Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (29 page)

This continuing vulnerability of the papacy to the French crown under Clement’s six successors at Avignon was not just a matter of external pressure from the monarchy. Inevitably the papacy itself was ‘colonised’ in the course of its long exile in France, and the papacy became French. We need, however, to beware of assuming too much about this ‘Frenchness’. France was still a collection of regions, each with its own language, legal system and local culture. Pope John XXII (1316–34), a southerner, could not read letters from the French King without the help of a translator. Nevertheless, all the Avignon popes were Frenchmen of some sort, and, of the 134 cardinals they created, no fewer than 112 were French, 96 from the surrounding region of Languedoc alone. Seventy per cent of all curial officials during this period about whom we have knowledge were French. Of the twenty-two non-French cardinals, fourteen were Italian, two were English, none at all were German. Though the Avignon popes continued to maintain the universalist claims of their predecessors, and to see themselves as the Father of all Christians, this solid identification of the papacy with France affected perceptions of the papacy, and contributed to a growing questioning of its claims to supremacy in the Church.

Prominent among these was the emergence of secularised political theory, a development for which in some ways the papacy itself was responsible. Since before the time of Gregory VII the popes had encouraged the development both of canon law and of university theology and philosophy The rise of Aristotelianism within the universities moved reflection on the nature of human society away from the Augustinian pattern inherited from late antiquity – within which the tensions between Pope and Emperor had arisen – towards the notion that the state had a natural autonomy and order separate from that of the Church. In the fourteenth century this line of thought reached its extreme in the teaching of Marsilius of Padua, whose secular account of society effectively reduced the Church itself to a department of state (the
Pars sacerdotalis)
. Marsilius lodged the supreme power, delegated to kings, not in the Pope but in the people.
Marsilius’ theories took on concrete form when Lewis of Bavaria had himself crowned emperor in Rome in 1328 by a senior Roman layman, a member of the Colonna family.

The Pope whom Lewis defied by this act was John XXII, whose pontificate highlighted many of the best and the worst features of the Avignon papacy Personally an austere and frugal character, he emphasised the grandeur of the papacy, insisting on his superiority over and right to appoint the Emperor. He was a financial and administrative reformer, increasing papal control over episcopal and monastic appointments, extending the system of papal taxation (‘annates’) throughout Europe, reorganising the papal Curia and the code of canon law. He was confronted by a major and long-standing division within the Franciscan order, a radical ‘Spiritual’ wing repudiating property and criticising many aspects of current Church life. These ‘Spirituals’ had always blamed the popes from Gregory IX onwards for permitting and even requiring the modification of the Rule from its primitive severity. John now entirely alienated them and even many moderate Franciscans by condemning outright the teaching that scripture proved that Christ and his Apostles were ‘paupers’, that is, that Christ had owned nothing. Even more catastrophic was his repudiation of the arrangement whereby the popes were the nominal ‘owners’ of the property of the Franciscan order, which only had the ‘use’ of it. This drastic abandonment of earlier papal policy split the order, and led to the election of a ‘Spiritual’ Franciscan as antipope in Rome in 1328. The ‘Emperor’ Lewis denounced John as a heretic, and his decidedly eccentric beliefs about the nature of the beatific vision eventually led to John’s formal condemnation as a heretic.

As the administrative reforms of John XXII suggest, however, the exile was not entirely negative. The Avignon papacy was at least freed from its age-old and mostly disastrous involvement in the intricate family vendettas of the Roman nobility, and the papal court at Avignon became more than ever the administrative and juridical centre of the Church. The popes of the early Middle Ages had drawn their power from the relics of the Apostles, the popes of the Avignon period from their centrality in the legal systems of Europe. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the Avignon popes greatly refined and systematised the papal bureaucracy and the papal finances. The system of curial departments had its origins then, and the establishment of the
Rota in 1331 created the machinery for dealing with marital cases which though much modified is still in use.

