CHIESA

CHURCH. - “It is the community of all the faithful, united by the profession of the same faith, by participation in the same Sacraments, under the authority of the legitimate pastors, especially the Roman Pontiff, the vicar of Jesus Christ on earth” (St Robert Bellarmine, De Ecclesia militanti, 2). The term church also denotes the building where the faithful assemble.

OUTLINE: A) THE CHURCH AS COMMUNITY OF THE FAITHFUL:

1. Theology of the Church

II. The Church in patristic texts and in early Christian monuments

III. History of the Church

IV. Church historiography

V. Church and State

VI. Legal status of the Church

VII. Justinian

B) THE CHURCH AS BUILDING:

I. Canon law and Italian law

II. Canonical-liturgical prescriptions

III. Art.

A) THE CHURCH AS COMMUNITY OF THE FAITHFUL
I. THEOLOGY OF THE CHURCH

OUTLINE:

I. The problem of the Church

II. Biblical and theological concept of the Church

III. Origin of the Church

IV. Purpose of the Church

V. Constitution of the Church

VI. Powers of the Church

VII. Recognition of the true Church

VIII. Roman character of the Church

IX. Duties toward the Church.
I. THE PROBLEM OF THE CHURCH — Jesus Christ could have manifested His nature and the divinity of His mission through the mere interior instinct of the Spirit; but He willed that our faith in Him and in the Church should be sustained by the preaching of the Apostles, by the external miracles that accompanied it, and by the interior vocation of Grace. Therefore, the problem of the Church resembles the problem of Jesus, which our intelligence cannot fully resolve without taking into account the facts that critical history records, with the duty to investigate their nature in order to grasp their full meaning and with the mysterious and ever-necessary aid of Grace to perceive the presence and design of God in events.

With this criterion, we must determine whether the Church is the work of God and imposes itself upon men as a reality originally and essentially divine, or whether it is a human construction that has unjustly usurped divine titles. In the second case, the Church would have no religious value, could not impose itself upon conscience, and one might be justified in freeing oneself from its influence; in the first case, which is the true one, every honest intelligence must recognize it and embrace it as a necessary condition for salvation. It is not merely a religion of authority, but truly a religion of the spirit, in conformity with the psychology of man, who is both soul and body, a citizen in the ways of the world with external destinies. Those who focus solely on the external aspect, on the inevitable weaknesses of men, may speak of a juridical organization very similar to worldly society; and those who are carried away by pseudognostic dreams may speak of a Church entirely spiritual, charismatic, untouched by earthly concerns so as not to be defiled; but those who adhere to the reality of facts are compelled to recognize the composite nature of the Church, made up of men but enriched with treasures of Grace for the sanctification of sinners, vulnerable in its human element but divine in its soul and especially in its Founder and Head, ever influential and indefectible; exposed to all the winds of passion and persecution, yet ever renewed in the rebirth of that spirit which gives it life.

The sophisticated maneuvering of human misunderstandings has deceived many scholars and reformers, who, relying on the politics of governments, have shattered some sectors of the Church’s external structure upon the fiery stone of nationalisms; but heresy excludes itself from the Kingdom of God by denying the authority that renders the Church divine, and schism withers miserably the branch of the national Church, which is born of pride and dies in aridity. Thus, we have churches of men in contrast to the one Church of Jesus Christ; we witness the ever-renewed and ever-failing efforts of these churches to justify themselves in the realm of science and religion, changing methods and systems, enslaved to nationalisms and to themselves.

Just as the Jews did not recognize Jesus Christ because He did not conform to their national ideologies of a conquering and oppressive king, so these modern schismatics do not recognize the true Church of Jesus Christ because it does not fit the arbitrary mold of their partisan and proud nationalism. In the name of freedom, they become slaves to political power, instead of conforming their conduct to the Gospel; they force the Gospel to justify their claims and their weaknesses. Thus, the problem of the Church, like the problem of Jesus, involves the responsibility of the intelligence, the rectitude of the will, the necessity

The rationalist, the schismatic, and the naturalist violate the rights of science, of freedom, and of grace, and remain outside the path of salvation.

