Category: Church History

2 min read

Church History

Catholic Signers of the Declaration of Independence

Michael R. Heinlein

April 30, 2023 4:11 am April 30, 2023

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2 min read

Were there Catholics who signed the Declaration of Independence? Just one. Charles Carroll is remembered as the lone Catholic to sign the important American document on July 4, 1776. The…

Were there Catholics who signed the Declaration of Independence? Just one.

Charles Carroll is remembered as the lone Catholic to sign the important American document on July 4, 1776. The product of a notable Catholic family from Annapolis, Maryland, Carroll was a cousin to America’s first bishop John Carroll of Baltimore.

Carroll set out for France at age 8 in pursuit of his education. He continued in studies in Europe for the next 20 years and returned home just before he turned 30. Once back in Maryland, Carroll quickly began to lend support to the early American revolutionaries who became more and more dissatisfied with the British government and what they regarded as their oppressive “taxation without representation.” Carroll used his voice to support the calls for separation from the British king.

A key player in various efforts to bring about the revolution, Carroll helped secure Maryland’s support for the Declaration of Independence. He also helped Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Chase in diplomatic efforts to rally support for the revolution from French Canadians.

During the years of the Revolutionary War, Carroll served as a member of the Continental Congress and helped form the Maryland state government. He was elected to the Maryland state senate in 1781 and served for a time in the first as one of Maryland’s first United States Senators.

Carroll advocated for the gradual abolition of slavery, although his record on the issue is complicated by the fact that he did not free his own slaves.

Carroll retired from public office in 1800 and was the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence when he died in Baltimore at 95 in 1832. A statue depicting him is one of two representing Maryland in the National Statuary Hall collection at the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.

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7 min read

Church History

Father Pierre-Jean De Smet

D.D. Emmons

January 18, 2023 7:40 am January 18, 2023

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7 min read

If you lived in the United States during the 19th century and asked anyone, other than a Native American, to name the most famous person in the American West, the…

If you lived in the United States during the 19th century and asked anyone, other than a Native American, to name the most famous person in the American West, the answer might be Buffalo Bill, Kit Carson or explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

But if you asked a Native American the same question, the response would likely be the “black robe” Father Pierre-Jean De Smet. Perhaps no individual in the 19th century had more impact on Native Americans than this Catholic missionary.

Born in 1801, Pierre-Jean De Smet began seminary training as a teenager in his native Belgium. Excited by the possibility of being a Catholic missionary in the New World, he immigrated to the United States at the age of 20 and entered the Jesuit Novitiate at White Marsh, Md. In 1823, he moved to the Jesuit facility in St. Louis, where, four years after arrival, he completed his priestly training and was ordained.

In 1826, Pope Leo XII established the Diocese of St Louis, which exceeded the size of the other nine American dioceses combined; it encompassed everything north of Louisiana and west of central Illinois. Almost all of this new diocese, especially west of the Mississippi River, was made up of remote and undiscovered land. It was along the Missouri River, in the Rocky Mountains and west toward the Pacific Ocean that Father De Smet would spend a lifetime proclaiming the Gospel of Christ to the Indians.

Eleven years after taking his priestly vows, Father De Smet was assigned to assist in the establishment of a Catholic mission, called St. Joseph, at Council Bluffs, Iowa. Here, near present-day Omaha, Neb., more than 2,000 Potawatomi Indians had been relocated from the Upper Midwest. Father De Smet spent two years among these people professing the Word of God and exposing them to Christian precepts. Although success was limited, many of these people did find new dignity, freedom and salvation in Christianity.

However, there was one problem that constantly nagged and hampered Jesuit efforts. The relocation agreement that moved the Indians to Council Bluffs stipulated that the U.S. government would monetarily compensate the Indians. White traders and merchants seemed to know of this stipulation and were quick to exploit the Indians, introducing them to the vices of the white man, including alcohol. Father De Smet and his colleagues struggled continuously to keep alcohol out of the missionary encampments, even protesting to the highest levels of government, but with little success.

