|
Popes and Kings
Power struggles continued between popes and secular rulers, with the papal power waning. The Concordat of Bologna in 1516 gave the French monarchy sweeping powers to appoint to benefices, and in 1523, Pope Adrian VI gave the Spanish monarchy control over appointing bishops in Spain. The Spanish king, Carlos I, had become the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1519, and in 1527, his imperial troops sacked Rome. In 1643, Louis XIV became king of France, and in 1681, he summoned the Assembly of the Clergy, which passed The Gallican Articles (1682), subordinating papal authority to that of the general councils and sharply limiting papal authority in France.
The Age of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution
The Age of Enlightenment
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Church was facing an increasingly difficult intellectual environment as the scientific revolution undermined belief in the supernatural upon which the Church depended for great deal of its standing in society. The overwhelming thrust of this growing secularization of European thought was to reject all received ideas of whatever origin in favor of human reason and especially the refusal to accept anything beyond the laws of nature rapidly being discovered by the great scientists of the day. Even the Bible was being subjected to critical reevaluation by such intellectuals as Voltaire whose handy index for scriptural references demonstrated how hopeless it was to attempt to explain the Bible’s contradictions and inconsistencies.
At the same time, there was a growing movement in favor of religious toleration especially in protest against the long-term negative consequences of Louis XVI’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the persecution of the French Protestants. Pierre Bayle attacked the revocation on the basis of rejecting any effort to coerce in matters of conscience. In England, the Toleration Act granted Protestant nonconformists to the Church of England relief from penalties specified in earlier legislation. All this tended to undermine the Church’s claim to be the only viable path to salvation.
The Church also had increasingly serious problems with the secular Catholic monarchies. In France, for example, the state attorneys insisted on the right of the government to define its own jurisdiction and unilaterally to decide the limits of the jurisdiction claimed by the Church. This Gallicanism was typical of Catholic governments including those of Spain, Portugal, Venice, Austria, and many Italian states, where the church found its authority, jurisdiction, and autonomy under siege. The effect of this pressure on the Church can best be seen in the fate of The Society of Jesus. The society, which had been founded in 1540 on the basis of exemplary loyalty to the Pope and the hierarchy, was the key to the revival of Catholicism in many parts of Europe. The Jesuits also sent many missionaries to the East in the seventeenth century. But the Jesuits exemplary loyalty to the Pope and their record of defending indigenous peoples made them many enemies among the lawyers and bureaucrats who served the national monarchies. Portugal expelled its Jesuits in 1759, and the order was suppressed in France in 1762. Spain expelled all Jesuits from its homeland and all parts of the Spanish Empire in 1767. Under very strong pressure from the national monarchies, Pope Clement XIV began to indicate a willingness to suppress the Jesuit Order in 1769, and in 1773, the order was dissolved. It would not be restored until 1814.
Elements of the secular hierarchy were also not averse to putting forth proposals that sought to limit papal authority. In 1763, Bishop Nikolaus von Hontheim (writing under the name Febronius) published his principal work attacking the authority of the papacy and making the popes subordinate to ecumenical councils. A second edition of this work was published in 1765, with translations appearing in German, French, Spanish, and Italian. The Punctuation of Ems, published by the electors and archbishop of Salzburg in 1786, limited the jurisdiction of papal nuncios and subordinated papal briefs to episcopal endorsement.
The French Revolution
After the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy asserted the right of the National Assembly to regulate ecclesiastical institutions, in effect making the clergy and the bishops employees of the state. The refusal of the papacy to accept the Civil Constitution led to a division among the French clergy. Some members of the clergy accepted the Civil Constitution (constituent) priests, while others refused to accept the Civil Constitution and remained loyal to the Pope.
Eventually both groups were persecuted by the revolutionary government and Catholicism was driven underground for a time in favor of a new state religion organized around the Goddess of Reason. The seizure of Pope Pius VI and his deportation to France, where he died in August 1799, marked the nadir of the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. But with the coming of Napoleon and his recognition of the importance of religion in maintaining order, a way was open that would allow the Church back into France. This was accomplished by the Concordat of 1801. After that, the Church made a remarkable recovery.
To more fully understand this material, click the links to the left.
|