The theology of the Church has a twofold aspect: the first is apologetic and defensive, aiming to highlight the divine value of the Church, its scientific claims to our rational recognition, against heretics and deniers; the other is more strictly theological, investigating the intimate life of the Church in its sacramental characters, in its work of sanctification and expansion, in its social and mystical dynamism, in its conformity to Jesus Christ and its irradiation into the world.

Science is not enough to recognize the divinity of the Church, but it is necessary; faith includes good will and freedom, but finds its pedagogy in science; grace constitutes the supreme reason of the believer, who begins by honestly recognizing the facts, proceeds to penetrate their deep meaning, and finally understands and adheres to the revelation of God by virtue of its known and demonstrated testimony.

This is the process of faith, this is the spiritual itinerary of all those who find the Lord and can say the words of the dogmatic formula: "I believe in the holy Church."

II. Biblical and theological concept of the Church

To understand the nature of the Church in its essential elements, one must consult the Gospel, the Acts of the Apostles, the Letters of St. Paul, and the Fathers of the 2nd century.

The first word and the first concept that presents itself to our consideration is that of Church. In profane usage, this word means a gathering of people, a convocation of an assembly; in the Old Testament it is used as a translation of the Hebrew qāhāl, and signifies an indiscriminate class of people; in the New Testament the meaning is clarified and consecrated in the sense of the society of those who follow Jesus Christ, taking on local and universal aspects according to whether one speaks of a family, a city, a region, or the whole world.

When Jesus says, "Upon this rock I will build my Church" (Mt 16:18), no one finds the phrase obscure, as it already had its commentary in the language of the Divine Master, who likened his followers to a flock, a sheepfold, a true society. The meaning of this word became ever more defined in evangelical catechesis and apostolic practice, in the affirmations of the Redeemer and in the facts that concretized that doctrine up to the day of Pentecost. If we were to give a barely sketched definition of the Church, we might say that it is the "society of the faithful to Jesus Christ."

The Gospel also indicates the Church by the name of "Kingdom." This word has a broader extension and embraces the entire work of divine Providence in the world. "Kingdom of God" says possession, dominion of God, without restriction of time or space, whereas the ChurchIt signifies a special form or a singular aspect of the Kingdom of God.

With this concept of the “Kingdom of Heaven,” the work of Jesus inserted itself into the psychology and aspirations of the Jewish people, and admirably lent itself to all those purifications and ascents which the Gospel presents dramatically in the contrast between the teaching of Jesus and the obstinate incomprehension of the Jews.

The Kingdom of God is the truth that shines in the mind and penetrates the heart of the faithful, who adhere to the teaching of the Lord; the Kingdom of God is that society which is built around Him and which is expressed under the figure of a banquet, a city, a vineyard; it is the Kingdom of God not only in the temporal framework of the condition of wayfarers, but also in that otherworldly, eschatological phase, in that eternal banquet of the elect who will enjoy God in beatitude.

All this has in the Gospel a very rich documentation which modern biblical theology brings increasingly to the fore, even as it is assailed by rationalistic falsifications that tend to break the synthesis between the interior, social, and heavenly elements of the Kingdom of God.

The Church, in its precise concept, is that special form of the Kingdom of God which is realized in the fullness of time as the saving work of Jesus, in its spiritual and social aspect, working in time but with extra-temporal aims and purposes. It is a kingdom altogether exceptional, yet it has its constitutional doctrine, its means of social transformation—which are the Sacraments—its peaceful soldiers, who are the faithful, its hierarchy composed of apostles (= bishops), priests and ministers, its goals of perfection and salvation, and even a visible history, which is the history of the Church. It is not confused with civil society as a cumbersome duplicate, nor does it so estrange itself from the world as to wander into the abstract; rather, one can see in the Acts of the Apostles what the presence of this Kingdom of God—which is the Church—means within the civil society of the first Christian century, making present life a conquest of future goods and causing one to walk upon the earth with one’s gaze fixed on the light of the divine sun.

Another fruitful concept for expressing the meaning of the Church is that of the “Mystical Body of Christ” (q.v.).

