The structure of ecclesiastical and devotional life
Ecclesiastical organization
With the removal of the most offensive instances of lay influence in ecclesiastical affairs, the organization of the universal church and local churches acquired a symmetry and consistency hardly possible before 1100. An 11th-century anonymous text that was accepted by canon law identified two orders of Christians, the clergy and the laity. It considered the clergy largely in a monastic context, indicating that the new attention to the secular clergy had transferred to them the virtues and discipline of monks. Although many monks were not ordained priests, their disciplined, contemplative life was held up for centuries as the ideal clerical model.
The work of the laity was the business of the world. The clergy, however, considered itself far more important than the laity. Members of the clergy themselves were ranked in terms of sacramental orders, minor and major. When a boy or young man entered the clergy, he received the tonsure, symbolizing his new status. He might then move in stages through the minor orders: acolyte, exorcist, lector, and doorkeeper. At the highest of minor orders the candidate could still leave the clergy. Many clerics in minor orders served in the administration of secular and ecclesiastical institutions. They also sometimes caused trouble in secular society, since even they received benefit of clergy, or exemption from trial in secular courts. Ordination to the major orders—subdeacon (elevated to a major order by Pope Innocent III in 1215), deacon, and priest—entailed vows of chastity and conferred sacramental powers on the recipient.
At the head of the Latin Christian church was the pope, whose powers were now articulated in canon law, most of which was made by the popes themselves and by their legal advisers. Not only did popes claim powers over even secular rulers in many instances, but a number of rulers, including King John of England (reigned 1199–1216), submitted their kingdoms to the popes and received them back to govern for their new spiritual and temporal masters. The popes also issued charters of foundation for universities, convened church councils, called Crusades and commissioned preachers to deliver Crusade sermons, and appointed papal judges delegate or subdelegate to investigate specific problems. In all these areas, as in the articulation of canon law, papal authority directly affected the lives of all Christians, as well as the lives of Jews and Muslims in their relations with Christians.
The popes were assisted by the College of Cardinals, which was transformed during the papal-imperial conflict from a group of Roman liturgical assistants into a body of advisers individually appointed by the popes. Among its duties articulated in conciliar and papal decrees of 1059 and 1179—rules still in effect in the Roman Catholic Church today—was to elect the pope. A cardinal could be a cardinal bishop (if the church he was given was outside the city of Rome, whose only bishop, of course, was the pope himself), a cardinal priest, or a cardinal deacon. Cardinals also had different roles. The cardinal bishop of Ostia, for example, always crowned a new pope. For some time the senior cardinal deacon gave the pope his papal name, a practice that began in the 10th century, perhaps in imitation of monastic tradition.
The papacy developed other means to implement its authority. After the Concordat of Worms (1122), which settled some aspects of the Investiture Controversy, popes held regular assemblies of higher clergy in church councils, the first of which was the first Lateran Council in 1123. Conciliar legislation was the means by which reform principles were most efficiently formulated and disseminated to the highest clerical levels. Although councils in the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries were closely controlled by the popes, later councils sometimes opposed papal authority with claims to conciliar authority, a position generally known as conciliarism. Papal legates, judges, and emissaries, widely used by Gregory VII and later popes, were dispatched with full papal authority to deal with issues in distant parts of Europe.
Papal collectors, who received funds owed to the popes for Crusading or other purposes, were also essential components of papal government. The papal chamberlain of Celestine III (1191–98), Cencio Savelli (later Pope Honorius III; 1216–27), produced the Liber Censuum (“The Book of the Census”) in 1192, the first comprehensive account of the sources of papal funding. In this respect, as in the formal communications of the papal chancery, the pope created an influential model, imitated by all other European principalities and kingdoms. Although only four papal registers (collections of important papal letters and decisions) from before 1198 survive more or less intact, all registers since then have been preserved.
The day-to-day work of the popes was carried out by the Roman Curia; the name Curia Romana was first used by Urban II at the end of the 11th century. The Curia consisted of the chancery; the Apostolic Camera, or financial centre; the consistory, or legal office, including the Roman Rota (chief papal court); and the Penitentiary, or spiritual and confessional office. The popes were also the secular rulers of Rome and the Papal States, and accordingly their servants included the rulers and officials of these territories.
