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Hierocracy and Popular Religion Catholicism in “Traditional” Europe The description and analysis here of patterns of religious action of the religious elites and lay masses of European Catholicism refer principally to a past Europe, a“traditional”Europe that has largely ceased to exist. Recent investigations by anthropologists are incorporated into the portrayal of popular religion in Europe, but there are fewer of these than of popular religion in Hindu and Buddhist societies, and it is the work of social historians of religion that provides a large part of the data that are synthesized and analyzed in this chapter. The major reason for the greater historical emphasis in the analysis of Catholicism compared with other religions is that the type of popular religion on which I have been focusing, a popular religion anchored in relatively autonomous and cohesive rural communities, is largely a phenomenon of the past in Europe. Anthropologists who have conducted studies of rural Catholic areas in recent decades have noted the effects on popular religion of urban culture, mass media, and secular and scientific values and norms.1 This is not to say that popular religion no longer exists in Europe, but with few exceptions it has lost the comprehensiveness and coherence that it had in the boundaried communities of what has been called “traditional Europe.”2 Although changes in popular religion are an important topic in this chapter, the major concern, as in previous chapters, is to delineate patterns of elite and popular religion at a level of generality that is applicable across the religio-cultural area (Catholic Europe) and a considerable expanse of time. With respect to the popular religion of rural populations, variations among areas and countries of Catholic Europe and from the Middle Ages through early modern to modern times are treated as secondary or as modifications to the broad patterns existing from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries until about the middle of the nineteenth century. The historical boundaries of a broad delineation of patterns of reli7 166 gious action can only be approximate, but for a study of the differences and interactions of official and popular religion in Catholic Europe, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries provide an appropriate beginning. Historians have come to regard the twelfth century as a period of extensive change in medieval society, and of special relevance for this study was the development, already underway in the eleventh century, of a unified, hierarchical , and autonomous structure of the Catholic Church. The variety of local church practices of the early Middle Ages was replaced by a more uniform practice for the clergy that was formulated by a centralized ecclesiastical hierarchy with the pope at its head. Standard practices came also to characterize the monasteries of Western Europe. Most monasteries adopted the Rule of Saint Benedict, originally written in the sixth century , which laid down in detail the appropriate activities of monks. The important ecclesiastical unit for the lay masses was the local parish, and an extensive network of parishes had taken shape by the thirteenth century . Although the establishment of most parish communities had come from lay rather than ecclesiastical initiative, the parish was the unit by which the majority of laypeople were incorporated, at least nominally, within the church.3 The medieval Catholic Church should not be regarded as a unified monolith that spoke with one voice. The question of authoritative teachings was not settled in the Middle Ages, and to present the teachings of particular theologians or the decisions of particular church councils as church doctrine can give the false impression that disputes had been solved. There was no uniform elite in the sense of a consensus of beliefs or an agreement over which particular groups represented the “true” church. There was, however, a church in the sense of an institution of clerics, distinct from the laity, with a separate code of law.4 The establishment of the institutions of the church in Europe was accompanied by the emergence of a popular Christianity among large sections of the European population. Writing on Britain of the early Middle Ages, Karen Louise Jolly states that the intermingling and mutual assimilation of Anglo-Saxon and Christian religion had produced, by the tenth and eleventh centuries, a popular Christianity that included a “middle ground” of practices that cannot be fitted into tidy categories of native and imported religions. As evidence of the dynamic interaction that had taken place between native culture and imported religion, she gives examples such as a blessing for fields...

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