who saw it as the work of the devil. It was outlawed in Denmark and Holland and in the Protestant parts of Switzerland and Germany. England did not accept it until 1752.

**7.4 Christians at War With Each Other** After Gregory XIII came a Franciscan friar named Felice Peretti, a former grand inquisitor who became **Sixtus V (1585-90)**. He encouraged Catholic rulers to go to war against Protestants and offered to help finance the Spanish Armada against England. He brought law and order to the Papal States after a two-year campaign in which thousands of brigands were publically executed. He limited the number of cardinals to seventy and required all new bishops, archbishops, and patriarchs to come to Rome before starting their ministries and to make regular _ad limina_ visits to Rome to report to the Pope on their respective dioceses. He also carried forward the redevelopment of the city of Rome to such an extent that it became the leading city in Europe. Sixtus reorganized the Curia into fifteen separate congregations, each responsible for a particular function in the administration of the Papal States or in the spiritual work of the papacy, such as the Index, the Inquisition, supervision of bishops, etc. He also developed the diplomatic corps by appointing nuncios to various governments. In general, Sixtus made the papacy the analog of the European monarchies.

The sixteen months after the death of Sixtus V saw a succession of three short-lived popes of no particular significance. They were followed by Pope **Clement VIII (1592-1605)**. He was a pious man who added books by Jews to an enlarged Index of condemned writings and encouraged the Inquisition, which sent more than thirty heretics to the stake during his reign, including the former Dominican Giordano Bruno, whose statue still stands on the Campo de' Fiori.

After Leo XI, who only lasted for 26 days in 1605, came Camillo Borghese, Pope **Paul V (1605-21)** , who helped finance the international Catholic army of Emperor Ferdinand II in the first major Catholic victory in the run-up to the Thirty Years War. This helped to contain the Protestant expansion in central Europe. The Borghese family became quite wealthy during his pontificate, and this led to the building of palaces, churches, fountains, and picture galleries as well as the completion of the facade of St Peter's. He censured Galileo in 1616 because of his heretical theory that the earth revolves around the sun. He also put Copernicus' treatise on the Index of Forbidden Books. He is the last pope who ever tried to assert his authority over a secular government by threat of interdict. This tactic met with an embarrassing failure in Paul's dispute with Venice in 1606-07 over the city's right to assign permits for church buildings and to arrest clergy who had committed crimes.

Paul's successor, **Gregory XV (1621-23)** , established the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith as well as the present procedures for papal elections that require a closed conclave, a secret ballot, and a two-thirds majority vote. He continued to support the Emperor and the German Catholic League financially in the Thirty Years War. For a while it looked like the Counter Reformation was going to triumph over Protestantism. However, the war would end in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia, which finalized the partition of the empire between the Catholic and Protestant factions.

After Gregory came Maffeo Barberini as Pope **Urban VIII (1623-44)**. He is remembered for suppressing the teachings of Galileo, who had made the mistake of defending the Copernican heliocentric theory by writing a set of dialogues that implicitly put the Pope in a bad light. This cost Galileo his freedom for the rest of his life, although he did manage to evade execution by the Inquisition. Urban VIII was a profligate patron of music and the arts, who managed to leave the papacy mired in debt. His most famous client was Bernini, builder of the monumental _baldacchino_ over the papal throne and altar in St. Peter's. He was also noted for lavishing papal resources on his family, and he acquired the Castel Gandolfo as a summer residence.

Pope **Innocent X (1644-55)** is noted for his denouncement of the Peace of Westphalia, a series of treaties that ended the Thirty Years War. It allowed rulers to independently decide on their nations' religious practices. Protestants and Catholics were redefined as equal before the law, and Calvinism was given legal recognition. Pope Innocent called it "null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time."

8. The Enlightenment and the Industrial Age

**8.1 A Time of Relative Peace** Innocent was followed by **Alexander VII (1655-67)** , a quiet, scholarly, and deeply spiritual man who supported the foreign missions, especially in China, where he sanctioned Chinese rites and dispensed clergy from having to pray the divine office in Latin. **Clement IX (1667-69)** was most noted for his opposition to Jansenism, which emphasized original sin, human depravity, predestination, and the necessity of divine grace. Clement X (1670-76) was largely ineffectual, according to Norwich, but he did nevertheless canonize an unusually large number of saints.

Benedetto Odescalchi, Pope **Innocent XI (1676-89)** , is generally considered to have been a truly great pope, characterized by personal integrity, practical skills, and lavish generosity to the poor. He worked on raising educational standards for the clergy and laity, brought the papal finances back into balance, and strongly disapproved of religious persecution, particularly French King Louis XIV's treatment of the Huguenots. The Pope carried on a decade-long political battle with Louis XIV over the king's encroachment on the rights of the church, and this rift between Rome and Paris lasted through the rest of the century.

Nepotism and a lavish papal life style came back into style with the election of Pope **Alexander VIII (1689-91)** , a former grand inquisitor of Rome. He tried unsuccessfully to reconcile with King Louis XIV. On his deathbed he condemned the king's efforts to enforce the Gallican Articles, which denied papal authority in temporal matters and asserted the ancient rights and liberties of the French church and the superiority of general councils over popes.