In St. Paul we also find another phrase to delineate the intimate value of the Church. He says that Christian marriage symbolizes the union of Christ with the Church, and he invites the wife to submit to her husband in all things as the Church does to Jesus Christ, and then he invites the husband to love his wife as Christ loved the Church, even to sacrificing Himself for her, to sanctify her, to make her pure and glorious, without blemish or wrinkle, holy and immaculate (Eph. 5). These words exalt especially the intimate relations between Jesus Christ and the Church, even to the point of considering her, in an intimate and mysterious way, as His spouse. From this union springs sanctity in every abundance of works and virtues.

The Apostle also considers the Church as a well-built and compact edifice, living and growing as a temple that sanctifies and is sanctified, having Jesus Christ as its cornerstone, the work of the apostles and prophets as its foundation, and all the faithful as living stones.

Church — Diocese of the Holy Spirit. The Nativity of the Church. Miniature from the Pontificale of Winchester (10th century). Rouen, Municipal Library, ms. 369 (v. 7), f. 29.

They are fellow citizens with the saints and members of God’s household (Eph 2:19-22). Thus it is the walled city on the mountain, the mysterious stronghold that rises above the waves of the sea of life amid the turmoil of men, a beacon and pillar of truth for voyagers. No one knows or describes the Church as does this former persecutor who becomes her Apostle and martyr today and for ever. It is well to bear in mind that the Church is a society, the Kingdom of God, the Bride of Christ, the temple of holiness.
### III. ORIGIN OF THE CHURCH

All acknowledge that the religious movement known as Christianity began with Jesus Christ; yet not all agree in recognizing that Jesus Christ is the immediate founder and institutor of the Church, conceived as a society, that is, a hierarchical moral organism for the purposes of salvation.

Some modern critics, recognizing the complex nature of the Kingdom of God proclaimed in the Gospel, assert that the first Christians all lived in expectation of a kingdom that did not come to pass, but instead the Church emerged through human effort.

Others, convinced that Jesus Christ restricted His work to a simple moral, interior, and individual renewal, deny that He intended to found a social organism or to organize it Himself.

There have even been those who have sought to derive the origin of the Church from those supernatural and temporary phenomena spoken of by St. Paul in 1 Cor. and which he calls charisms. In the first Christian generation, the outpouring of the Spirit produced exceptional and often miraculous effects with regard to the spread of Christianity and the building up of the Church.

St. Paul is explicit on this point, but some moderns have clung to the idea of a charismatic Church, either to claim that it ceased to exist when the charisms waned, or to conclude that the true Church of Jesus Christ is not the juridical and hierarchical one known today as Catholicism, but a spiritual and mysterious one composed of the elect, united by the bond of the Spirit without doctrinal determinations or the intervention of authority. This Church, without soul or body, may appear flawless and convenient for all, yet it has no value for anyone.

Catholic doctrine teaches that Jesus Christ immediately instituted His Church as a true social organism, which developed gradually but did not derive its essential elements from any other source. The proofs of this truth are found in the Gospel. In the first place, there is a true identification between the Church and the social kingdom preached and founded by Jesus. Beyond its intimate and eschatological aspect, the Kingdom of God takes concrete form in time through the Apostles, the doctrine of Jesus Christ, the Sacraments as means of sanctification, and St. Peter as the depositary of supreme authority. It is through the Church that God is known and glorified, souls are transformed, and eternal life is attained. Jesus founded no other kingdom than this. Whoever denies the Church denies Jesus Christ and the Gospel. The fact is undeniable.

A second argument may be formulated by gathering the scattered elements in Jesus’ preaching. He founded a true society that gathers a multitude of people to achieve a well-defined end, with a program and means suited to its realization, and with a central governing authority. The entire Gospel teaches nothing other than the duty for all to follow the Divine Master, accept His doctrine, and practice His law within the Church governed by the Apostles for the sake of eternal life. Jesus Christ conferred the power to forgive and to teach, instituted the sacrifice, and promised the Spirit so that all might become children of God. Indeed, the Spirit descended upon the Apostles on the day of Pentecost, which may therefore be considered the birthday of the Church. Now the Church of Jerusalem is precisely the society founded by Jesus in its primitive form, yet with a well-defined doctrine, distinct and independent from the Synagogue, governed by the Apostolic College with its authoritative determinations in the form of a council.

That external circumstances contributed to shaping its character and development is beyond doubt; but that this Church arose through human effort and was not the continuation of Christ’s redemptive work is absolutely false.