In that era, the enemy of the Potawatomi was the aggressive and much larger Sioux tribe. These two tribes had frequently engaged in warfare, mostly to the Sioux’s advantage. In 1839, Father De Smet took it upon himself to end the violence. He made the trip from Council Bluffs to the Sioux encampment in the eastern Rocky Mountains, some 12 days of travel up the Missouri River. Alone and unarmed, he walked into the Sioux camp. As he found throughout all his missionary efforts, he was treated respectfully and provided great hospitality. The Indians listened to what this black robe had to say and agreed to make peace with the Potawatomi.

Father De Smet was graced with a God-given special charism that allowed him to relate and minister to Native Americans. He never offended them, never lied, never took advantage or mistreated them. In fact, he would, on numerous occasions, zealously defend their rights before presidents and congressional leaders alike. He was their benefactor at a time when many other whites regarded them as little more than savages. In the most unsanitary, foreign and remote conditions he accepted whatever charitable gifts they offered. A smelly buffalo robe was graciously accepted, or food served on a filthy plate was eagerly consumed; he found ways to fit in with people he grew to love and admire.

In 1840, after two years at Council Bluffs, Father De Smet was assigned to minister to the Flathead (or Salish) Indians, located in what is now Montana. During the several years prior to Father De Smet’s assignment, the Flatheads had made repeated trips to St. Louis seeking a black robe to come live with them and teach them about Jesus. In the spring of 1840, Father De Smet was directed to proceed to the Flathead encampment near present-day Missoula, Mont., and establish what became known as St. Mary’s Mission.

Missionary Challenges

Father De Smet, along with other Jesuits, would establish at least seven missions in the Rocky Mountains, as well as numerous smaller locations largely using the methods of their founder, St. Ignatius. This was never an easy task as the effort was plagued with danger. Just getting to the Indians took days, weeks or even months. Travel was primarily by riverboat, and those river journeys were filled with potential accidents: sand bars, tree stumps, snags, low water and unchartered shore lines. Disease, terrible weather, including tornadoes and snowstorms, forests and thickets also had to be braved. And always there was the unknown reception by the Indians, which never seemed to slow Father De Smet.

Additional aggravation came from the U.S. government, which was forever trying to force the Indians farther and farther west, to confine nomadic people to the reservation. The government also insisted on parceling up the Indians among different religious missionary groups, clearly favoring the Protestants. Perhaps the biggest detriment to all the missionaries was the idea that the noble, proud Indians would adapt to the white man’s culture — that is, they would not only be Christianized but act, dress and conform to a white man’s world. That last challenge was never fully realized.

The Jesuits would quickly discover that the harvest was plentiful but laborers were few. There was an ongoing need for funding and more black robes if their missionary effort was to succeed.

Father De Smet was up to the challenge. He raised money by selling his writings that described the Indians and the geography of the West. He went to Europe repeatedly and not only obtained funding, but convinced more Jesuits to migrate to his missions in the United States. He also petitioned U.S. Congress to support the Jesuit missionary efforts.

During his 72 years of life Father De Smet would come to know and associate with popes, Catholic superiors, presidents, members of congress, Indians from dozens of tribes and his fellow Jesuit missionaries. He would use them all for the greater glory of God.

Peace Mediator

On seven occasions over a 20-year period, Father De Smet was solicited by the U.S. government to intercede between warring Indian tribes and between conflicts of Indian tribes and the United States. One Indian tribe not willing to accept containment on a reservation, not willing to accept the white man’s infringement into their way of life, was the Sioux.

In 1862, they started a war against the United States. The army struggled to handle the situation, and once again the government asked Father De Smet to find a way to intercede and end the warring. The Jesuit, by now 67 years old, took on the assignment to stop the bloodshed and save the Indians from eventual extermination. From St. Louis, Father De Smet traveled 33 days by boat up the Missouri and then trekked another 16 days over land into south central North Dakota looking for the chief of the Sioux, Sitting Bull.

In April 1868, armed with his crucifix and black robe, he entered the Sioux camp and after a few days convinced the famous chief to send representatives to meet with government officials at Fort Rice, N.D. At face value this was a remarkable achievement, because there is little evidence that the two men had ever met. It was Father De Smet’s reputation and the Holy Spirit at work. At the conclusion of the Fort Rice conference, Father De Smet returned to St. Louis where he died on May 23, 1873, Ascension Thursday, from kidney disease.