His successor, Pope **Innocent XII (1691-1700)** , another great pope, prohibited nepotism in all forms, reformed the judicial system and the administration of Rome and the Papal States, and treated the poor and the needy as his primary concern. He also managed to negotiate peace with King Louis XIV after the decades-long deadlock. He got the Vatican finances under control and was thereby able to end the sale of church offices.

The next four popes were not particularly illustrious. **Clement XI (1700-21),** under constant pressure from King Louis XIV, worked against Jansenism. He promoted foreign missions but tried to suppress Chinese rites, which the Jesuits resisted. He was generally ineffectual. **Innocent XIII (1721-24)** was likewise rather unproductive, continuing to try to get the Jesuits in China to stop allowing Chinese rites. **Benedict XIII (1724-30)** , seventy-six years old when elected, was a generous man who lived a simple life and generally ignored foreign affairs. He banned the lotteries in the Papal States, but he was very badly served by his corrupt chancellor, Cardinal Coscia, who ran the Vatican deeply into debt. **Clement XII (1730-40)** was seventy-eight when elected and was in poor health. He revived the state lotteries, allowed paper money, and tried to expand trade. This enabled him to fund beautification projects in Rome, including the famous Trevi fountain.

A blessing came with the election of Prospero Lambertini, **Benedict XIV (1740-58)** , who is characterized by Duffy as a 'genial, able, and attractive practitioner of eighteenth-century papal statecraft having high intelligence, boundless tact, bubbling geniality, and civilized efficiency.' Benedict supported science, seminary education, and a host of practical Church reforms, and he protected reform-minded historians and theologians. He avoided direct confrontation with secular rulers, while working quietly to promote the practical working conditions of the Church. He signed concordats with a number of nations, even ceding most church appointments to the crown in Spain. He wrote the first-ever papal encyclical – on the duties of bishops – in particular that they must actually live in their dioceses. Horace Walpole called him "A priest without insolence or interest, a prince without favorites, a pope without nephews." All of Rome mourned his death on May 3, 1758.

His successor, **Clement XIII (1758-69)** was seen as a kind-hearted, generous man, but lacking in self-confidence. His papacy was taken up mainly with his trying to fend off the efforts of the Bourbon rulers and the Marquis of Pombal in Portugal to disband the Jesuits, whom they considered a threat for being too numerous and ambitious and too aggressive in meddling in international affairs. They were expelled first from Portugal and then from France in 1764 and from Spain, Sicily, and Naples in 1767. Clement managed to avoid suppressing them up to the end of his 76-year life.

The attacks on the Jesuits by Bourbon rulers continued during the papacy of **Clement XIV (1769-74)** , whom Norwich characterized as being 'highly intelligent, friendly and unassuming, and totally incorruptible with a fine sense of humor.' Finally however, Clement gave in to the intense international pressure and dissolved the Jesuit order in 1773. They had long been under attack by Enlightenment 'liberals' in Europe because they represented the strength and independence of the Church. The political influence of the Church and papal authority continued to decline for the remainder of the eighteenth century.

Giovanni Angelo Braschi as Pope **Pius VI (1775-99)** did contribute at great expense to Rome and St. Peter's, including the creation of the Vatican museum, but he also enriched his nephews at the expense of the Church. On the broader scene, he was up against a collection of kings and princes in the Catholic states, who had grown accustomed to control of church affairs, as in the appointment of bishops and abbots. The latter were pleased to operate with increasing independence from the Vatican, and they generally opposed interference from papal nuncios.

**8.2 The Napoleonic Wars** The worst was yet to come in the form of the 1789 French Revolution. The state of Catholic Christianity in France was already deplorable, with even bishops as nonbelievers, as was the case with the Cardinal of Toulouse and with Talleyrand, the bishop of Autun. In 1790 the French Assembly enacted the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which essentially took over the governance of the Church and which the King finally sanctioned in July 1790. What followed was the takeover of church assets to fund the national debt, including the closing of monasteries. Most of the French clergy emigrated to more hospitable lands.

The Revolution was later taken over by Napoleon Bonaparte, who invaded Italy in 1794 and annexed the Legations of Ravenna and Bologna, which were the most prosperous parts of the Papal States. The Peace of Tolentino in February 1797 confirmed the surrender of papal control of land and church properties. After rioting against French rule in Rome in December 1798, French troops entered the City and the ailing Pope Pius VI was later carried off. He finally expired in exile in France in August 1799.

By July 1800, Napoleon had defeated Austria and again held the northern states. In an effort to ward off counter-revolutionary forces from the rest of Europe, he pledged his support of the Catholic Church and Pope **Pius VII (1800-23)** , and he pledged to restore the Papal States to the Church. The French episcopacy was split between pre-revolution bishops and Civil Constitution bishops. The French church was reorganized by the Concordat of July 1801, which allowed bishops to be appointed by Napoleon but invested by the Pope. Clergy were made salaried officials of the State, and in the process eighty-five bishops lost their positions. Later on, Napoleon placed severe restrictions on Church and papal activities and communications in France. However, he did manage to get the Pope to come to Paris to anoint him Emperor in May of 1804.

