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Sunday, March 14, 2010

Apostolic Succession (Part 15): The Test Of History

Having discussed some of the Biblical and patristic principles related to apostolic succession, I want to close this series with an examination of how succession has been practiced by many of those who claim it. I'll use as my example the most prominent succession claim in church history, that of the papacy. Ask yourself how well the history of the office aligns with the Biblical and patristic standards discussed earlier in this series.

My focus here will be on non-doctrinal issues more than doctrine. I've discussed some of the doctrinal errors of the Roman bishops in an earlier response to Dave Armstrong and elsewhere.

In discussions of the sins of the Popes, Catholics often cite the sins of Israelite kings or apostles, for example. But a king isn't a bishop, nor is an apostle a bishop. (Though an apostle could serve as a bishop, the two offices aren't the same.) Not only do we have to distinguish among different requirements for different offices, but we also have to distinguish among different levels of evidence for different authority claims. We have good reason to trust an apostle, for example, even if he committed a sin such as Peter's denying Christ. If scripture tells us to accept Peter's apostolic authority, despite his sins, then we can accept Peter's authority on grounds such as the evidence we have for the Divine inspiration of scripture. If Catholics want us to trust a Pope in a similar manner, then let them produce similar evidence justifying that trust.

As J.N.D. Kelly noted in his Oxford Dictionary Of Popes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), the legitimacy of some of the Popes continues to be disputed to this day. For example:

The legitimacy of [Leo VIII's] pontificate, at least until John XII's death, has been contested; it depends on the validity, debated among canonists, of John's deposition....

[Silvester III's] right to be considered an authentic pope is open to question....

Usually classified as an antipope, [Alexander V's] claim to be an authentic pope is still debated, and some historians give him the compromise description of "council pope". (pp. 127, 144, 237)


The Roman Catholic historian Eamon Duffy writes in Saints And Sinners: A History Of The Popes (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997):

By contrast [to an earlier Roman bishop who had been martyred], in the later persecution under Diocletian in 303, Pope Marcellinus (296-304?) would cave in to pressure. He surrendered copies of the scriptures and offered sacrifice to the gods. He died a year later in disgrace, and the Roman church set about forgetting him....

In the misery of exile, surrounded by imperial clergy and far from home, Liberius [bishop of Rome] weakened. He agreed to the excommunication of Athanasius [a bishop who defended the deity of Christ], and signed a formula which, while it did not actually repudiate the Nicene Creed, weakened it with the meaningless claim that the Logos [Jesus Christ] was 'like the father in being' and in all things. In 358 he was finally allowed to return to Rome.

He found the city deeply divided. On Liberius' exile in 355, the Emperor had installed a new pope, Liberius' former archdeacon Felix. Consecrated by Arian bishops in the imperial palace in Milan, Felix was an obvious fellow traveller, but imperial patronage was a powerful persuader, and many of the Roman clergy had rallied to him. Constantius was now unwilling simply to repudiate Felix, and commanded that Liberius and he should function as joint bishops....

Liberius' successor Damasus (366-84), who had served as deacon under both Liberius and Felix, would inherit some of the consequences of his predecessor's exile. His election in 366 was contested, and he was confronted by a rival pope, Ursinus, whom he only got rid of with the help of the city police and a murderous rabble....

Deprived of the support of empire, the papacy became the possession of the great Roman families, a ticket to local dominance for which men were prepared to rape, murder and steal. A third of the popes elected between 872 and 1012 died in suspicious circumstances - John VIII (872-82) bludgeoned to death by his own entourage, Stephen VI (896-7) strangled, Leo V (903) murdered by his successor Sergius III (904-11), John X (914-28) suffocated, Stephen VIII (939-42) horribly mutilated, a fate shared by the Greek antipope John XVI (997-8) who, unfortunately for him, did not die from the removal of his eyes, nose, lips, tongue and hands. Most of these men were manoeuvred into power by a succession of powerful families - the Theophylacts, the Crescentii, the Tusculani. John X, one of the few popes of this period to make a stand against aristocratic domination, was deposed and then murdered in the Castel Sant' Angelo by the Theophylacts, who had appointed him in the first place.

The key figure in both John X's appointment and his deposition was the notorious Theophylact matron, Marozia. She also appointed Leo VI (928) and Stephen VII (928-31), and she had been the mistress of Pope Sergius III, by whom she bore an illegitimate son whom she eventually appointed as Pope John XI (931-6)....

