Reflections of a stormy petrel

The history of the Western Church begins with the Pope recognized as the ultimate court of appeal. Kings were crowned by bishops and therefore could, in extreme cases, be uncrowned (as Pope Innocent did to King John Lackland, and Gregory VII to Emperor Henry). But in the late middle ages, the kings - beginning with the king of France - began to realize that they could bring the Church under their own control, and make themselves effectively lords and masters. The Great Schism was the result of this, with the king of France and his allies manipulating the Avignon succession, the Italian states (then immensely powerful) and varying numbers of allies behind the Rome succession, and eventually a third line of Popes based in Spain. This was obviously intolerable, and in the end unity was restored, but in the meanwhile Czech Bohemia had gone off on its own tangent, the Hussite revolt, which demonstrated that a whole state could break off from the Roman communion and not only survive (at least for a while) but become powerful and threatening. By the time of the Reformation, the idea of breaking away from Rome and remaking the church in whatever image the ruling classes wanted it had already become reality, which is why the revolt caught on so fast. Luther was not much of an innovator - even his public personality was pretty much imitated from that of earlier Dominican preachers, especially Tauler. But while two centuries earlier anyone would have been horrified, as if by the ending of the world, at the notion of breaking up the Church and renouncing Roman allegiance - the reason why France and the other kingdoms had tried to pull the Papacy to themselves, ripping it up in the process, was that they still thought only in terms of one Church led by one Pope - the idea could now be easily entertained, especially by lords who bordered on Bohemia and whose fathers and grandfathers had suffered from Hussite raids within living memory.

The point is that the Reformation is by no means the only assault that the papacy had to suffer in the transition from the Middle to the Modern ages. Equally poisonous, and possibly even more dangerous, was the increasing nationalization of the local Catholic churches by all the great powers - Empire/Austria, Venice, France, Spain, Portugal. By 1600, the Pope had almost no right of intervention in anything but the most shocking affairs in local churches, and the local sovereigns treated church institutions and patrimony as their own to be dealt out as they saw fit. In France, abbacies were given to women and bishoprics to atheists. In a sense, Henry VIII had blundered: the example of the kings of France and Spain showed that he could pretty much have done as much with the Church and its goods as they did, without quarrels or excommunications. The only difference between the churches of France and of England until the revolutionary age was that, while the Anglican body was open to infiltration from outright Protestants, especially Calvinists, because of its claim to be "reformed" and its general theological weakness, the Church of France was not, and the Calvinists, however strong they were in France (which was, after all, the country of origin of Calvinism), remained an excluded minority and had to develop their own institutions. But that did not spare England from a civil war very much like France's, between the Calvinist minority and the majority - Catholic in one case, Anglican in the other. In both cases, the result was a pyrrhic victory for the Calvinists: Henry of Navarre became king of France, but had to accept the Catholic faith to be able to rule it; Parliament defeated Charles I of England, but made such a botch of governing that it was overthrown by the military leader Cromwell, and eventually had to re-admit the king and the Anglican Church.

In all this, and in every other religious conflict in the seventeenth century, the struggle was about controlling the one form of Church in the State. The Puritans were certainly not fighting for religious freedom, as is shown not only by their behaviour during the English civil war but also by the kind of commonwealth they set up in north America when they had the chance. Except for late creations such as Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, state churches were the rule (the state church of Connecticut was not disestablished until1831) and intrusive religious control the norm. But this was not, it must be clear, a direct result of the mediaeval norm, so much as a perversion. In the Middle Ages, the Church was independent of the State, and judged it when necessary. It also tried to mitigate the cruel customs of the time. (It is no coincidence that slavery was legislated almost out of use in mediaeval Europe.) It did not serve the State, in so far as such a thing as the State existed - which was in fact a welter of lordships bound together by written law and personal obligation. The idea that the State could possess the Church, rather than the reverse, is a late-comer to western civilization. And while it first became manifest in the struggle to control the Papacy in the fourteenth century, it has lingered long and in some ways it is with us still. As ;ate as 1905, the French government made an all-out effort to destroy and take over the Catholic Church, under guise of "democratizing" it - a democratization from above carried out with military occupations and confiscations, against the will of the Catholic faithful. Mexico tried it even later, under Plutarco Calles, and of course we have the whole sordid history of the various totalitarian tyrannies. None of them worked.

The idea that the Church can be independent of the State - an idea that many modern statesmen, including Obama, still haven't completely absorbed - only really became prevalent in the last three centuries, and even so it left a lot of people behind. The first Protestant churches, and the Anglicans, were state bodies, even more purely than the contemporary Catholic Churches, and however much they might prate about the right of private judgment. They only existed where the local princes said they could. It is for that reason that they have, in the long run, not made the transition to the contemporary world very well. Even after the various princes lost power or interest, Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians and so on kept the instinct to stick to what the boss says, and identified the boss with the various societal leaderships which managed to make their views sound like the voice of the people; hence the disheartening show of supposed Christians throwing the Bible and Holy Tradition overboard bit by bit. And that is even where the political power did not in fact directly impose such betrayals, as it did to the state Lutheran churches of Scandinavia, to the Church of England, and so on. Those who actually picked up the opportunity and ran with it were those bodies that had never been the tools of any state power, beginning with the Baptist churches, and to whom the congregational principle was more than just some sort of political excuse not to have a bishop. These churches started out as the most insignificant of the insignificant - there is not even a clear starting point or a famous founder; a number of congregations seem to have started in various places in England and New England, and just gradually found each other, and never anything but the sketchiest of common beliefs. And today they are a power across continents, rooted from Russia to Latin America and from Africa to England, and have imposed their image on the whole of Protestantism, so that "Protestant" and "Evangelical" are almost synonymous.