In 1805, Napoleon declared himself the ruler of the northern republics in Italy, and in 1806 he annexed the Kingdom of Naples. Relations with the Pope continued to deteriorate when in January 1808, French troops occupied Rome, which was annexed by Napoleon, along with the Papal States. On July 6 the Pope was arrested and taken prisoner to Savona on the Italian Riviera. From there, the Pope refused to invest bishops in France, leaving twenty-seven sees vacant by 1810.

In June of 1811, Napoleon called a Council to invest bishops, but Pope Pius refused to cooperate, leading to his being hauled off to Fontainebleau, where he was forced to surrender all his temporal powers, an act he later repudiated. In January 1814, Napoleon offered a peace treaty to the Pope and the restoration of the Papal States, but Napoleon abdicated and was exiled on April 12. On May 24 the Pope returned to Rome in triumph. On August 7, 1814, the Society of Jesus was restored.

In 1815, the Congress of Vienna met to settle the issues arising from the French revolutionary wars, the Napoleonic wars, and the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. It restored the Pope's rule of Papal States. Pius was convinced that to be the chief bishop of the Church required that he be a temporal king as well. From 1817 onward, the Pope signed concordats with more than two-dozen countries, in most of which he lost the right to appoint bishops. The restored papal government in the Papal States was modernized somewhat but was still run by clergy. A civil service and lower-level offices were open to lay men, and representative government was allowed. The areas around Rome were still ruled by clergy without lay involvement.

**8.3 The Return of Papal Monarchy** Pope **Leo XII, (1823-9)** reinstated the old feudal aristocracy in the Papal States. He ordered Jews back to the Ghetto and forbade them to own real estate or to do business with Christians. He also reinforced the Index of Forbidden Books and the Holy Office of the Inquisition. He was followed by Pope **Pius VIII (1829-30),** who was a doctrinal conservative in poor health, but who did revoke the harsh measures of Leo XII in the Papal States.

Pope **Gregory XVI (1831-46)** had an exalted and strictly monarchical view of the papacy. This was a time of increasing political pressure for the unification of Italy, the Risorgimento, and there was considerable agitation against clerical rule in favor of separation of church and state. The Pope had to call on the Austrians to suppress revolts. He is remembered for his ban on railways in the Papal States, calling them _chemins d'enfer_ (literally "ways of hell," a play on the French for railroad, _chemin de fer_ , literally " road of iron "). In 1832, his encyclical _Mirari vos_ condemned freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, and the separation of church and state. In it, he denounced the 'detestable and insolent malice' of those who 'agitate against and upset the right of rulers' and who seek 'to enslave the nations under the mask of liberty.' On the plus side, Gregory condemned slavery and the slave trade in 1839, and he supported Catholic missionary activities. He created more than 70 new dioceses around the world, including ten in the U.S., and the world status of the papacy grew on his watch.

Pope **Pius IX (1846-78)** came in as a patriotic liberal who embraced new things. In the Papal States, he promoted railways, tariffs, and agricultural reform, as well as political reform, and he abolished the requirement that Jews must attend weekly Christian sermons. He was initially celebrated in Europe and the U.S. as a model ruler. However, in 1848, revolution was breaking out in Europe, and papal rule in the Papal States depended on the presence of French and Austrian troops to suppress rebellion. Meanwhile, the Turin-based King of the Piedmont, Victor Emmanuel II, was turning it into a secular state, and the unification of Italy, the _Risorgimento_ , had begun. Pius saw his temporal rule over the Papal States, the _Patrimony of Peter_ , as inseparable from his role as a religious leader, and he vowed resistance to the end. This did not prevent the Kingdom of Piedmont from annexing two-thirds of the Papal States in 1860.

In December 1864 came the publication of his encyclical _Quanta Cura_ with its appended _Syllabus of Errors_. This was his reaction to a speech by a Count Montalembert in Belgium that urged a reconciliation of the church with democracy and a separation of throne and altar.

The _Syllabus_ was a collection of 80 propositions that stated that it is an error, for example, to believe that:

15. Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true.

21. The Church has not the power of defining dogmatically that the religion of the Catholic Church is the only true religion.

24. The Church has not the power of using force, nor has she any temporal power, direct or indirect.

55. The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church.

77. In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship.

78. It has been wisely decided by law in some Catholic countries that persons coming to reside therein shall enjoy the public exercise of their own peculiar worship.

This met the approval of the Ultramontanes, the Catholic arch-conservatives who believed that the papacy should be regarded as the absolute authority in political and ecclesiastical matters. However, liberal Catholics, at whom it was aimed, were appalled. The _Syllabus_ was banned in France and burned in Naples.