Its [the declining papacy's] symbol is the macabre 'cadaver synod' staged by Stephen VI in January 897, when he put on trial the mummified corpse of his hated predecessor but one, Pope Formosus. The corpse, dressed in pontifical vestments and propped up on a throne, was found guilty of perjury and other crimes, was mutilated by having the fingers used in blessings hacked off, and was then tossed into the Tiber. Stephen himself was subsequently deposed by the disgusted Roman crowd, and strangled in prison....

Of the twenty-five popes between 955 and 1057, thirteen were appointed by the local aristocracy, while the other twelve were appointed (and no fewer than five dismissed) by the German emperors. The ancient axiom that no one may judge the Pope was still in the law-books, but in practice had long since been set aside.

The popes themselves were deeply embroiled in the internecine dynastic warfare of the Roman nobility, and election to the chair of Peter, as we have seen, was frequently a commodity for sale or barter. The Ottonian era had led to a temporary improvement in the characters of the popes, but by the second quarter of the eleventh century standards had crumbled once more. Benedict IX (1032-48), whose election was the result of a systematic campaign of bribery by his father, the Tusculan grandee Count Alberic III, was as bad as any of the popes of the preceding 'dark century'. Like his uncle and immediate predecessor John XIX, Benedict was a layman, and was still in his twenties at the time of his election. He was both violent and debauched, and even the Roman populace, hardened as they were to unedifying papal behaviour, could not stomach him. He was eventually deposed in favour of Silvester III (1045). With the help of his family's private army, he was briefly restored in 1045 amid bloody hand-to-hand fighting in the streets of Rome. He was evidently tired of the struggle, however, for he accepted a bribe to abdicate in favour of his godfather, the archpriest John Gratian....

The spread of nepotism and of venal appointments to the cardinalate, in return for money or favours, made the outcome of elections towards the end of the century even less likely to reflect a simple search for 'God's candidate'. In the 1484 conclave which elected Innocent VIII (1484-92) there were a record twenty-five cardinals present, many of them scandalously secular men. Proceedings were stage-managed by Giuliano della Rovere, nephew of the dead Pope. When it became clear that he himself was unelectable, he saw to it that a manageable nonentity was chosen. The successful candidate, Cardinal Cibo, bribed electors by countersigning petitions for promotion brought to him in his cell the night before the decisive vote.

Roderigo Borgia's election as Alexander VI in 1492 was accompanied by even more naked bribery....Yet, for all his ability, Roderigo was a worldly and ruthless man, and at the time of his election was already the father of eight children, by at least three women....

Before the Great Schism, the papacy had derived much of its funding from the vigorous exercise of its spiritual office - payments from suppliants at the papal court, revenues derived from papal provisions, annates on benefices, Peter's Pence. The erosion of papal prerogatives during the schism and Conciliar era, however, drastically reduced such payments, and the papacy was increasingly thrown back on the secular revenues derived from the Papal States - a fact which accounts for the papal wars in defence of those States....

Nevertheless, the mounting cost of papal wars, and the lavish building programmes of successive popes, made the search for new sources of revenue unending. The most notorious of these was the sale of indulgences, especially the indulgence for the rebuilding of St Peter's. More significant still, however, was the growing dependence of the popes on the sale of office....

In the same year in which Erasmus published Julius Exclusus, in which the Lateran Council ended, and in which Pope Leo packed the College of Cardinals with thirty-one new creations, an unknown theology professor in Wittenberg, an obscure new German university, proposed an academic debate on the subject of indulgences. His name was Martin Luther, and he was reacting against the indulgence which Pope Julius and after him Pope Leo had issued to help fund the rebuilding of St Peter's. Raising donations for Church projects by dispensing spiritual blessings was a long-established practice, and few people questioned it....

Devout minds everywhere were revolted by this sort of stuff [Johann Tetzel's means of selling indulgences], and there had been many protests before about such abuse of indulgences. But Luther was not protesting about the abuse of indulgences: he was protesting about indulgences themselves. Luther was a pious and scrupulous monk, who had recently passed through a profound spiritual crisis. Overwhelmed by a sense of his own sinfulness, he had found the idea of God's justice terrifying, and the Church's remedies through confession and acts of penance powerless to calm his fears. Release had come from a phrase in St Paul: 'The righteous shall live by faith.' For Luther, this one phrase turned the whole medieval system of salvation on its head. The saint was not, as the Church taught, a man or woman who no longer sinned: the saint was a sinner who put all his or her trust in God. Good works, penance, indulgences, contributed nothing to salvation. Faith, a childlike dependence on God, was everything. There was a place for good works in the Christian life, but as a thankful response for salvation achieved, not as a means of earning it. (pp. 14, 25, 82-83, 87, 149, 153-154)

1 comment:

  1. So much for the old canard "to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant" . . .

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