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11 min read

Church History

Catholics and Civil Rights

Msgr. Owen Campion

October 30, 2022 9:20 pm October 30, 2022

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11 min read

The civil rights movement was a series of events and developments that profoundly affected and radically changed life in the United States, and Catholics and the Church played important roles….

The civil rights movement was a series of events and developments that profoundly affected and radically changed life in the United States, and Catholics and the Church played important roles.

Setting a date for the beginning of the movement is not that easy. It began in no single place. In some historical estimates, it began with the abolitionists, those Americans who demanded an end to legalized slavery, gradually making themselves heard in the generations before the Civil War.

For other historians, the deciding moment was the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln on Jan. 1, 1863. Although remembered today, not inappropriately, as a bold, wide step forward, the Emancipation Proclamation was limited. It freed slaves in most, but not all, the territory of the 11 states that had withdrawn from the Union to become the Confederate States of America.

It left in bondage slaves in all of Tennessee, a Confederate state; in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, states that had remained within the Union despite their acceptance of slavery; and in parts of Louisiana and Virginia, both also states that had entered the Confederacy.

In fact, it was the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the amendment’s seating in law on Dec. 31, 1865, that slavery at last was outlawed in the United States.

Catholics were among the Americans arguing about slavery, both pro and con, and they were affected by all the events of the time, but they were not major players, given their status as a small and not yet influential minority — except in Louisiana and to a lesser degree in Maryland.

With regard to racial justice and equality, however, no Catholic either in Louisiana or Maryland made history opposing slavery. Catholic New Orleans was a huge slave market. From Galveston, Texas, to Wilmington, Del., Catholics owned slaves. And, perhaps hard to imagine, dioceses and religious congregations also owned slaves.

Plessy v. Ferguson

The Catholic community in these states, and in other states, at the time either lost sight of African-Americans, preoccupied as the bishops and also the laity were by other concerns, many of them of the bread-and-butter variety, or Church efforts for blacks that were concentrated upon rudimentary education or human services such as care for the sick. It is important here to recall the general state of education and of human services at the time.

A candlelight procession led by nuns calmed tensions in East Harlem in New York in 1967. That year, several cities across the United States experienced riots due to civil rights issues.

Racial segregation, eventually the match that ignited the civil rights movement, was set in constitutional law on May 1, 1896. At that time, by a vote of seven to one, with one associate justice abstaining, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, ruled that “separate but equal” facilities based on race were in accord with the Constitution. The case was originally about seating in railroad coaches. It came to involve every aspect of life, and in practical terms it meant the deprivation and humiliation of African-Americans virtually throughout much of the United States. What Plessy did not permit in law, it accommodated and empowered as social convention.

The case became the basis of an entire cultural pattern. How did Catholic bishops, priests and laity react? Catholics were gaining numerical strength and political power as the 20th century dawned. There was little, if any, however, Catholic criticism of, and certainly no defiance of, segregation. For Catholics, criticizing the culture created by Plessy was going too far out on a limb.

There were exceptions, specifically in the sense of attention on the part of some bishops and other Catholics to the plight of blacks, a plight inevitably bleak and hopeless because of the widespread, popular frame of mind enabled by Plessy.

Trapped in Surrounding Culture

Katharine Drexel, a wealthy Philadelphia heiress, took an interest in African-Americans and Native Americans and eventually founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament to educate black and Indian youths. At the same time, the Josephite Fathers and the priests of the Society of the Divine Word turned their eyes toward blacks.

St. Katharine Drexel helped blacks in the early 20th century. CNS photo from Pope John Paul II Cultural Center

While these efforts were praiseworthy, the overwhelming current of American Catholic opinion, and organized effort, was to ignore injustices imposed on blacks. It may be hard to imagine such indifference, but segregation was so strict and encompassing that few whites truly knew precisely what blacks experienced.

The formal stance of the Church was to relieve human misery and to equip young blacks for lives easier and more rewarding than those their forebears had known, but the attitude was paternalistic. It was as if blacks were perpetual children, rendered as such by their lack of the aptitude that whites enjoyed.

In this, the Church was trapped in the culture surrounding it, and rare was the program that denied this presupposition about anyone not born white. After all, going beyond the United States, it was the mindset that launched, and certainly fixed in place, the great colonial empires ruled from Europe, including Catholic Belgium, France, Italy and Portugal.