The First Vatican Council was convened by Pius IX on 8 December 1869 to tackle the 19th century unbelief and rationalism, which Pius thought were undermining Christianity, and to strengthen the Church in her stand against hostile societies and governments. However, the Ultramontanes had been lobbying for some time for a blanket proclamation of infallibility of papal teachings, and this became a prominent item on the Council agenda. Through the efforts of the Archbishop of Bologna, Cardinal Guidi, the final declaration was tightly written to encompass only doctrine concerning faith and morals. The Pope was enraged at what he took to be a betrayal by Guidi, who argued with him that the bishops were also witnesses to the tradition, to which Pius replied: "tradition? _I_ am the tradition." – _La tradizione son io_ – probably his most-remembered and least-respected pronouncement. The final vote on the infallibility decree on 18 July 1870 was 533 to 2 in favor, with 57 bishops having departed the day before to avoid having to vote against it. Perhaps they realized that a non-infallible church council can not infallibly declare that some person is infallible, even if he is a pope.

The final vote took place in the midst of a devastating thunder and lightning storm. On the day after the vote, the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and the French troops were recalled from Rome. Subsequently, King Victor Emanuel invaded the Papal States. On September 20, Rome fell, and the Pope remained confined to the Vatican while Rome became the Capitol of the new Italy. In November 1870, Italy passed the Law of Guarantees, which gave the Vatican exclusive use (not ownership) of the Vatican, the Lateran, and Castel Gandolfo and also gave the Pope the exclusive right to appoint bishops in Italy. This led to the current practice of papal selection of bishops through out the world.

9. Modern Times

**9.1 Modernism and WW I** Pope **Leo XIII (1878-1903)** , elected at age 68 in fragile health, was able to reign for 25 years. He was an arch conservative, but was able to establish himself as the first modern pope. Leo taught that the state is only truly free when it supports the church, but that no one form of government is favored by the church and that Catholics should participate fully in public life. He held that the church accepted the legitimate authority of the state and that Catholicism was not incompatible with democratic forms of government. However, he had to exercise very patient diplomacy in the face of the hostility of the Italian government toward the church during the 1870's and 80's and the anti-clerical _Kulturkampf_ in Germany from about 1872 to 1886, along with similar behavior in France that lasted until the end of his pontificate.

Leo's great contribution came in the area of social justice, particularly in his most famous encyclical, the revolutionary _Rerum Novarum_ in 1891. This was addressed to the widespread concern, particularly on the part of progressive Catholics, about the effects of industrialization and urbanization on working-class people. His teaching was rather radical for a conservative: the state should protect the rights of labor; workers should receive a living wage, and they have a right to organize themselves into unions and even have the right to strike.

On the other hand, Leo considered himself a monarch, insisting on the style and ceremony of a sovereign, and requiring people received in an audience to kneel before him throughout the interview. He never allowed his entourage to sit in his presence. His eighty-six encyclicals set an all-time record; two of them called for ending the enslavement of Africans. He considered himself to be the ultimate teacher of Catholic thought and behavior, and devoted himself to strengthening Vatican control of every facet of church administration throughout the world.

Guiseppe Sarto, Pope **Pius X (1903-14)** , is characterized by Duffy as distinguished by his personal approachability, warm open-hearted manner, and anti-intellectualism, all of which won him immense popularity. However, he had almost apocalyptic distrust of modern society. Norwich attributes his lack of impact on Europe and the world to his being ' too quiet, too humble, too holy, and his very holiness closed his mind to original thoughts. As pope he held that: "When we speak of the Vicar of Christ, we must not quibble, we must obey; we must not ... evaluate his judgments, criticize his directions, lest we do injury to Jesus Christ himself. Society is sick...the one hope, the one remedy, is the Pope." He wrote as his vision of the church: "The church is by its very nature an unequal society: it comprises two categories of person, the pastors and the flocks. The hierarchy alone moves and controls .... The duty of the multitude is to suffer itself to be governed and to carry out in a submissive spirit the orders of those in control."

Above all else, Pius X is remembered most for his 1907 decree against modernism, _Lamentabili_ , and his encyclical _Pascendi_ , which collected an assortment of new ideas and called them a 'compendium of all the heresies' and denounced the modernists as 'vicious, deceitful and disloyal enemies of the church.' To carry out his purge, he set up a secret service to root out the heresies by spying on all manner of church officials, and he instituted the Anti-Modernist Oath for clerics of all ranks. Authentic biblical scholarship and teaching essentially came to a halt for decades to come. The oath remained part of the routine formation of clergy into the 1960's.

Another consequence of the Pius X pontificate was a growing papal monopoly of episcopal appointments. He established the system of papal nuncios sent to Catholic countries all over the world, directing policy, overriding local decisions, decisively influencing the choice of bishops, which became an ever more powerful instrument of centralization within the church.

Some relief came to the church in the person of the peace-maker Giacomo della Chiesa, Pope **Benedict XV (1914-22)** , characterized by Duffy as a compassionate and sensitive priest, horrified by the realities of modern warfare. His constant efforts to halt the fighting in the World War failed, and he had to be content to provide relief from the Vatican coffers for the wounded and for refugees. His overtures for reconciliation with France were helped by his brilliant move of canonizing Joan of Arc in 1920. At home, he halted the anti-modernist witch-hunt, gave permission to Italians to vote in state and municipal elections, and encouraged Catholics to join unions. By the end of his pontificate, more than two-dozen nations had established diplomatic relations with the Vatican.

