Wednesday, January 24, 2018
The Popes and the Emperors
During the reign of Emperor Claudius, as had happened before and would happen again, the Jews were expelled from Rome and mention is made of this in the book of Acts concerning St Paul. Originally, the Romans considered Christians to be a sect of Judaism and St Paul, who was ethnically a Jew and a Roman citizen, became frustrated in trying to convert them and decided to accept their rejection and direct his efforts towards the Greeks and Romans. Later, in the reign of Emperor Nerva, we can see more evidence that the Christians submitted to imperial authority by the fact that they petitioned the emperor to stop forcing them to pay the tax that Jews had to pay as they were a different religion. At that time, the state still did not recognize Christianity as a valid religion but Emperor Nerva did order that Christians not be forced to pay the tax since they were not Jews. Official recognition of the Christian religion would not come until the issuing of the Edict of Milan by Emperor Constantine the Great. Later, Emperor Theodosius the Great would make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.
The underlying point though is that the bishops of Rome were by virtue of being born in the Roman Empire or, later, baptized as Christians, subjects from birth of the Roman emperors and that did not change with their election or selection for the papal throne. When the last remnants of the Western Roman Empire fell with the forced abdication of Romulus Augustulus, this did not legally change. With no emperor in the west, quite understandably, the Eastern Roman Emperor assumed sole authority for the whole Roman world and still regarded the popes as his subjects in the temporal sphere and as shepherds in the spiritual sphere (though the East Roman Emperor never recognized Romulus so that the exiled Julius Nepos was regarded in the east as the “last” West Roman Emperor until his death). This culminated in an era which I have previously heard plenty of Catholics complain about but never deny which was the so-called “Byzantine Papacy”.
The so-called “Byzantine Papacy” did not end until the reign of Pope Stephen II in 756. Prior to that time, the gains of Emperor Justinian had been rolled back and what was referred to as the Duchy of Rome (legally part of the [eastern] Roman Empire) was under threat from the Lombards of northern Italy. Constantinople was unable to help and the Pope turned to the King of the Franks, Pepin, son of the famous Charles Martel, to come to his rescue. He did so, the Lombards were defeated and in the subsequent peace treaty, only the “Romans, Franks and Lombards” were signatories, the Byzantines being left out completely. After the Lombards broke the treaty, attacked again and were defeated again, the King of the Franks ceded territory he had conquered from the Lombards to Stephen II which subsequently became the Papal States. Legally speaking, and this is why I warn Catholics about always trying to play the “legitimist” game, all of this territory was still part of the empire, having been basically stolen from the Byzantine emperors as the last Roman emperors still standing.
In the east, Church and State were firmly united. In the west, they were united as well but also fairly consistently at odds with each other and I think the perception of this has grown worse in modern times. The idea developed in the west of the “two swords” approach with the emperor (this being the German emperor) having the secular sword and the pope having the spiritual sword. However, the popes maintained that their sword was bigger than the emperor’s sword and that they could take away his sword if they wanted to because they had given it to him in the first place. I think this is magnified in our time because, basically, *everything* is or can be argued from moral grounds so that any issue can be considered a moral issue and thus falling under papal jurisdiction. All I have been able to come up with, to put it another way, is that there is a revulsion by some Catholics to the idea that the Bishop of Rome could ever, even in temporal terms only, be “subject” to a higher power, again, even if that power is only higher in terms of worldly power and nothing at all to do with spiritual power.
I think, at least this has so far been all I can come up with, the underlying reason for any denial that the popes were ever subjects of the Roman emperors which, like it or not, is an objective fact. It seems to me that some have become too attached to the idea of the popes being temporal sovereigns as they were in the era of the Papal States and since the recognition of the State of Vatican City because this has been so heavily emphasized as being absolutely essential to the independent function of the papacy as an institution, that it would be impossible for Catholicism to function without the popes being a power unto themselves. Personally, I do not think this view an incontestable one. Certainly it did not prevent any and all secular influence and I cannot be the only one who was outraged at the number of clerics implicated in child sex abuse crimes who escaped justice by being transferred to the Vatican establishment and thus beyond the reach of any secular government. However, the fact is that the papacy did exist for quite a few centuries without any secular power of their own, as subjects of the Roman emperors and it did not mean that they were simply the tools of Rome or Constantinople. What it did mean was that they had only their personal piety and courage to rely on. Those who were persecuted, exiled or martyred, I think, shows that such devotion was not unknown just as, I think, the amount of secular praise heaped on the current pontiff shows that independent sovereignty does not prevent a pope from giving in to popular trends or influence from beyond the Vatican walls.
For Further Reading:
Centrality of the Roman Empire
Church and Empire
The Tiburtine Sybil & Imperial Prophecy
Christ and the Emperor Tiberius
The Story of the Byzantine Empire