The popes ran afoul of local movements for greater independence, including the revolution led by Arnold of Brescia, the priest and religious dissident, in 1143. Revolts continued throughout the 13th century and increased in frequency during the Avignon papacy (1305–78), when the popes resided in Avignon, and during the Great Schism (1378–1417), when there were two and then three claimants for the papal office. (The crisis was resolved in 1415–18 at the Council of Constance, which elected a new pope and restored papal authority over the city of Rome and the Papal States.) When a pope could safely reside in Rome, he worked at the church of St. John Lateran, his cathedral as bishop of the city of Rome, and not at the Vatican, which was chiefly a pilgrimage shrine. Only after Martin V (1417–31), the pope elected at the Council of Constance, found that the papal quarters at the Lateran had fallen into ruins was the papal residence and administration moved to the Vatican.
Lower levels of the clerical hierarchy replicated the papal administration on a smaller scale. The immense dioceses of northern Europe, ruled by prince-archbishops (as in Cologne) or by prince-bishops (as in Durham), were very different from the tiny rural dioceses of southern Italy. Within the secular clergy the highest rank below the pope was that of primate, who was usually the regional head of a group of archbishops. The archbishops, or metropolitans, ruled archdioceses, or provinces, holding provincial synods of clergy under their jurisdiction, ruling administrative courts, and supervising the suffragan bishops (bishops assigned to assist in the administration of the archdiocese). The archbishop was expected to make regular visits to the ecclesiastical institutions in his province and to hear appeals from the verdicts of courts at lower levels.
The archdiocese was divided into dioceses, each ruled by a bishop, who supervised his own administration and episcopal court. In ecclesiastical tradition, bishops were considered the successors of the Apostles, and a strong sense of episcopal collegiality between pope and bishops survived well into the age of increased papal authority. Episcopal courts included a chancery for the use of the bishop’s seal, a judicial court under the direction of the official or the archdeacon, financial officers, and archpriests (priests assigned to special functions). The bishop’s church, the cathedral, was staffed by a chapter (a body of clergy) and headed by a dean, who was specifically charged with administering the cathedral and its property. The chapter was not usually the bishop’s administrative staff and thus sometimes found itself in conflict with the bishop. Struggles between bishop and chapter were frequent and notorious in canon law courts, since they could be appealed, like disputed episcopal elections, all the way to the papal court.
Episcopal powers were extensive: only the bishop could consecrate churches, ordain clergy, license preachers, or appoint teachers in episcopal schools. The bishop’s pastoral responsibilities extended to all Christians in his diocese. Moreover, since canon law touched the lives of all Christians, episcopal legal officials held great power. They visited diocesan institutions and presided over trials of those accused of violating canon law, which concerned many areas that in modern legal systems are subsumed under civil and criminal law, family courts, and moral offenses.
The diocese was divided into deaconries for the archdeacons, which might convoke lesser synods. Deaconries too had their own chancellors, notaries, and judicial officers, as well as archpriests who assisted the deacons. Since the archdeacon or official was usually the point of contact between the laity and ecclesiastical discipline, they were often the butt of satire and complaint. One topic said to have been proposed for debate at a 13th-century university was: Can an archdeacon be saved?
At the lowest level of the clerical hierarchy was the parish, with its priest, suffragan priests, vicars, and chaplains, who together supervised the spiritual life of the majority of European laity. The parish owned its church and the land that provided the priest’s income (the glebe); additional income was derived from tithes collected from all parishioners and often from an endowment. The priest was presented to the bishop for ordination by a layman, cleric, or clerical corporation with proprietary rights over the parish. In many cases, the actual care of souls in a parish was in the hands of a vicar, who was deputed by a patron to perform the priest’s duties when the priest was away studying or occupied in other business. The parish priest also administered the ecclesiastical calendar for his parishioners. Parishioners themselves might belong to spiritual associations, called confraternities, but all were expected to be baptized, to make confession once a year (after the fourth Lateran Council prescribed this in 1215), to take Holy Communion, to marry, and to be buried in the parish churchyard. The parish was the level at which most people learned their Christianity and the level at which most of them lived it.