Some Catholics, by the 1920s, came to see these injustices indeed as injustices. Jesuit Father John LaFarge was among them. Editor of America magazine, he had a platform to dissect the social norms so widely prevalent and to call for correction.

Bishops were appointed to dioceses with large black populations and, while never confronting what Plessy had created, they built schools and hospitals for African-Americans. Perhaps unwittingly they sowed the seeds of logical questions that later entered the minds of Catholics. If blacks are entitled to the Christian concern of the Church, how then are they different from other human beings? If they are not different, how can they be treated as if they were?

Then came the terrible events in Europe, in particular the savage anti-Semitism in Germany. No decent person could observe what was being done to Jews by the Adolf Hitler regime and not be repelled. To be sure, it was not the same in this country, although the collective experience of American blacks hardly was exempt from brutality of the most frightful type in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Lynchings were not uncommon. The criminal justice system and judicial action were jokes when it came to justice for blacks. Still, the specter of European Jewry’s sufferings under Hitler caused some Catholics in this country to think.

Always, of course, Catholics, as well as others, simply were kindhearted and prompted by the love of Christ that embraced all. Once, for example, the Ku Klux Klan stopped a train in Alabama and dragged a black man from the train. They led him to a tree along the roadbed, planning to hang him. Unnoticed by the Klan, a Benedictine abbot was on the train. He had not all that much security himself, being a Catholic cleric. Nevertheless, seeing what was happening, he left the train and walked directly to the Klan leader to plead for the man’s life. Ignored, the abbot then knelt in the dirt before the Klan wizard and implored that the man’s life be spared.

The man was hanged, nevertheless, but Christianity drove the abbot, and it drove many other Catholics to recoil at the abuses of blacks.

Jumping on Board

When the U.S. Supreme Court, in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, on May 17, 1954, reversed Plessy, strong currents of interracial justice moved through American Catholic public opinion, but by no means pulled the heartstrings of every American Catholic.

Bishop Vincent Waters of Raleigh, N.C. St. Katharine Drexel helped blacks in the early 20th century. CNS photo/courtesy Diocese of Raleigh

To give them their due, the older generation of Southern bishops at the time not only guided the Church through the terrible days of the convent inspection laws, the Ku Klux Klan, the Al Smith campaign of 1928, and limited resources and great demands, but in communities from El Paso, Texas, to Norfolk, Va., Little Rock, Ark., to Jacksonville, Fla., they had made the Church a presence for the good of the entire society.

Some were reluctant to embrace the cause of desegregation. It was not as if any opposed equal rights nor denied the status of human dignity of blacks. Most had worked precisely to enhance this status. Rather, they feared that if they moved too quickly, all would be lost, and in the end neither Catholics as a whole or blacks would be in better straits.

Given the natural course of events, these more cautious bishops were leaving the scene. Succeeding them was a new breed. Having matured in the days just before World War II, and often educated in Europe or in the more intellectually sophisticated centers of the Atlantic Northeast, they saw as the priority the bringing of justice to African-Americans.

Some came from outside the South. Native Southerners, however, were outstanding as bold champions of change, such as Bishop Vincent S. Waters of Raleigh, a Virginia native, Tennessee-born Bishop Joseph A. Durick of Nashville, Bishop Joseph Brunini of Natchez-Jackson, himself from Mississippi, and Bishop Carroll T. Dozier of Memphis, also from Virginia.

To be honest, all these bishops headed divided presbyterates. Old ways died hard for more than a few Catholic priests. Others, to their credit, were at the front line.

There were dozens and dozens of priests who marched when the demonstrations started. They were insulted and cursed by many, encouraged by some, but they marched precisely to put the Church in the forefront of the movement to recognize human rights for blacks.

In Mississippi, Father Bernard F. Law, later cardinal-archbishop of Boston, did remarkable things to elevate and validate the image of the Church because of his constant, but often resented, call for rights for blacks.

