{pay'-puh-see}

The papacy denotes the office of the pope, or bishop of Rome, and the system of central ecclesiastical government of the \TRoman Catholic Church\t over which he presides.  Believed by Roman Catholics to be the successor of the apostle \TPeter\t, the pope grounds his claim to jurisdictional primacy in the church in the so-called Petrine theory.  According to that theory, affirmed by the Council of \TFlorence\t in 1439, defined as a matter of faith by the First \TVatican Council\t in 1870, and endorsed by the Second \TVatican Council\t in 1964, Jesus Christ conferred the position of primacy in the church upon Peter alone.  In solemnly defining the Petrine primacy, the First Vatican Council cited the three classical New Testament texts long associated with it:  John 1:42, John 21:15 ff., and, above all, Matthew 16:18 ff.  The council understood these texts, along with Luke 22:32, to signify that Christ himself constituted Saint Peter as prince of the apostles and visible head of the church, possessed of a primacy of jurisdiction that was to pass down in perpetuity to his papal successors, along with the authority to pronounce infallibly (see \Tinfallibility\t) on matters of faith or morals.

Although the pope's priestly powers as bishop come from the sacramental act of ordination, the pope derives his papal authority from an act of election, which since 1179 has been the right of the Sacred College of Cardinals (see \TCardinals, College of\t).  It is by virtue of their decision that each new pope inherits his official titles, ancient and modern, secular and sacred:  bishop of Rome, vicar of Jesus Christ, successor of the prince of the apostles, supreme pontiff of the universal Church, patriarch of the West, primate of Italy, archbishop and metropolitan of the Roman province, sovereign of the state of \TVatican City\t, servant of the servants of God.

The Early Papacy

Scanty pieces of evidence dating back to the 1st century AD indicate that the church at Rome had already attained a certain preeminence in doctrinal matters even among those few churches which could lay claim to apostolic foundation.  The apostolic credentials of Rome, moreover, would appear to have been uniquely impressive.  It is certain that Saint Paul had preached at Rome, and he was probably put to death there about 67 during the reign of Nero.  It seems likely, as well, that Saint Peter had visited Rome and had also been martyred there. About Peter's actual position at Rome, however, and about the position of the early Roman bishops, the historical record is silent.  What is unquestioned is that by the 3d century the Roman bishops were representing themselves as having succeeded to the primacy that Peter had enjoyed among the apostles and as wielding within the universal church a primacy of authority in doctrinal matters.  During the 4th and 5th centuries, after the Roman emperor \TConstantine\t's grant of toleration to Christianity (the Edict of Milan, 313) and its rise to the status of an official religion, a series of popes, most notably \TLeo I\t (r. 440-61), translated that claim into a primacy of jurisdiction over the church.  That claim was matched, however, by the rival claim of the church at Constantinople to a jurisdictional primacy in the East equal to that of Rome in the West.  In fact, for at least another century, it was the Byzantine emperor of Constantinople who could actually claim to be functioning as the supreme leader of Christendom in spiritual as well as temporal matters.

The Medieval Papacy

The 6th to the 16th century marked the rise of the papacy to the position of unique prominence within the Christian community that, despite vicissitudes, it has since retained. In that complex development three broad phases may be emphasized.  The first, extending from the late 6th to the late 8th century, was marked by the turning of the papacy to the West and its escape from subordination to the authority of the Byzantine emperors of Constantinople.  This phase has sometimes, but improperly, been identified with the reign (590-604) of \TGregory I\t, who, like his predecessors, represented to the inhabitants of the Roman world a church that was still identified with the empire.  Unlike some of those predecessors, Gregory was forced to confront the collapse of imperial authority in northern Italy.  As the leading civilian official of the empire in Rome, it fell to him to undertake the civil administration of the city and its environs and to negotiate for its protection with the Lombard invaders threatening it. In the 8th century, after the rise of Islam had weakened the Byzantine Empire and the Lombards had renewed their pressure in Italy, the popes finally sought support from the Frankish rulers of the West and received (754) from the Frankish king \TPepin the Short\t the Italian territory later known as the \TPapal States\t.  With the crowning (800) by \TLeo III\t of \TCharlemagne\t, first of the Carolingian emperors, the papacy also gained his protection.