**9.2 Fascism and WW II** After Benedict's unexpectedly early death, the following conclave produced a career scholar and Vatican librarian, Achille Ratti, as Pope **Pius XI (1922-39)**. Behind a mild, 'genial, smiling, apparently approachable' facade lay a decisive authoritarian who insisted on obedience and did not tolerate contradiction or resistance. His attitude toward Protestants was strongly negative, and he forbade any Catholic involvement in ecumenical conferences. His encyclical _Casti connubii_ condemned artificial birth control as immoral. On the plus side, he introduced the principle of subsidiarity by which nothing is to be done by a higher agency that could be done at least as well by a lower agency. He was also committed to the advancement of science and learning generally.

His principle life's work was embodied in the eighteen concordats that he signed with European nations, including the historical one with Mussolini in 1929. This gave the pope his own sovereign state, the 109-acre Vatican City, along with other benefits, including a huge financial compensation for the loss of the Papal States. Also included was the infamous concordat with Nazi Germany in 1933. These were both seen by other nations as the church giving implied approval to fascism. He was by no means a democrat and was willing to work with fascists to gain advantages for the Church, but he abhorred socialism, and especially communism. In the end, however, he broke with the Nazis with his encyclical _Mit brennender Sorge_ and he also broke with fascist Italy.

Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli came into office as Pope **Pius XII (1939-1958)** a bare six months before the start of World War II. He had served as papal nuncio first to Bavaria and later to the new German republic and subsequently as the Vatican Secretary of State. He was regarded as a devout, austere, sensitive, intelligent, saintly man. He was a devotee of German culture and music, and he spoke fluent German. He has been criticized for failing to oppose the Nazis and the holocaust with sufficient vigor.

On the plus side was his encyclical _Divina afflante spiritu_ of 1943, which restored permission for Catholic biblical scholarship after it had been shut down by Pius X in 1907. However, he suppressed numerous distinguished theologians, some of whom were made cardinals by later popes. In his encyclical _Humani Generis_ of 1950, he said that once a pope decides a matter it "cannot be any longer considered a question open to discussion among theologians." Finally, he was criticized for his suppression of the Worker Priest movement in France in 1953 while in the same year signing a new concordat with Franco, the dictator of Spain. Pope Benedict XVI declared Pius XII venerable in December 2009, opening the path to his canonization.

**9.3 Aggiornamento: Vatican II** After Pius XII came Angelo Giuseppi Roncalli, Pope **John XXIII (1958-63)** , now one of the most beloved popes in history. At age seventy-seven, he was assumed to be a short-time place-holder who would not rock the boat, known as he was for 'peaceable holiness and pastoral warmth.' He focused many of his activities on being Bishop of Rome. Within three months of his election, he stunned the rest of the hierarchy by calling a general council, on 25 January 1959 to "to open the windows ... and let in some fresh air". This was opposed by the old guard in the Vatican, especially Cardinal Ottaviani, the head of the Holy Office. Failing to block the council, he tried to take it over and dictate the agenda. Pope John inspired the bishops to discard this stacked agenda and to start from scratch on his program of " _aggiornamento_ ," meaning bringing things up to date.

Duffy calls it 'the most revolutionary Christian event since the Reformation.' It was greatly influenced by theologians like Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, and John Courtney Murray, whose teachings, ironically, had been condemned by the previous pope. One of the most influential documents was _Dignitatis Humanae_ , which declared that 'the human person has a right to religious liberty' and that this is a fundamental part of the dignity of human beings. This explicit denunciation of the idea that non-Catholics had no right to religious freedom was obviously a direct refutation of the opposite teaching in the _Syllabus of Errors_ of Pius IX.

After the death of John XXIII on 3 June 1963, the task of seeing the Council through fell to his successor, Giovanni Battista Montini as Pope **Paul VI (1963-78)** , who is characterized by Duffy as having one of the greatest but most troubled pontificates of modern times. It was a time of much social turmoil in which old structures and traditional authority were under attack. This exacerbated the tensions between reformers and traditionalists throughout the Council and afterwards. Paul did his best to strike a balance between the two sides, but this often made him look indecisive.

The crushing experience of his pontificate was the widespread rejection of his teaching against all forms of artificial birth control in his encyclical _Humanae Vitae_. Here, he allowed curial conservatives to dissuade him from following the near-unanimous conclusion of his specially appointed advisory committee that recommended modification of the traditional church teaching. The argument was that, if he allowed himself to do that, it would be a serious blow against the teaching authority of the church. As it turned out, his ultimate decision had exactly that effect.

Paul VI was succeeded by the beloved Patriarch of Venice, Albino Luciani who took the name **John Paul I (1978)** in honor of his two predecessors. Expectations in some quarters were that he would be active in curial reform and that he aimed to end the financial corruption in the so-called Vatican bank, officially known as the _Istituto per le Opere di Religione,_ the Institute for the Works of Religion. Unfortunately, the apparently healthy sixty-six-year-old Pope was found dead in his bed after a pontificate of thirty-two days. The cause of death was never determined, because his body was immediately embalmed without an autopsy. As might be imagined, this gave rise to rumors and speculation about foul play, and exposés have been written about it. If the Pope's death did involve an assassination, it would not have been the first in the history of the papacy.