Swinging Toward Racial Equality

OSV file photo

At the national level, the Catholic bishops were unswervingly behind the civil rights movement, and their series of public statements made their position crystal clear. At the level of the papacy, Pope Paul VI left no question about Catholic teaching and universal Church policy in the matter. For example, he named African-American priests to the episcopacy, a switch from the time when many dioceses would not accept black applicants for the seminary. The arc was swinging toward racial equality in American Catholicism. At the very time so many young Catholics were attending Catholic schools, Catholic education embraced racial equality. Teachers taught it. Catholic publications forthrightly supported it, and at the time when the Catholic press was at its strongest. Young priests were ordained who fully supported civil rights, and some Catholic lay organizations came around, albeit sluggishly.

This hardly is to say that in the 1950s and 1960s American Catholic public opinion, especially in the South, accounted for one great, mighty groundswell for rights for blacks. Many Catholics feared violence. The Church lost ground numerically among whites, although in the end maybe not as much as might be assumed. Bishops and priests lost good will, although again not as much as they had presumed. No social study of American life today escapes the facts that racism lives in this country. The arc, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, swings toward justice. Still, it goes back and forth. As the U.S. bishops wrote in a statement marking the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington: “The dream of Dr. King and all who marched and worked with him has not yet fully become a reality for many in our country. While we cannot deny the change that has taken place, there remains much to be accomplished.”

Msgr. Owen Campion is OSV chaplain.

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8 min read

Church History

Why is Sacrosanctum Concilium Important?

Msgr. C. Eugene Morris

August 17, 2022 7:30 am August 17, 2022

8 min read

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8 min read

These celebrations have provided an opportunity for the Church to properly assess the achievements of the council as well as to discuss areas in which the council may have fallen…

These celebrations have provided an opportunity for the Church to properly assess the achievements of the council as well as to discuss areas in which the council may have fallen short. In addition to articulating both the successes and failures of Vatican II, these celebrations have provided the framework by which to discuss the impact of the council on the life of Holy Mother Church as well as positing what impact the council may have on the future of the Church.

In addition to these celebrations, in his Christmas address of 2005, then Pope Benedict XVI provided a significant hermeneutic (or lens) through which to view the work of the Second Vatican Council. He spoke about the hermeneutic of continuity between the work of the council and the life of the Church before and after the council. The “hermeneutic of reform,” of renewal, sees “the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us. She is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God.”

And then he noted that certain sectors of culture and society sought to separate Vatican II from the history of the Church and promoted a hermeneutic of discontinuity focused on the spirit of the council, not the truths of the documents themselves: “The hermeneutic of discontinuity risks ending in a split between the pre-conciliar Church and the post-conciliar Church. It asserts that the texts of the council as such do not yet express the true spirit of the council. It claims that they are the result of compromises in which, to reach unanimity, it was found necessary to keep and reconfirm many old things that are now pointless. However, the true spirit of the council is not to be found in these compromises but instead in the impulses toward the new that are contained in the texts…. In a word: it would be necessary not to follow the texts of the council but its spirit. In this way, obviously, a vast margin was left open for the question on how this spirit should subsequently be defined and room was consequently made for every whim.”

This gap between the texts themselves and the allusive spirit of the interpreter created an opportunity to respond to every whim in the life of the Church.

The framework provided by both Pope Benedict and the Church’s historical celebrations creates the context for an overview of the first document promulgated by the council fathers, Sacrosanctum Concilium, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. It can be rightly argued that this document more than others suffered under the hermeneutic of discontinuity presented to the world in the context of the spirit of the document opposed to what the document actually outlined and promulgated. Despite the confusion sometimes created by this misreading of the document, Sacrosanctum Concilium remains integral to the Church’s organic development of the liturgy.

The council fathers wisely began the deliberations of Vatican II with the sacred liturgy precisely because of its significance in the life of the Church. The liturgy is “the outstanding means whereby the faithful may express in their lives, and manifest to others, the mystery of Christ and the real nature of the true Church” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, No. 2).

After articulating the nature of the liturgy, which is to build up and strengthen the body of Christ, the document prepares to articulate principles whereby the liturgy may be renewed chiefly so that the liturgy may be that source which imparts “an ever increasing vigor to the Christian life of the faithful” (No. 1). Before providing concrete principles by which this renewal should be governed, the council fathers exhorted a respect for and adherence and obedience to the tradition of the Church.

