The Church and the Empire - D. J. Medley (first color ebook reader txt) 📗

and the four Lateran Councils (1123, 1139, 1179, 1215) were the occasions for great and important additions to the Canon Law. But from the time of the third Lateran Council, at all events, all ordinances of a General Council were issued in the name of the Pope, although the approval or the fact of the Council was likewise expressed. Thomas Aquinas merely expresses the recognised law of the Church when he says that the Holy Fathers gathered together in Councils can make no laws except by the intervention of the authority of the Roman Pontiff, for without that authority a Council cannot even meet.

[Sidenote: Popes above law.]

It followed from this assumption of the supreme legislative power that, in the first place, the Pope himself claimed not to be bound by the laws which he made. Thus in the thirteenth century papal writers denied that the Roman Church could commit simony. Certain acts are simoniacal because they have been prohibited as such by Canon Law; but inasmuch as it is the Pope who had forbidden them, the prohibition does not bind him. And in virtue of this power, from the time of Innocent IV the Popes added to their bulls a non obstante

clause whereby they suspended in a particular instance all laws or rights which might otherwise stand in the way of their grant.

[Sidenote: Papal dispensation.]

It followed, further, that the Pope claimed also the power of granting dispensations from existing laws and absolution for their infringement. Every papal bishop was armed with the power of granting pardon in God’s name for breaches of the law which had already been committed. The Pope, however, claimed not only this power concurrently with all other bishops, but he even developed a right of granting dispensations beforehand, so that the tendency was to ignore the bishop of the diocese and to apply directly to the Pope or his representatives, who thus were willing to permit infractions of the law. Thomas Aquinas declares that any bishop can grant dispensation in the case of a promise about which there is any doubt; but that to the Pope alone, as having the care of the Church Universal, belongs the higher power of giving unconditional relaxation from an oath of perfectly clear meaning in the interests of the general good.

But even papal writers sometimes complain of the irresponsibility of the papal acts, and Popes themselves had to allow that there were spheres outside their legislative interference. Thus Urban II acknowledges that in matters on which our Lord, His Apostles, and the Fathers have given definite decisions, the duty of the Pope is to confirm the law. Thomas Aquinas, while holding that the Pope can alter the decisions of the Fathers and even of the Apostles in so far as they come under the head of positive law, yet excepts from the possibility of papal interference all that concerns the law of nature, the Articles of Faith (which, he says elsewhere, have been determined by Councils), or the sacraments of the new law.

[Sidenote: The Pope as supreme judge.]

The third wide sphere of action within the Church in which the Pope established his supremacy was that of justice. The Dictatus Papae asserts not only that the Pope should be judged by no one, but that the “greater causes” of every Church should be referred to him, that none should dare to condemn any one who appealed to Rome, and that no one except the Pope himself can interfere with a papal sentence. Litigants of all kinds were only too ready to appeal against the local tribunal, and the Pope gave them every encouragement. St.

Bernard indignantly pointed out to Innocent II that every evil-doer and cantankerous person, whether lay or cleric or even from the monasteries, when he is worsted runs to Home and boasts on his return of the protection which he has obtained. It is true, Gregory VIII (1187) tried to check the practice of appeals; but his short reign gave no time for any real result. Bishops and archdeacons tried sometimes to stop appeals by excommunication, which prevented the victim from appearing in an ecclesiastical court; but the third Lateran Council (1179) forbade this method of defence. Alexander III definitely laid it down that appeals could be made to the Pope in the smallest no less than in the greatest matters, and at every possible stage, before and after trial, at the pronouncement of the sentence and after it has been awarded; and this, he points out, is not the case in civil law, where an appeal is only admitted after judgment.

Indeed, the most serious matter with regard to papal appeals was the reservation by the Pope to his own decision of cases which were regarded as too serious for the local courts. The bishops had themselves largely to thank for the development of this direct papal jurisdiction; for they began the custom of referring to Rome the cases of great criminals and of serious crimes. But these “greater causes,”

claimed for the Pope as early as the time of Gregory VII, included not only grave moral crimes such as murder, sacrilege, and gross immorality, but also cases of dispensation beforehand, of absolution after excommunication for certain offences. Under the same head would come the right of canonisation exercised by archbishops until Alexander III claimed it exclusively for the Pope, and the right of translating a bishop from one see to another, which involved a dissolution of the metaphorical marriage between the bishop and his see and therefore needed a special dispensation.

[Sidenote: The papal Curia.]