These reforms carried their own problems, of course. The extension of papal ‘provisions’ from the papal claim to fill vacancies created by clergy who happened to die while at Rome to a multitude of additional cases, eventually including all bishoprics and archbishoprics, helped to eliminate local electoral quarrels and to improve the standard of those appointed. It also invaded many existing rights, and created a bottomless pit of hungry expectation and a scramble for jobs, which the popes could never hope to satisfy. At a time when France, Germany and England were at odds, the fact that a good deal of the papal income came from provisions and procurations in Germany and England led to resentment, and a sense that the resources of the churches of England and Germany were being devoured by France. This was an illusion, in fact, for probably more than half the income of the Avignon papacy came from France. Nevertheless, the impression persisted, and soured attitudes to the popes. The growing complexity of papal administration catered to real needs, but developed a top-heavy life of its own and strained goodwill towards the papacy itself. Already at the Council of Vienne William Durand, Bishop of Mende, had called for the reversal of the trend towards the centralisation of the Church around the pope, and had argued in favour of greatly strengthened local hierarchies and regional synods. Nothing came of Durand’s proposals, but these dissatisfactions grew.

Nor were the vastly increased papal revenues wisely spent. Some of the Avignon popes were wildly extravagant. Clement VI was a charitable man who stayed in Avignon during the Black Death there which wiped out more than 62,000 of the inhabitants, supervising sick-care, burials and the pastoral care of the dying. But he was also a bon viveur and a lavish entertainer, who declared that ‘a pope should make his subjects happy’. He spent money with reckless abandon, and once declared that ‘my predecessors did not know how to be popes’. Much of it was poured into the black hole of internecine Italian politics and warfare, as the popes struggled to hold together from a distance the papal patrimony in Italy. It has been calculated that John XXII spent 63 per cent of his income on warfare, and two thirds of all the revenues raised by the Avignon papacy was spent on retaining mercenary armies and on the sweetening of allies in the snakepit of Italian politics.

The papacy’s seventy-year exile at Avignon came to an end in January 1377 when Pope Gregory XI (1370–8), the last Frenchman to be elected pope, returned to Rome. A deeply religious man of mystical temperament, he believed Rome to be the only right place for the Pope, a view in which he had been encouraged both by the precarious state of the papal territories in Italy, which demanded his personal attention, and by more spiritual persuasions of the Dominican visionary St Catherine of Siena. In her letters she calls him ‘dulcissimo babbo mio’ (my sweetest daddy), but her advice was relentlessly demanding: ‘Even if you have not been very faithful in the past, begin now to follow Christ, whose vicar you are, in real earnest. And do not be afraid … Attend to things spiritual, appointing good shepherds and good rulers in the cities under your jurisdiction … Above all, delay no longer in returning to Rome and proclaiming the Crusade’.
²³
It says much for the spiritual stature of the Pope that such letters could be written to him, and that he was willing to act on them.

But Gregory died in March 1378, and the Conclave which elected his successor was mobbed by the Roman crowds, terrified that the French cardinals might elect a French pope who would return to Avignon. Under this pressure, the cardinals elected an Italian, though not a Roman, Bartolommeo Prignano, absentee Archbishop of Bari. He took the name UrbanVI (1378–89). Urban as a cardinal had been a leading administrator, regent of the papal chancery at Avignon, and was much respected. As pope, however, he turned out to be violent, overbearing and probably clinically paranoid. Unable to manage or even to cope with him, the cardinals repudiated him. Less than six months after electing Urban, they fled Rome, declared Urban’s election invalid because conducted under duress, and elected the Cardinal Bishop of Geneva as Pope Clement VII. The Great Schism had begun.

Clement made his way, with the entire Curia, back to Avignon, while Urban created a new curia by appointing twenty-nine cardinals from all over Europe. There were now two popes, two papal administrations, two self-contained legal systems. The countries of Europe would have to choose which Pope they would obey. It was an agonising dilemma. There had often been antipopes before, but the rivals had usually been elected or appointed by rival groups. Here, the very same cardinals who had by due process chosen the Pope, had by due process declared him no pope at all, and had solemnly elected his successor. Even saints were confused about the
rights and wrongs of the situation. St Catherine of Siena supported Urban, St Vincent Ferrar supported Clement. Nations tended to choose their allegiance along dynastic and political lines. France, Burgundy, Savoy, Naples and Scotland submitted to Clement and the Avignon papal administration, while England, Germany, north and central Italy and central Europe obeyed Urban. The great religious orders divided on the issue. The popes excommunicated each other and placed their rivals’ supporters under interdict.