Jesus’ Priestly Office

The principles used to assist the Church in liturgical renewal involve, first, an understanding of the nature of the sacred liturgy. At the heart of what the Church celebrates in the sacred liturgy is a continuation of the Paschal Mystery of Jesus Christ and an expression of His mission to bring about salvation and reconciliation for the whole world.

The Church’s perennial teaching is that the redemptive work of Christ continues in the life of His spouse, the Church, who cooperates concretely in the mission of the Savior through sacramental life. The council states: “Christ is always present in His Church, especially in her liturgical celebrations. He is present in the sacrifice of the Mass, not only in the person of His minister, ‘the same now offering, through the ministry of the priests, who formerly offered himself on the cross,’ but especially under the Eucharistic species” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, No. 7).

The council fathers are able to define the liturgy as “an exercise of the priestly office of Jesus Christ” (No. 7). Through His priestly office Christ is able to sanctify men who are in turn able to fittingly adore God. The liturgy as an action of adoration and sanctification allow men to experience here on earth a foretaste of the glories of heaven and consequently requires from the faithful knowledge and spiritual understanding of what is happening when they are present at the sacred liturgy.

Renewal

Having established foundational principles for the renewal of the sacred liturgy, the document articulates norms for its renewal based on more general aspects of the nature of the liturgy: the communal nature of the liturgy, catechetical and pastoral aspects of the liturgy.

The document concludes the articulation of norms by mapping out the adaptation of the liturgy to the cultural realities in which it would be celebrated. The remaining sections of the document are given over to a discussion of each of the seven sacraments and sacramental realities beginning with the most holy Eucharist. Here the council fathers offer a re-articulation of traditional Catholic theology regarding each of the sacraments and applying the principles set forth at the beginning of the document.

After addressing each of the seven sacraments, the document addresses the importance of sacred art and furnishings. So, too, the council fathers give attention to the liturgical year, the Divine Office and sacred music.

The significance of Sacrosanctum Concilium comes not only from the comprehensive discussion of the whole of the liturgical life but also from the various misunderstandings about the sacred liturgy that developed as a result of a misreading of the document.

Chief among these misunderstandings regards the “full, conscious, and active participation” of all the faithful. This has been understood more often than not as an exhortation to involve more lay faithful in the work of the liturgy when the document makes no specific reference to how this might be implemented.

Furthermore, having already articulated the importance of tradition in rooting and guiding the renewal of the sacred liturgy, this particular phrase, having already appeared in magisterial documents, involves an interior preparation and awareness and has very little to do with exterior functions.

The document speaks eloquently about the importance of the ongoing use of and formation in the Latin language (see No. 36). While allowing the use of the vernacular in the celebration of the sacred liturgy, there is a clear exhortation for the preservation of the use of Latin in the liturgy.

Finally, while it has become normative to celebrate the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass facing the congregation, nowhere in the documents was it suggested or mandated that the Church abandon the ancient practice of celebrating holy Mass ad orientem — that is, facing the east.

Clear Directions

While the spirit of Sacrosanctum Concilium has been trumpeted to allow a variety of abuses to sacred celebrations, the document itself has provided the Church with clear directions to better assist all the faithful in fruitful celebrations of the sacred mysteries.

The exhortation for better knowledge of the rites and rituals of the faithful has provided the impetus for many in the post-conciliar period to strive for greater knowledge about the rituals so that they might more deeply penetrate the mysteries celebrated therein. So, too, the exposure to more sacred Scripture has brought the richness of biblical language more comprehensively into the liturgy.

As the Church now moves beyond these historical celebrations and reflections, she is presented with an opportunity to return to the actual content of the document itself and to authentically execute the desire of the council fathers for a deeper appreciation of the Church’s liturgical life. With the pontificates of Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis, who has publically committed himself and the Church to the liturgical insights and direction of his predecessor, the Church will be able to more authentically engage the dynamics of liturgical renewal articulated by the council.

The understanding of the council fathers that the celebration of the Church’s liturgical life was the source and summit of all her activities is still very much operative today as it was at its promulgation.

What Sacrosanctum Concilium provides, within the framework of restored tradition and sound doctrine, is the opportunity to assist the faithful in experiencing more deeply and richly the incarnate wisdom and love of God.