These extensive powers could only be put in practice by an elaborate machinery for their enforcement. In the first place the Pope was surrounded by a numerous body of officials to whom is applied from the middle of the eleventh century the title Curia. Gerhoh of Reichersberg, an ardent papal supporter writing about a century later, objects to the substitution for the word “Ecclesia” of this term “Curia,” which would not be found in any old letters of the Roman pontiffs. The rapacity of the officials became a byword throughout Christendom. John of Salisbury told Hadrian IV, with whom he was on terms of intimacy, that many people said that the Roman Church, which is the mother of all the churches, shows herself to the others not so much a mother as a stepmother. “The Scribes and Pharisees sit in it, laying intolerable burdens on the shoulders of men, which they do not touch with a finger…. They render justice not so much for truth’s sake as for a price…. The Roman pontiff himself becomes burdensome to all, and almost intolerable.” Honorius III in 1226 acknowledged to the English bishops that this greed was a long-standing scandal and disgrace, but he ascribed it to the poverty of Rome, and proposed that in order to remove the difficulty two stalls should be given to him for nomination in every cathedral and collegiate chapter. The magnates considered the remedy, if possible, worse than the disease. The popular songs of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries contain many references to the fact that nothing was to be had at Rome except for money, and that success in a cause went to the richest suitor. And yet Rome had many sources of wealth. She drew regular revenues from estates which had been given to the papal see; from monasteries which were subject to visitation of papal officers alone; from kingdoms, such as England, whose kings had made themselves feudal vassals of the Pope. Several nations, moreover, paid special taxes, such as Peter’s Pence, a kind of hearth tax, which went from England. The Papacy also exacted a number of dues on various pretexts which increased with the growth of papal power. Such were the Annates or Firstfruits and analogous payments, which amounted to the value of the first year’s income, and were claimed from newly appointed bishops and abbots as an acknowledgment of the papal right of confirmation. Nor did Metropolitans get their pall, which was necessary for the exercise of their special authority, without the payment of considerable sums.

Over and above these regular and occasional sources, the Popes exacted on especial occasions, such as the Crusades, a tax amounting to a tenth on all ecclesiastical property, and even allowed kings to take it with their leave. But these formed a small portion of the money which found its way to Rome. When the papal legate found fault with Ivo of Chartres because simony was still prevalent in his diocese, the bishop retorted that those who practised it excused their action from the example of Rome, where not even a pen and paper were to be had free. Dante addresses the shade of Pope Nicholas III in the Inferno (xix.):—

“Your gods ye make of silver and of gold; And wherein differ from idolaters,

Save that their God is one—yours manifold?”

And he ascribes the evil which he is condemning to the so-called Donation of Constantine.

[Sidenote: Papal Legates.]

The most manifest agents and organs of papal authority throughout Christendom were the legates. The Pope had appointed permanent representatives called Apocrisiaries at Constantinople, and had sent emissaries to General Councils and for other special matters. But from the time of Leo IX legates began to be appointed with a general commission to visit the churches; and Gregory VII developed this method of interference with the local authorities into a regular system. In some cases local hostility was disarmed by the appointment of the Metropolitan as ordinary legate, and the position was accepted with the object of retaining the chief authority upon the spot. Such the Archbishop of Canterbury became after 1135. But the existence of this official did not prevent the despatch from time to time of legates � latere, as they were called. The ordinary legate exercised the concurrent jurisdiction claimed by the Pope, that is, the right of interference in every diocese; these legates coming from the side of the Pope were armed with the power of exercising most of the rights specially reserved for the personal authority of the Pope.

The Dictatus Papae asserts that the Pope’s legates take precedence of all bishops in a council even though they may be of inferior rank, and Gregory VII applies to their authority the text “He that heareth you heareth me.” In 1125 John of Crema, a legate sent to England, presided at a Council at Westminster, where were present ecclesiastics from the archbishops downwards and a number of nobility; and “on Easterday he celebrated the office of the day in the mother church in place of the supreme pontiff, and although he was not a bishop, but merely a Cardinal Priest, he used pontifical insignia.” A Metropolitan in his oath of loyalty to the Pope was made to swear that he would treat with all honour the Roman legates in their coming and going, and would help them in their needs; and the procuration or maintenance from all countries which they not only visited, but merely passed through, was arbitrarily assessed. Innocent III enforces it by directing against ecclesiastics who were contumacious a sentence of distraint of goods without any right of appeal. The burden was no light one. Wichmann, Archbishop of Magdeburg, writing on behalf of Frederick I, tells the Pope that the whole Church of the Empire is subject to such heavy exactions at the hands of the papal officials, that both churches and monasteries, which have not enough to supply their own daily wants, are yet compelled “beyond their utmost possibility” to find money for the use of these legates, sustenance for their train of attendants, and accommodation for their horses. In more picturesque language John of Salisbury describes the legates of the Apostolic See as “sometimes raging in the provinces as if Satan had gone forth from the presence of the Lord in order to scourge