The Papacy and the Historian VI: Kith and Kingship

Extract

I want to take as my next vantage point from which to survey the traditions of papalism the achievement of the policy Gregory the Great had started—though it had acquired some accretions he might not have cared for very much—the confiding of the rule of the Church to a specially marked-off status group of ordained persons. This is usually called the Gregorian Reformation, after its most famous protagonist Gregory VII. This is very misleading, especially as it leads scholars to see Gregory VII’s pontificate as the beginning of something when it is just as much a dead end. Gregory is supposed to have been an original and creative pontiff who saw the truth that the Church was subject to the Babylonish captivity of the lay princes of the day, notably the German Emperor (or potential Emperor to be strictly correct). He surveyed the great traditions of the Catholic religion, starting with St Paul, and by wielding his remarkable gifts of iron logic he laid the foundations of a recovery of Christian liberty. This meant in practice an hierarchical Church much more tightly governed than ever before but by clerics. At times Gregory’s letters suggest he thought of the Church as one huge parish with himself as parish priest, the bishops, etc., as curates and the lay princes as a sort of churchwarden or leader of Catholic action. It is not true to say that Gregory simply wanted the Church to be free of lay intervention or rule—it was in fact so in his day to as large a degree as it ever was in the Middle Ages and far more so than it was in the post-Reformation world, in either Catholic or Protestant kingdoms. What Gregory wanted was the subordination of lay rulers to his moral dictatorship, he wanted them to intervene but on his say-so. What the boundaries of the moral were, Gregory would define.