Msgr. C. Eugene Morris, a priest of the St. Louis archdiocese.

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9 min read

Church History

Who Are Some Overlooked Popes?

Christopher M. Bellito

May 20, 2022 7:01 am May 20, 2022

9 min read

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9 min read

Everyone has heard of the big-name popes. There’s Gregory I the Great (r. 590-604), the first to call himself “servant of the servants of God.” There was the influential canon…

Everyone has heard of the big-name popes.

There’s Gregory I the Great (r. 590-604), the first to call himself “servant of the servants of God.” There was the influential canon lawyer Innocent III (1198-1216), the warrior Julius II (1503-1513), and several popes named Pius, including Popes Pius VI (1775-1799) and VII (1800-1823), both of whom were taken prisoner by the French in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, respectively. More recently, we have the architect of the Second Vatican Council, John XXIII (1958-1963), and then the beloved John Paul II (1978-2005), maybe the next “Great” pope. But of the more than 260 men who succeeded Peter, there are many overlooked popes. While they weren’t all worthy of entry into a hall of fame, there were many who helped save the Church and change the papacy — and are worth meeting.

Consolidating Papal Power

For nearly three centuries, Christianity was an illegal religion in the Roman Empire, so the bishop of Rome could extend his authority beyond his city only rarely. During the fourth century, Roman emperors tolerated and then favored Christianity before finally making it the one, only and official religion of the empire. As a result, the bishop of Rome could now exercise his unique stature as Peter’s successor and extend his influence throughout the known world of Europe and the Mediterranean coast.

Pope Damasus I (366-384) built on what could be considered moments of papal authority in the Church’s early years. He inherited some examples of Roman bishops intervening in situations such as legal disputes, questions of leadership or Church doctrine and rules.

We might even say that he was one of the first “popes” in the sense that he consolidated and centralized papal authority as he acted above and beyond all the other bishops who, until that time, were referred to as papas (Greek for father), too.

Damasus said his decision was the ultimate one in disputed questions and cases, making himself the final court of appeals and asserting he could reverse a decision made by archbishops against bishops under them. He set himself up as arbiter when local or regional councils decided on a doctrinal statement or disciplinary action, claiming that no lower decision was final until he said so. Perhaps Damasus’ most influential decision was to commission Jerome, his secretary, to translate the Bible into Latin. This translation, which came to be called the Vulgate, was the authoritative biblical text for Christianity for centuries, and Jerome is honored as a Doctor of the Church.

A Papal Son

We are sure of at least three papal fathers and sons, but there was only one pair where the son directly followed his father. We should note that this happened at a time when the Church was trying to make clerical celibacy the norm, but priests with sons was not unusual and clearly didn’t stand between a man and the papacy at that time.

Anastasius I (399-401) was succeeded by his son Innocent I (401-417). Pope Innocent declared that nothing done by priests and bishops anywhere, no matter how far from Rome, could be considered to be settled until Rome’s bishop gave his approval or rejection. Once the bishop of Rome, acting with his authority as Peter’s successor, made that approval or switch, there was no higher authority to turn to. He also believed that the way liturgies were celebrated in Rome should be the norm for every other Christian site. As Innocent said, all streams flowed from Rome.

A Good Avignon Pope

From 1309 until 1377, the papacy moved to southern France, to a lovely region called Provence and a city that popes built into a lavish second-city Rome named Avignon. While there were good reasons for the papacy to leave Rome temporarily, the papal Curia became entrenched in what was deemed a nicer location and gained a fairly justified reputation for greed. The Italian humanist Petrarch (1304-1374) visited Avignon and declared it the Babylon of the West, which is why people call this period the Babylonian captivity of the papacy.

Recent scholarship reveals that while these decades were not the highest moments of Church history, the Avignon papacy was far from a rogues’ gallery. One pope stands out. Benedict XII (1335-1342) had a reputation as a strong investigator of heresy. Born Jacques Fournier, he was a spiritual man and a scholar: a member of the ascetic Cistercian order with a theology doctorate from the University of Paris, the most prestigious school of theology in the Church at the time. He was especially concerned with improving the quality of Church leaders: we find no evidence of nepotism in his record, and he instituted more rigorous examination of candidates for high offices.