**9.4 Advances and Retreats** Luciani's death was followed by the larger-than-life pontificate of Karol Wojtyla as **John Paul II (1978-2005)** , the first non-Italian since the Dutch Adrian VI in 1522, and the second-longest-reigning pope in history. John Paul became an international media star as a result of his opposition to communism and his support of the Solidarity movement in Poland, along with his scores of trips to countries around the world. His kneeling to kiss the tarmac upon alighting from his airplane became an iconic image.

It is impossible to categorize John Paul II in a simple way. He excoriated both communism for its oppression of people and western capitalism for its materialism. His campaign against the 'culture of death' led him to condemn both artificial birth control, which endeared him to the conservatives, and capital punishment, which endeared him to liberals. Perhaps his most important legacy is his banishment of the long-standing church teaching against the Jews and his visit to the synagogue in Rome and to the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Here, he inserted a penitential prayer for past sins of the church against Jews. On the other hand, he is also remembered for his opposition to Liberation Theology in Latin America, which he associated with Marxism. He alienated many of the world's Catholic women by proclaiming that ordination of women is a topic never to be discussed.

Without doubt the greatest failing of the pontificate of John Paul II was his lack of attention to the sex-abuse scandals that broke upon the international scene in early 2002. He has been severely criticized for his handling of the case of Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, Archbishop of Vienna, who turned out to have been an abuser of scores of young men. John Paul allowed him to retire at seventy-five in 1995 and to become an abbot in a monastery before finally sending him off to exile in Dresden in 1998. Another even worse case is that of Father Marcial Maciel, the notorious founder of the Legionaries of Christ, who had been accused repeatedly as a serious molester, but whom John Paul embraced as a gift to the church. It later turned out that his true gift to the church was that of a prodigious fund-raiser, much of which was for Vatican programs.

A case that still rankles in the U.S. is that of Cardinal Bernard Law, former Archbishop of Boston, who was essentially forced by priests of his diocese to resign over his cover-up of abuse and shielding and transfers of abusers. John Paul's version of discipline was to appoint Law as Archpriest of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the four major basilicas in Rome, where he continued to serve on important Vatican curial congregations. John Paul's apparent indifference to the scandals has not derailed his case for canonization, which is scheduled for 2014.

On 19 April 2005, John Paul II was succeeded by his close associate, Dean of the College of Cardinals and longtime Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, as Pope **Benedict XVI (2005-2013)**. One thing he had to deal with was the Instruction _Crimen Solicitationis_ , which was first issued in 1922 and again in 1962 and which prescribed the procedures for dealing with cases of priests' solicitation of immoral or illegal acts in the confessional and also with clergy sexual misconduct with children. The Instruction specifically states that those involved in processing such cases are bound by the Secrecy of the Holy Office, and that the penalty for violating this is their automatic excommunication. In 2001, Cardinal Ratzinger issued a letter affirming that the Instruction was still in force, but was under review by the CDF. Nothing in the Instruction _specifically_ prohibited bishops from informing law enforcement authorities about the crimes of priests, but it is not surprising that bishops dealing with abuse cases would take the secrecy requirement literally. It is not yet required by the Vatican that bishops report crimes to law enforcement officials. In 2010, the Vatican published new rules for dealing with sex abuse by priests that called it a grave crime, but in the same document it also called the "attempt" to ordain a woman as a comparably grave crime. In terms of holding a fragmenting church together, this has obviously not been very helpful.

In 2009, Benedict established "personal ordinariates" so that disenchanted Anglicans could essentially become Catholics. Married Anglican clergy could become Catholic priests, while retaining much of their own identity and liturgy. This provoked much questioning about the church's insistence on retaining compulsory celibacy for Catholic priests. Benedict resigned the papacy as of February 28, 2013, becoming the first pope to do so on his own initiative since Pope Celestine V in 1294.

On March 13, 2013, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina was elected pope at age 76. He was the first Jesuit to be elected pope and the first to take the name Francis. He is said to have been elected with the mandate to reform the central administration in the Vatican. However, he has surprised virtually everyone with his overall emphasis on caring for the poor and marginalized people who have been neglected, and his call for a less dogmatic attitude in the hierarchy: "The church's pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently, ... We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the Church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel." This promises to be an new kind of papacy, and it has generated great anticipation across the whole ideological spectrum.

10. The Essential Reforms

**10.1 The State of the Church Today** The theme of the recent book _The Great Emergence_ by Phyllis Tickle is that the Christian church has a 'rummage sale' every 500 years or so. The last one, of course was the Reformation begun by Martin Luther. Just as that transformation was greatly facilitated by the newly invented printing press, the current one is even more powerfully driven by the internet and other mass media. Today, not only are people better educated, they are better informed. The system of male domination by a medieval monarchy that is rapidly losing its remaining moral authority seems increasingly insecure.