Devotional life
The popes also supervised the regular clergy, which included the religious orders of monks, canons regular (secular clergy who lived collegiately according to a rule), and mendicants. Each of these orders had a superior, who was advised by a chapter general that comprised representatives of the religious houses of the order. Orders, like dioceses, were organized according to regions, each having a regional superior and holding regional chapters. Individual religious houses were headed by an abbot or abbess (the mendicant orders had a slightly different organization) and administered by a chancellor and chamberlain. Provosts and deans usually supervised the property of each house.
In the 12th century, new devotional movements (movements devoted to Jesus or the saints) led to outbursts of religious dissent (with new forms of ecclesiastical discipline devised to control them) and equally passionate expressions of orthodox devotion. Although monasticism was by then an old institution, one of the great themes of the century was the search for the apostolic life as monks, canons, and laypeople might live it. The canons regular were one result of this movement, as were new monastic orders, particularly the Cistercian Order. But the most dynamic movement was that of the mendicant orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, founded in the early 13th century.
The Order of Friars Minor, founded by the layman Francis of Assisi (1181/82–1226) to minister to the spiritual needs of the cities, spread widely and rapidly, as did the Order of Preachers, founded by the canon of Osma, Dominic of Guzmán (c. 1170–1221). These and other devotional movements of laypeople were supported by Pope Innocent III and his successors. The mendicant orders greatly influenced popular piety, because they specialized in preaching in new churches that were built to hold large crowds. Indeed, during this time the sermon came into its own as the most effective mass medium in Europe. The mendicants also increased devotion to the Virgin Mary and to the infant or crucified and suffering Jesus, rather than to the figure of Jesus as regal and remote.
Other forms of devotional life took shape during the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries. The Cistercian Order, for example, instituted the status of lay brother, who was usually an adult layman who retired from the world to undertake the management of monastic resources. Still other members of the laity retired to the sequestered life of hermits and recluses, usually under the supervision of a chaplain.
During the 13th and 14th centuries, devotional movements arose that were neither monastic nor clerical in any other sense. The most notable of these was the Beguines, an order of devout women (and occasionally, but more rarely, men, who lived in all-male communities and were called Beghards) who lived together in devotional communities within towns, especially in the Low Countries and the Rhineland, followed no rule, and took no vow. They worked in the towns but lived collectively and might leave for marriage or another form of life at any time. Some of the most important devotional literature of the period was written by and for Beguines.
The vast movements of reform, ecclesiastical organization, and pastoral care of the 12th and 13th centuries reached their greatest intensity in the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216). Lothar of Segni, as he was originally known, was the son of a landholding noble family outside Rome; he was educated in the schools of Paris and attached to the Roman Curia in 1187. Innocent issued the strongest and most tightly argued claims for papal authority, and he launched Crusades and instituted the office of papal judge-delegate to combat clerical crimes and heterodox belief. He also supported the new mendicant orders, paid particular attention to the needs of popular devotion, reformed and disciplined the Curia, and assembled the fourth Lateran Council in November 1215. Innocent came as close to realizing the ideals of reform and renewal in ecclesiological practice as any pope before or since.
The organization of normative religion, the formal rules and norms of practice in the faith, was intended to give regularity and order to lived religion. Daily religious life was characterized by the acceptance of tradition and authority and by belief in the saints as patrons of local communities and belief in the parish priest as a conveyor of grace by virtue of his sacramental powers (conferred by ordination) and his legal powers (conferred by the bishop). During the 12th century, institutional structures for official acts of canonization were established, but the enthusiasm for the saints remained an important part of both popular devotion and the official cult of the saints (the system of religious belief and ritual surrounding the saints). The cult of the saints was celebrated by clergy and laity in the observance of feast days and processions, the veneration of saints’ relics, pilgrimages to saints’ shrines, and the rituals of death and burial near the graves of saints. The liturgical dimension of pastoral care regulated the major events of the day, week, season, and Christian year, according to whose rhythms everyone lived. Priests blessed harvests, animals, and ships and liturgically interceded in the face of natural or man-made disasters.
Religious devotion strengthened the presence of normative religion in marriage and the family, the sacred character of the local community and the territorial monarchy, and the moral rules by which lay affairs were conducted. The fourth Lateran Council largely institutionalized the work of the 12th-century moral theologians at Paris, who had begun to apply the principles of doctrine and canon law to the lives of their contemporaries.