Papal History

It will be found a general truth of early Papal history that the man who appeals to Rome is heard more indulgently than the opponent who did not appeal. Hilary, who had deposed the Bishop in plain accordance with the rules, resented Leo's conduct, and scoffed at his supposed supremacy. He then apprehended violence, and stealthily left Rome for Gaul . Leo thereupon - or after hearing new charges against Hilary- wrote to the bishops of Vienne 3 that they were released from obedience to Hilary, who was thenceforward to confine himself to Arles .

Pope Victor III., a few years later, shudders to mention the "murders and robberies and nameless vices" of Benedict, and his vague charges, supported by Raoul Glaber and other authorities, suggest that the Lateran Palace must have recalled to the mind of any sufficiently informed Roman some of the scenes which had been witnessed in Nero's Golden House in the lowest days of paganism. At length, after being twice expelled from Rome, he wearied of the Papacy - one authority says that he wished to marry-and sold it to his uncle John Gratian for one or two thousand pounds of gold. By this time there was a certain young Hildebrand studying in the Lateran School , and the story of his life will tell us the sequel of this extraordinary chapter of Papal history.

With Spain the Pope concluded one of the most remarkable Concordats in Papal history. There had gradually been established a custom by which the Papacy appointed to all benefices which fell vacant during eight months of the year, and the bishops and their chapters appointed to vacant benefices during the remaining third of the year. The court had the right of appointment only to benefices in Granada and the Indies . As a natural result, Spanish ecclesiastics crowded to Rome , and it was estimated that the Dataria derived from them about 250,000 crowns a year.

In France the anticlerical Liberals gained from year to year on the Catholic reaction which had followed the Commune of 1871, and Gambetta's battle-cry rallied the old forces in alarming numbers. In 1876 (November 6th) Antonelli died, and the grave scandal which disclosed his irregularities gave joy to the enemies of the Papacy. A last gleam of consolation came to the Pope in 1877, when the Catholic world held a magnificent celebration, on June 3d, of his episcopal jubilee. But the aged Pope saw no retreat of the disastrous forces he had encountered, and, after the longest and most calamitous rule in Papal history, he died on February 7, 1878.

How did the papacy, at least temporarily, overcome episcopalism, how was the latter, so to speak, driven underground, and how did it gather force again in the late Middle Ages? These are only a few of the problems which the opulent history of the medieval papacy poses. Much work has yet to be done, and it may perhaps not be presumptuous to express the hope that those who are so anxious to tailor medieval papal history to modern exigencies, might one day profitably and constructively direct their energies to the one or the other problem here mentioned. What this question concerns is the less obvious, hidden and unacknowledged influence of the Bible upon, not only the programme, but also on the style, language and thought processes of the papacy.