It is now common knowledge that participation by Catholics in their Church in the westernized world is shrinking rapidly and is now down to single digits in some European countries. In the U.S. about a third of baptized Catholics have left the church completely, and attendance at Mass by the remainder is under 25%. Thus, only about 15% of cradle Catholics in the U.S. still participate in the church. What kind of business could survive if it lost 85% of its original customers? The "branches" in this business are the parishes and schools, but these have been closing by the hundreds during the past decade or so. The main reason given by local bishops for these closures is the shortage of priests. The great majority of the remaining Catholics are aware that much of this problem could be solved by simply eliminating compulsory celibacy and accepting back into the ministry priests who have resigned to marry.

**10.2 Compulsory Celibacy** The rule of compulsory celibacy for priests is a carryover from the medieval governance structure of the Roman Church. The system is essentially that of a monarch, princes, lords, vassals, and serfs. As in the Middle Ages, a man is accepted as the vassal of a lord when he kneels down and pledges obedience and loyalty to the lord, who then lays hands upon the candidate vassal and accepts him into his service. The lord then provides the vassal with a residence, livelihood, etc., in return for the service of the vassal. In the church today, the lord/bishop does the same for the vassal/priest. He provides the job, residence, salary, medical insurance, retirement plan, etc., for each priest in return for the pledge of obedience. The control of bishops over priests would be greatly weakened if priests had wives, who could have their own incomes, medical insurance, retirement plans, etc. The question then is: how long will the serfs continue to put up with the compulsory-celibacy rule that deprives them of priests and parishes?

**10.3 The Election of Bishops** The system has evolved over the past couple of centuries to the point at which the pope, as the absolute monarch of his own sovereign state, has been granted the right to appoint bishops in virtually every diocese in other sovereign states. This came from deals worked out with the rulers of various countries over the years. However, this practice is in flagrant violation of ancient church teaching. For example, Pope Celestine I (422-432) stated emphatically: " **the one who is to be head over all should be elected by all**." Celestine added " **no one who is unwanted should be made a bishop; the desire and consent of the clergy and the people is required**." Later, recognizing that a bishop imposed from without might incur the hatred of the people, Pope Leo I the Great (440-461), insisted that the bishop must be acceptable to the clergy and people: " **It is essential to exclude all those unwanted and unasked for, if the people are not to be crossed and end by despising or hating their bishop. If they cannot have the candidate they desire, the people may all turn away from religion unduly**." If all church teachings are to be obeyed, why then is this one being violated? Furthermore, isn't it also a violation of the principles of government in a representative democracy? What has become of the spirit of 1776 in the U.S.?

**10.4 The Role of Women** The exclusion of women from church offices is antithetical to common sense and to the principles of a modern society. This practice becomes increasingly ludicrous as more and more women assume leadership roles in government, business, academia, the professions, etc. The contrasts between the quality of leadership of such women and that of some male Catholic hierarchy are too obvious to continue to ignore. The latest outrage is the attempted take-over of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious – the LCWR – by the Vatican. The sisters are accused of "radical feminism." Apparently, their work in schools, universities, hospitals, orphanages, missionary outposts, soup kitchens, homes for the indigent, etc., somehow falls short. They are accused of not doing enough preaching on the so-called "pelvic issues" that are of primary interest to the male hierarchy. Treating women as somehow inferior to men is primitive behavior and cannot be allowed to continue.

The subordination of women comes from a pathological culture that is embedded in many clergy from the time of their "formation." This culture has been metastasizing in the church since the second century. It flows from the misogyny exhibited by a number of so-called doctors of the church. Examples of some of their rhetoric are as follows:

Tertullian [ca 160-225]: " **The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil's gateway; you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree; you are the first deserter of the divine law."**

Gregory of Nazianzan [[329-389]: **"Fierce are the dragons and cunning the asps, but women have the malice of both beasts"**

St. Augustine of Hippo [354-430]: **"What is the difference whether it is in a wife or a mother? It is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any woman ..." "I consider that nothing so casts down the manly mind from its heights as the fondling of women, and those bodily contacts which belong to the married state."**

St. John Chrysostom [ca 347-407]: **"The whole of her bodily beauty is nothing less than phlegm, blood, bile, rheum, and the fluid of digested food. If you consider what is stored up behind those lovely eyes, the angle of the nose, the mouth and cheeks, you will agree that the well-proportioned body is merely a whitened sepulchre" "There are in the world a great many situations that weaken the conscientiousness of the soul. First and foremost of these are dealings with women. ... "For the eye of woman touches and disturbs our soul – and not only the eye of the unbridled woman, but that of the decent one as well."**

Albert the Great (Albertus Magnus) [ca 1200-1280]: **"Woman is less qualified [than man] for moral behavior. For the woman contains more liquid than the man, and it is a property of liquid to take things up easily and to hold onto them poorly. Liquids are easily moved, hence women are inconstant and curious. When a woman has relations with a man, she would like, as much as possible, to be lying with another man at the same time. Woman knows nothing of fidelity. Believe me, if you give her your trust, you will be disappointed. ... Woman is a misbegotten man and has a faulty and defective nature in comparison with his. ... What she herself cannot get, she seeks to obtain through lying and diabolical deceptions. And so, to put it briefly, one must be on one's guard with every woman, as if she were a poisonous snake and the horned devil.... In evil and perverse doings woman is cleverer, that is, slyer, than man. Her feelings drive woman toward every evil, just as reason impels man toward all good."**

So, the upshot is that women are inferior to men in the eyes of God, who doesn't want them pretending to be Catholic priests and cluttering up His altars.