By the late 9th century, however, the Carolingian empire had disintegrated, the imperial government in Italy was powerless, and the bishopric of Rome had fallen under the domination of the nobles.  Once again the papacy sought aid from the north, and in 962, Pope John XII crowned the German king \TOtto I\t emperor.  In this revived empire, soon called the \THoly Roman Empire\t, the pope theoretically was the spiritual head, and the emperor the temporal head.  The relationship between temporal and spiritual authority, however, was to be a continuing arena of contention (see \Tchurch and state\t).  Initially, the emperors were dominant and the papacy stagnated.  The emperors themselves, however, set the papacy on the road to recovery. In 1046, Emperor \THenry III\t deposed three rival claimants to the papal office and proceeded to appoint, in turn, three successors.  With the appointment in 1049 of \TLeo IX\t, the third of these, the movement of church reform, which had been gathering momentum in Burgundy and Lorraine, finally came to Rome.  It found there in Leo and in a series of distinguished successors the type of unified central leadership it had previously lacked.

With the papacy taking the leadership in reform, the second great phase in the process of its rise to prominence began, one that extended from the mid-11th to the mid-13th century.  It was distinguished, first, by \TGregory VII\t's bold attack after 1075 on the traditional practices whereby the emperor had controlled appointments to the higher church offices, an attack that spawned the protracted civil and ecclesiastical strife in Germany and Italy known as the \Tinvestiture controversy\t.  It was distinguished, second, by \TUrban II\t's launching in 1095 of the \TCrusades\t, which, in an attempt to liberate the Holy Land from Muslim domination, marshaled under papal leadership the aggressive energies of the European nobility.  Both these efforts, although ultimately unsuccessful, greatly enhanced papal prestige in the 12th and 13th centuries.  Such powerful popes as \TAlexander III\t (r.  1159-81), \TInnocent III\t (r. 1198-1216), \TGregory IX\t (r.  1227-41), and \TInnocent IV\t (r. 1243-54) wielded a primacy over the church that attempted to vindicate a jurisdictional supremacy over emperors and kings in temporal and spiritual affairs.

This last attempt proved to be abortive.  If Innocent IV triumphed over Holy Roman Emperor \TFrederick II\t, a mere half-century later \TBoniface VIII\t (r.  1294-1303) fell victim to the hostility of the French king \TPhilip IV\t.  In 1309, Pope \TClement V\t left Rome and took up residence in Avignon, the beginning of the so-called Babylonian Captivity (1309-78), during which all the popes were French, lived in Avignon, and were subject to French influence, until \TGregory XI\t returned the papacy to Rome.  During the 13th and 14th centuries, therefore, papal authority over the universal church was exercised increasingly at the sufferance of national rulers and local princes of Europe.  This fact became dismally clear during the Great Schism of the West (1378-1418;  see \TSchism, Great\t), when two, and later three, rival claimants disputed for the papal office, dividing the church into rival "obediences";  in their desperate attempts to win support, the claimants opened the way to the exploitation of ecclesiastical resources for dynastic and political ends.  The years of schism, then, and the related efforts of the general councils of \TConstance\t and \TBasel\t to limit the papal authority (see \Tconciliarism\t), saw the onset of the process whereby the papacy was reduced to the status of an Italian principality.  Its supreme authority over the universal church had come to be no more than theoretical, the power over the national and territorial churches having passed to kings, princes, and rulers of such city-states as Venice.

The Papacy in the Age of Reformation

Such was the situation when the papacy was confronted in the early 16th century with the great challenge posed by Martin \TLuther\t to the traditional teaching on the church's doctrinal authority and much else besides.  The seeming inability of \TLeo X\t (r.  1513-21) and those popes who succeeded him to comprehend the significance of the threat that Luther posed--or, indeed, the alienation of many Christians by the corruption that had spread throughout the church--was a major factor in the rapid growth of the Protestant \TReformation\t.  By the time the need for a vigorous, reforming papal leadership was recognized, much of northern Europe was lost to Catholicism.

Not until the election (1534) of \TPaul III\t, who placed the papacy itself at the head of a movement for churchwide reform, did the \TCounter-Reformation\t begin.  Paul established a reform commission, appointed several leading reformers to the College of Cardinals, initiated reform of the central administrative apparatus at Rome, authorized the founding of the \TJesuits\t, the order that was later to prove so loyal to the papacy, and convoked the Council of \TTrent\t, which met intermittently from 1545 to 1563.  The council succeeded in initiating a far-ranging moral and administrative reform, including the reform of the papacy itself, that was destined to define the shape and set the tone of Roman Catholicism into the mid-20th century.  The 16th century also saw the development of foreign missions, which were encouraged by the popes and enhanced their prestige.