In the long perspective of history, the Roman Catholic Church has accepted that the ‘real’ popes were Urban and the successors elected by his cardinals and their successors. At the time, however, and throughout the thirty-nine years during which the schism persisted, this sort of clarity was hard to come by. Certainly, there is no getting round Urban’s near insanity, and his brutal treatment of opponents – at one point he had six cardinals under torture, five of whom eventually simply disappeared. Successive popes (five in all) and antipopes (four in all) expressed a wish to see the schism end, but in practice both sides put all their energies into consolidating their own support and undermining that of their rivals.

For the Church at large it was a trauma. The practical effects of the Great Schism were disastrous, for the rival popes created rival colleges of cardinals, and appointed competing bishops and abbots to the same sees and monasteries. The spiralling expenses of the papacy had now to be met from a divided constituency, rival popes scrambling for contested revenues. Here, ironically, the Roman obedience fared badly. The Avignon regime had never been fully dismantled, and had three generations of administrative machinery – and archives – behind it. The new Avignon popes managed to sustain much of the old jurisdictional and financial structures. By contrast the internal finances, administration and record-keeping of the Roman papacy seem to have collapsed under the strain, and as a result we know next to nothing about its running during the schism.

Yet the Pope was more than an administrative head. He was Christ’s own Vicar, holding the keys of heaven. In him alone was the power to dispense in hundreds of complex spiritual difficulties, in his hands was the power to give or to withhold the precious indulgences which would speed the believer through the pains of purgatory. The source of the right of archbishops and bishops to exercise their spiritual powers, the final court of appeal in doctrinal uncertainty, the
Pope was necessary for the life of the Church, and obedience to the false Pope would deliver the deluded individual or community into the hands of the devil. As year followed year and the schism became a permanence, men began to ask themselves how it could be ended. Could it be that Christ had left his Church with no means of solving the problem of being a body with two heads?

It was out of this agonised questioning that the movement known as Conciliarism was born. Great popes of the high Middle Ages, like Innocent III, had regularly used synods and general councils as a means of promoting reform and addressing the needs of the Church. Could a council put an end to the schism, by calling on both popes to resign, and choosing a new pope who would thus be the choice not of this group of cardinals or that rival group, but of the whole Church? These were attractive ideas, a way out. But if a council could do this, what became of papal supremacy, of the doctrine taught by Gregory, by Innocent, by Boniface and their successors, that the Pope judges all, and is judged by none?

The Conciliar solution was tried in 1409, when a group of disillusioned cardinals of both obediences, despairing of a negotiated solution between the rival popes, summoned a council. This call received wide support, and the Council, meeting at Pisa, deposed Pope Gregory XII (1406–15) (the Roman Pope) and Pope Benedict XIII (1394–1417) (the Avignon Pope). The Council then elected a new pope, Alexander V (1409–10). Neither of the old popes accepted their deposition, however, and so the Church now had three popes. The situation was finally resolved by the Council of Constance, which deposed John XXIII and Benedict XIII, and offered Gregory XII the face-saving gesture of a dignified abdication. An electoral body composed of the cardinals and thirty representatives of the Council elected Cardinal Odo Colonna as Pope Martin V (1417–31). Benedict XIII held out against the decision, and his cardinals elected a successor in due course, but they had virtually no support, and to all intents and purposes the schism was over.

The high papal prestige and unchallenged papalist theory of the era of Innocent III, however, was gone for ever. There was now an important body of opinion in the Church which held that in emergencies even the Pope was answerable to the Church in council, and the Council of Constance solemnly decreed as much. At one level, this was merely a formalising of what had long been believed, that a
heretical pope
could
be deposed by the cardinals or by a council, not because they possessed an authority above that of the Pope, but because by virtue of his heresy he automatically ceased to be pope: a council might therefore exercise authority over the person of an individual pope, leaving the office itself untouched. Even the theorists of the Gregorian papacy, like Humbert of Silva Candida, had conceded as much. But there were those who went further, and saw the decrees of Constance not as formulating emergency measures for dealing with papal apostasy, but as spelling out the underlying realities of authority and power in the Church. Taking their lead from the political theories of Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham, they taught that true religious authority rested not in the Pope or even the college of bishops, but in the Church as a whole, which might delegate it to anyone at all. A general council was thus like a parliament, the nearest approach to a perfect expression of the authority of the whole Church, and popes and bishops, who held their power only derivatively, must obey a council, and could be deposed by a council at will.