The Chair of Saint Peter: A History of the Papacy (review)

Abstract

General The Chair of Saint Peter: A History of the Papacy. By William J. La Due. (Maryknoll, NewYork: Orbis Books. 1999. Pp. x, 374. $35.00.) Any attempt to capture the history of the world's oldest functioning institution in a single volume must be reckoned an act of rare courage or towering hubris. La Due is braver than he is proud. This is, on balance, a pretty successful volume: comprehensive, balanced, and readable. But it is also a book with an argument. In advancing his case, La Due is never shrill, never angry, but always determined and confident. His thesis, then. According to La Due, the New Testament offered no fewer than five different, and to some extent mutually exclusive, models of ecclesial organization. None of these accorded much place to a pope (as popes came to be known) or to a Petrine office. The growth of monarchical bishops, in Rome or elsewhere, was by no means a sure thing and was hotly contested. In antiquity, as a church with a growing sense of its corporate identity gradually emerged, that church tended toward a collegial model of organization that expressed itself most vividly in great ecumenical councils. Bishops tended to regard themselves as equal inheritors of the apostolic office. To he sure, some bishops of Rome, especially Leo I, articulated grand claims for the authority of the bishops of Rome, but those claims were not widely accepted and the actual powers of the popes were limited and local in practice. In the interminably transient political and diplomatic worlds of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, some popes made bold claims for their office and some struggled to survive. Only with the Gregorian revolution of the eleventh century did popes begin to sense the real powers of their office. The popes of the twelfth and thirteen centuries translated that sense into reality by creating legal doctrines and institutional frameworks that tended in the direction of absolutism. In La Due's telling, the papacy had, by the time of Boniface VIII, gotten hopelessly out of step with the times. Through the crises of Avignon, the Great Schism, conciliarism, and the Reformation, the popes routinely found themselves unequipped to respond effectively or imaginatively to the swirl of change all around them. By the time the Council of Trent assembled, the popes began building a genuinely absolutist model of government within the Church that grew in inverse proportion to the papacy's ability to influence the world around it. By the time of Pius IX a timorous and besieged papacy withdrew into the Vatican, declared itself infallible, claimed universal ordinary jurisdiction throughout the world, and declined any dialogue with the moral or intellectual forces of the modern world. Twentieth-century challenges such as communism, Nazism, and the World Wars did not provide promising frameworks for rethinking the certainties of the nineteenth century. John XXIII unexpectedly sought aggiornamento, and Paul VI bravely followed him in that quest. …