A Service of Love

2. The Second Millennium

29 2 The Second Millennium It is no coincidence that the schism between Christian West and East occurred at the same time as the eleventh -century Gregorian reform in the West, named after Pope Gregory VII (1073–85), during which a strongly juridical understanding of the papacy developed. Eamon Duffy considers that “Gregory’s was a lonely vision of the papacy. Though he often spoke of other bishops as confrater or coepiscopus (brother and fellow bishop) in practice he saw himself fighting a solitary battle, in a world which had turned its back on the demands of the Gospel.”1 It is important to note, however, that the centralization of power in the papacy at this time, increasingly supported by collections of canon law from the late eleventh century onwards, Gratian’s Decretum Gratiani or Concordia discordantium canonum (mid-twelfth century ) being the most celebrated, was driven not simply by a will to dominate but rather by the desire to eradicate abuses such as lay investiture and simony, and to assert the freedom and purity of the church. The result, nevertheless, was a reconfiguration of the 1. Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, 3rd ed. (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2006), 122. 30 The Second Millennium church, “not as a communion of local churches, but as a single international organization, with the Pope at its head.”2 Pictorially speaking, a pyramid, with the pope at the top, replaced a network of local churches, with the local church of Rome, and its bishop, at the center. Under Gregory’s like-minded predecessor, Pope Leo IX (1049–54), Cardinal Humbert went to Constantinople in 1054 guided, as Henry Chadwick says, by an “underlying axiom” that “obedience to papal authority was the key to unlock all ... disputed matters.”3 The mutual excommunications between Humbert and Patriarch Michael Cerularius swiftly followed. Congar refers to the transition in the West at that time from an “ecclesiology of communion” to an “ecclesiology of powers.”4 De Lubac notes that the term “body of Christ” can have three referents: Christ himself, the Eucharist , and the church. The church fathers of the early centuries took for granted the link between the first and the second of these bodies, and concentrated on the link between the second and the third of these bodies (“the Eucharist makes the Church”).5 After Eucharistic controversy in the eleventh century the emphasis changed, however, and the spotlight fell on the link between the first and the second bodies (Christ is really present in the Eucharist by the transubstantiation of the bread and 2. Ibid., 130. 3. Henry Chadwick, East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 217. 4. Yves Congar, “L’ «Ecclesia» ou communauté chrétienne, sujet int égral de l’action liturgique,” in J.-P. Jossua and Y. Congar, eds., La Liturgie après Vatican II (Paris: Cerf, 1967), 241–82, here at 261. 5. Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum (Paris: Aubier, 1949), 104. The Second Millennium 31 wine). The unfortunate result was that the former link between the Eucharist and the church was gradually neglected and forgotten. This fact, he says, “dominates the whole evolution of Eucharistic theories.”6 It may be said that it dominates the whole evolution of ecclesiology also, and explains the “separation of the doctrine of the Eucharist and ecclesiology” that Ratzinger calls “one of the most unfortunate pages of medieval theology.”7 The medieval scholastics accordingly understood ecclesial office in terms of two powers which they clearly distinguished: power of order, which related to the Eucharist and culminated in the priest, and power of jurisdiction over the church which the pope possessed fully (plenitudo potestatis) and shared with bishops, each of whom he called to share a part of his solicitude (in partem sollicitudinis). Congar comments that under Leo IX and Gregory VII, the Church was seen as “a single society subjected to the authority of the pope.” “The pope is the universal bishop. The other Churches exist because he calls bishops ‘in partem sollicitudinis.’” Canonists and theologians tended to regard the church as “a single diocese, of virtually universal extent, and the pope as the source of every determination of its life.”8 Two points deserve particular comment: the term “universal bishop” and the paired terms plenitudo potesta6 . Ibid., 288. 7. Joseph Ratzinger, “The Pastoral Implications of Episcopal Collegiality ,” Concilium...