Pope Benedict fought absenteeism by sending home any priest or bishop in Avignon whose primary job was being a pastor somewhere else. At the same time, it seems he gave up the idea of returning to Rome: he built a huge fortresslike palace, transferred the papal archives to Avignon and reserved for himself many appointments, which had previously been left on the local level, to prevent corruption.

The Humanist Pope

Nicholas V (1447-1455) reigned when the papacy was trying hard to regain its footing after the setbacks of the Avignon papacy and the Great Western Schism. Originally Tommaso Parentucelli, as a young man, he was right in the middle of the Renaissance flowering of art, architecture and literature in the key city of Florence, Italy.

Pope Nicholas did much to restore not only the papacy but Rome as its vibrant heart. He made 1450 a jubilee year, which rejuvenated the city’s economy. Led by Nicholas’ example, Roman families were generous patrons to painters, sculptors, architects, engineers, tapestry designers, weavers and metalsmiths. Nicholas was also interested in the written word and essentially established the Vatican Library.

Pope Nicholas collected Greek and Latin manuscripts, often directing that other documents in different languages be rendered into Latin for the archives. He used money gained during the jubilee year to send agents throughout Europe and the Mediterranean to find, buy or copy manuscripts.

Even the very word Vatican that we use as shorthand for what the pope and Roman Curia are doing gained new meaning because of Pope Nicholas. The papal home and headquarters had for over a millennium been in and around the Lateran basilica and palace, which the Roman emperor Constantine donated in the early fourth century. Nicholas moved the papal offices to the Vatican hill in Rome, in part because of its historic connection with Peter, the site of whose death and burial had been marked there for centuries.

Not only did he relocate the papal bureaucracy there, but, as part of his program to recover papal prestige and burnish its reputation, he made the decision to build a new St. Peter’s Basilica, which eventually became the structure standing there now.

The Unlikely Reformer

One would think that a 25-year-old cardinal who received the honor of a red hat because his sister was a papal mistress would be the last person leading efforts to reform the Church, but that’s just what happened with Pope Paul III (1534-1549). Born Alessandro Farnese to a powerful family, he lived the typical, if distressing, life of some Renaissance cardinals. Not long after being elected pope, he named two of his teenaged grandsons cardinals and gave other offices to his family members.

But while at the same time guilty of nepotism, something changed in the man. His mind turned toward reform in the years just after Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses in 1517. As pope, he appointed reform-minded cardinals to the Curia and brought churchmen from outside Roman circles to prepare a report on what was wrong in the Church, knowing that a perspective from afar was needed to break up the entrenched in-house mentality of protecting the home office.

Although Pope Paul III could not move against the papal bureaucracy as quickly or completely as he would have liked, he still set into motion the reform mindset that would result with the Council of Trent, which first met during his papacy in 1545. He also looked forward to the future of Catholicism even as those around him counseled retrenchment against Protestantism.

Pope Paul encouraged innovative religious orders, such as the Ursulines (founded in 1535 by St. Angela Merici), with their ministry to poor girls, and the Jesuits (approved by Pope Paul in 1540), deeply involved in evangelization, missions, education and the Catholic Reformation.

Resurrecting Peter

Pope Sixtus V (1585-1590) was another builder pope who responded to the Protestant rejection of the papacy by resurrecting the importance of Peter and his successors as vicars of Christ. Born Felici Peretti, he continued building the new St. Peter’s Basilica, and it was during his pontificate, in fact, that the dome of the basilica was finally completed. He likewise reorganized the Curia into fifteen permanent congregations headed by cardinals, a system that is still in existence. He also tied the current Church in with its historic past in Rome by celebrating Lenten liturgies in the city’s oldest churches, where they had first been observed. As one of his preachers said, “O blessed are we, we who behold today living and breathing that ancient form of the Church.”

In a real sense, it is Sixtus V’s city that pilgrims continue to visit — the city of Peter and his successors.

Christopher M. Bellitto is associate professor of history at Kean University in Union, N.J. He is the author of “Church History 101: A Concise Overview” (Liguori Publications, 2008) and “101 Questions and Answers on Popes and the Papacy” (Paulist Press, 2008).

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