We all know Catholic priests and bishops who deplore such misogyny, but there are obviously not enough of them yet to clean up the clerical culture. It will be necessary for a clear majority of Catholics to rebel actively against it and to refuse to support a continuation of such pathological rubbish.

**10.5 Church Teaching** We often hear that someone's opinion is being condemned because it violates church teaching. This could have some logical basis if it could be shown that church teaching has never been erroneous. However, this notion is not supported by the record. A few examples stand out. The most famous, of course, is the case of Galileo, who showed by observation, in agreement with Copernicus, that the earth moves around the sun, rather than vice versa. This was condemned by the Vatican as heresy in 1633 on the basis of scripture: not only Genesis 1.14-19, but also the Lord's answer to the request of Joshua (Josh. 10.13): _the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies_. Also, Psalm 104.5 says: _the Lord set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved_. Fortunately, the pope was a former friend of Galileo and allowed him to recant and thereby escape burning at the stake. He got off with a life sentence of house arrest.

Regarding slavery, the 1993 encyclical _Veritatis splendor_ by Pope John Paul II declared that " **slavery is intrinsically evil, as an offense against human dignity and, as such, is prohibited always and everywhere without any exception**." This is a correction of Pius IX's _Instruction_ of 20 June 1866, which taught that " **Slavery itself, considered as such in its essential nature, is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law.... It is not contrary to the natural and divine law for a slave to be sold, bought, exchanged, or given** ".

Regarding usury, the Council of Aix in 789 decreed that " **it is reprehensible even for a layman to make money by lending at interest**." However, Pope Pius XII, in _Citorna Particolarmente_ in 1950 asked " **Does not the social function of the bank consist in making it possible for the individual to render his money fruitful, even if only in a small degree, instead of dissipating it, or leaving it sleep without any profit, either to himself or to others?** "

Regarding access to the Scriptures, at the Council of Toulouse in 1229 it was decreed that " **We prohibit also that the laity should be permitted to have the books of the Old or the New Testament, unless anyone from motives of devotion should wish to have the Psalter or the Breviary for divine offices or the hours of the Blessed Virgin, but we most strictly forbid their having any translation of these books**." On the other hand, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation of the Second Vatican Council in 1965 stated that " **Easy access to Sacred Scripture should be provided for all the Christian faithful .... If, given the opportunity and the approval of church authorities, these translations [of the Bible] are produced in cooperation with the separated brethren as well, all Christians will be able to read them. .... Both pastors of souls and Christians generally should see to the wide distribution of these in one way or another**."

We Catholics now find ourselves in an Information Age in which we can no longer evade our responsibility to recognize the present-day dysfunction in our church and to undertake corrective action. We can take some comfort in the fact that much of the corruption in the past history of the church is now behind us. We no longer have to concern ourselves with things like the genocides in the various crusades and the torture and burning of heretics and witches. The centuries of slander and oppression of Jews have, we hope, come to an end. However, we are still left with some major problems. The most serious is the behavior of the hierarchy in covering up and even facilitating the widespread sexual abuse of children by clergy. This can only be stopped by making bishops accountable to the people, rather than only to the pope. This will require the people to stop recognizing bishops imposed upon them by the pope and to insist that in the future the only legitimate bishop will be one elected by the people for a defined term.

In the spirit of Phyllis Tickle's historical analysis in _The Great Emergence_ , the Vatican might be characterized as the analog of a third temple, run by the analog of the Sadducees. In Tickle's ongoing rummage sale, the main items initially on the table should be papal selection of bishops, compulsory celibacy, and discrimination against women. This rummage sale cannot happen soon enough.

###

Bibliography

On the Bible:

_Who Wrote the Bible,_ Richard Elliott Friedman, HarperOne 1997.

_The Bible With Sources Revealed_ , Richard Elliott Friedman, HarperSanFrancisco, 2003.

_The Hidden Book in the Bible,_ Richard Elliott Friedman, HarperOne 1998.

_Ancient Israel's Faith and History, An Introduction to the Bible in Context_ , George E. Mendenhall, ed. Gary A. Herion, Liturgical Press, 2001.

On the Papacy:

_Lives of the Popes_ , by Richard P. McBrien, HarperSanFrancisco, 1997.

_Saints and Sinners, A History of the Popes,_ Eamon Duffy, Yale Univ. Press, 2001.

_Absolute Monarchs_ , by John Julius Norwich, Random House, 2011.

_The Great Emergence, How Christianity Is Changing and Why_ , Phyllis Tickle, Baker Books, 2008.

On Church Teaching:

_A Church that Can and Cannot Change_ , John T. Noonan, Jr., Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2005.

_Rome Has Spoken_ , Ed. Maureen Fiedler and Linda Rabben, Crossroad, 1998.