The Catholic Church, poisoned nearly to death by the state-church principle, nonetheless was struggling towards the idea of independence even before the earliest Baptist congregations gathered. The main reason why the Jesuits got a bad name - and the reason why the Catholic kings of all Europe demanded and eventually obtained their suppression - is that their theologians theorized the independence of the Church. As long as the vast majority of Catholics were subjects of no more than four absolute sovereigns - the kings of Portugal, Spain, France and the Emperor (later Emperor of Austria), independence was a practical impossibility, and indeed the so-called Age of Enlightenment saw the high tide of State control and use of the Church, reaching the stage of self-conscious theorizing as "Gallicanism" and "Febronianism". What the French Revolution demanded of the Church - total and declared obedience to the State - was what all the "Enlightened" despots of the time, except for the atheist Frederick II of Prussia, had been consciously working towards. Both sides of the struggle were enemies of the Catholic Church, as I pointed out here: http://fpb.livejournal.com/517145.html .

But that was only part of the breaking point. The other part is the growing number of Church bodies that were either under non-Catholic sovereigns or large minorities in non-Catholic countries. By 1815, all the strongest non-Catholic sovereigns in Europe were responsible for vast bodies of Catholics: Britain for Ireland, Prussia for Silesia and west Poland, Russia for east Poland and Lithuania, the Netherlands for Belgium - in fact, Catholics were an overall majority of the briefly united Kingdom of the Netherlands, which soon made trouble. It was becoming a more and more common experience for Catholics to live in states that had no relation to their church, and to deal with them as an independent group. The balance finally tipped when, as a direct result of the last and worst English attempt to exterminate Ireland's Catholics, a huge mass of Catholic immigrants poured over the English-speaking world (http://fpb.livejournal.com/554795.html ). While at the same time the old Catholic powers drifted in various ways towards institutional anti-clericalism - which was to dominate all of Portugal, France, Spain and Italy after 1871 - the English-speaking Catholic Church, spear-headed by millions of hungry Irishmen, her path opened - oh delicious irony! - by the conquering sword of its own traditional enemies in London, poured as relentlessly as a lava flow unchecked across the face of five continents. And it did so on an entirely volunteer basis, supported purely by the endeavours of its individual members, with no support and little sympathy from imperial or federal authorities: http://fpb.livejournal.com/534114.html . By 1850, the Pope felt strong enough to throw a direct challenge to the world's greatest empire, and established a new hierarchy of bishops over the British mainland itself. The British huffed and puffed, but found there wasn't anything they could do. An enormous new body of churches suddenly reared up across the world, grown in a conscious tradition of relying only on itself and on its own forces, law-abiding but wholly autonomous of the State.

The final stage of this part of the drama was the First Vatican Council and the dogma of Papal Infallibility. The reason why it was done then is that the Church, and especially the Vatican, felt the hot breath of the anti-clerical Savoy government of Italy, and of an increasing number of contemporary governments, and wanted to make it clear that it answered to another authority than theirs. Papal Infallibility is the Church's Declaration of Independence: it obeys no earthly power, neither authoritarian nor democratic, but only the law that built it and the authority that it has always recognized.

Today the Catholic and Evangelical churches are the two most potent and lively Christian realities in the world, spread across the continents, and growing. Everything that comes from the bad old tradition of state churches is rotten or dead, and even the Orthodox are learning to be independent of the Tzar. That, by the way, is the link between the First and the Second Vatican Councils: as the First Council - that was left unfinished when the troops of the King of Italy stormed Rome and the Council Fathers scattered - had only defined the role of the Pope, the Second defined the whole Church - bishops, priesthood, laity. There is much about Vatican II that bewilders an impartial observer: it condemned no heresy - not even Communism - and its constitutions, while admirable, do seem like a restatement of the obvious. But they are a restatement of Church doctrine in terms of the new world in which the State Church has died and the Church as a whole must live in a wholly autonomous way. That is why it was summoned and that is why it spoke.

And since history is the greatest of comedian and the master ironist of all ironists, I might as well close by placing the Council malcontents in their place in this frame of interpretation. It does not take much to understand that the "spirit of Vatican II" gang, the people who apparently want to turn the Catholic Church into an imitation of the American Episcopalians, belong to the same trend that has wrecked the old, state-supported Protestant denominations: that is, to a kind of person who instinctively seeks the sanction and support of what seems the contemporary consensus; that is, someone who wants the approval of an earthly power, and not having it in the state, looks for it in the consensus. But on the other hand, the so-called conservative dissident and schismatics, Lefebvrites and sedevacantists, can all be seen, with no effort at all, to be nostalgic for the state church and the King's authority. That is the real burden of all their songs; that is what Lefebvre preached about all the time. The real, live burden of his doctrine was the evil of the Revolution. In short, both the open opponents of Vatican II and its abusers and subversors are basically motivated by their itch for a political, terrestrial authority, king or revolution or consensus. Leonardo Boff and Marcel Lefebvre are brothers under the skin.