The Papacy in the 18th and 19th Centuries

Their diplomatic skills notwithstanding, the 17th- and 18th-century popes proved unable to reverse the long-established trend toward increasing royal control of national clergies and increasing autonomy of the national and local doctrines.  National doctrines of French, German, and Austrian provenance (known respectively as \TGallicanism\t, Febronianism, and Josephism, and all of them in some measure promoting the limitation of papal prerogatives) helped reduce these popes progressively to a state of political impotence. Their decline became manifest in 1773, when, capitulating to the Bourbons, Clement XIV suppressed the Jesuits, the papacy's most loyal supporters.  A few years later, despite the \Tconcordat\t of 1801 reestablishing the church in France after the Revolution, the imprisonment of \TPius VII\t by Napoleon appeared to foreshadow the very demise of the papal office.

What this event actually foreshadowed was the demise of the papal temporal power.  Although in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars the Congress of Vienna (1815) restored the Papal States, they were forcibly annexed to the new Kingdom of Italy in 1870, and not until 1929 with the \TLateran Treaty\t was the "Roman Question"--the problem of nonnational status for the pope--solved.  The treaty, which created in the heart of Rome a tiny, sovereign Vatican state, restored to the papacy a measure of temporal independence but left it with political influence rather than actual political power.

Paradoxically, the eclipse of papal temporal power during the 19th century was accompanied by a recovery of papal prestige. The monarchist reaction in the wake of the French Revolution and the later emergence of constitutional governments served alike, though in different ways, to sponsor that development. The reinstated monarchs of Catholic Europe saw in the papacy a conservative ally rather than a jurisdictional rival.  Later, when the institution of constitutional governments broke the ties binding the clergy to the policies of royal regimes, Catholics were freed to respond to the renewed spiritual authority of the pope.

The popes of the 19th and 20th centuries have come to exercise that authority with increasing vigor and in every aspect of religious life.  By the crucial pontificate of \TPius IX\t (r. 1846-78), for example, papal control over worldwide Catholic missionary activity was firmly established for the first time in history.  The solemn definition of the papal primacy by the First Vatican Council gave clear theoretical underpinnings to Pius IX's own commitment to an intensified centralization of ecclesiastical government in Rome.  The council's companion definition of papal infallibility strengthened the energetic exercise of the papal magisterial power that was so marked a feature of the years between Vatican I and the assembly of the Second Vatican Council in 1962.

The Papacy in the 20th Century

Never before had popes been quite so active in moral and doctrinal teaching, and the great encyclicals of \TLeo XIII\t (r. 1878-1903) and \TPius XII\t (r.  1939-58) especially, dealing with an imposing range of topics from sexual morality and eucharistic teaching to economic, social, and political ideas, became determinative in shaping the development of Catholic thinking.  The efforts of these popes, moreover, although punctuated in 1907 by \TPius X\t's condemnation of \Tmodernism\t, did much to reverse the uncompromising hostility to modern thinking that Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors, which in 1864 had condemned liberalism, socialism, modern scientific thought, biblical studies, and other liberal movements of the day, had served to dramatize.  The continuing strength of the forces within the church favoring theological innovation and energetic reform became unmistakably evident at the Second Vatican Council, convened by \TJohn XXIII\t (r.  1958-63), and found expression especially in its decrees on ecumenism, religious liberty, the liturgy, and the nature of the church.  The ambivalence of some of those decrees, however, and the disciplinary turmoil and doctrinal dissension following the ending of the council, brought about new challenges to papal authority.  The establishment of national conferences of bishops tended to erode it to some degree, and \TPaul VI\t's encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968), reaffirming the prohibition of artificial birth control, was met with both evasion and defiance.  By the late 1970s papal authority itself had become a bone of contention.

Paul VI (r.  1963-78), however, continued the ecumenical efforts of John XXIII in his contacts with Protestant and Orthodox churches, as in his attempt to make discreet moves in the direction of pragmatic accommodation with the communist regimes of eastern Europe, a policy that would have been unthinkable during the reigns of Pius XI and Pius XII.  Paul also reorganized the curia and spoke strongly for peace and social justice.  With the accession of the Polish \TJohn Paul II\t (1978- ) the church had, for the first time since \TAdrian VI\t in the 16th century, a non-Italian pope.  \TFrancis\t \TOakley\t

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