The Churches founded by St. Paul are not autocephalous; they do not constitute a federation of independent organisms but are members of a single moral body, namely the Church of Jesus Christ, which grows, expands, and progresses toward perfection and eternal life. Precision of doctrine, unity of governance, coherence of life with the teaching of the Divine Master, Baptism

The Holy Spirit and the Eucharistic Table are the essential and vital elements of this divine and human society that extends throughout the world, united and compact.

The apostolic writers of the 2nd century are more dogmatic and ecclesiastical than many later writers.

The Didache speaks of the Church gathering into the Kingdom of Christ from all the ends of the earth; St. Clement of Rome speaks of the Church of Rome and that of Corinth with such a unitary concept that it allows for the correction of every indiscipline and every schism (late 1st century).

St. Ignatius of Antioch tells the Ephesians to regard the bishop as Jesus Christ, that deacons are not ministers of the Table but of the Church. He praises their union with the bishop, which is like the union of the Church with Jesus Christ, and of Christ with God. All those who return to the unity of the Church are of God and live according to the Savior. All the letters of St. Ignatius prove the immediate origin of the Church from Jesus Christ (early 2nd century).

St. Polycarp, in his Letter to the Philippians, greets the Church of God journeying in Philippi, admonishes the deacons to keep themselves undefiled as ministers of God and of Christ, not of men, and emphasizes the duty of submitting to the priests as to God and to Jesus Christ (V, 2, 3).

St. Justin, in his Dialogue, tells the Jews that the promises made to the Fathers have passed to the Church, which was born from Jesus Christ, that the faithful of Christ are one Church, which arose from Him as a new world through faith and Baptism (mid-2nd century).

St. Irenaeus, in his work *Adversus haereses*, clearly affirms the duty of obeying the priests who have the succession of the Apostles, to whom the mission of preaching is entrusted. The classic phrase is: "Where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God" (late 2nd century).

It must be concluded that those critics who deny the immediate foundation of the Catholic Church by Jesus Christ place themselves in contrast with the most secure historical documentation, allow themselves to be carried away by their arbitrary ideology, and, in order to deny the faith, are forced to deny reason.

Some feign scandal because there are sinners in the Church, that capital vices are fought against, and not all are saints from the first day. They forget that Jesus Christ came to seek sinners, and all men are such; the danger is not in recognizing oneself as in need of forgiveness and rebirth, but in believing oneself righteous without even having a conscience of one's own guilt, and without understanding that the Church, founded by Jesus Christ, is precisely the kingdom of justification for wayfarers.
IV. PURPOSE OF THE CHURCH — Vatican Council I well expressed the essential purposes of the Church when it said that «the eternal Shepherd and Bishop of our souls, in order to render perpetual the saving work of the Redemption, decreed the foundation of the Church, in which, as in the house of the living God, all the faithful might be united in the bond of faith and charity» (Denz-U, 1821).

This doctrine finds its historical demonstration in the Gospel. Jesus Christ affirms: «As the Father has sent me, so I send you» (Jn 20:21) to preach the Gospel to all men, to forgive their sins, to regenerate them in the bath of life, to make them partakers of every grace in the Eucharistic Communion, to constitute all the faithful as a royal priesthood and a Church without spot or wrinkle.

To this end Jesus Christ promises to remain in the midst of His disciples and with His disciples until the end of the world; for the same purpose He sends the Holy Spirit, who will be the soul of the Church, its invisible and invincible support until the end of the world.

The entire Gospel documents this thought, which, translated into theological language, signifies the purification of souls, the renewal of hearts, and the sanctification of society. The Apostles consider themselves ministers of Christ, dispensers of His mysteries, builders of a new world, which will be the kingdom of Christ, His Mystical Body, which will still be He Himself living and operative in the society of souls that possess Him, justifying sinners in the mysterious infusion of His blood through the Sacraments.

This evangelical doctrine does not permit us to indulge in the dream of an invisible Church, made up of saints and the predestined, as if souls were wandering in a heaven of imagined charity; nor does it tolerate that extrinsic view which sees in the Church nothing more than a juridical and hierarchical organism, one that would too closely resemble the reproved Synagogue and a body without a soul. The Church is founded so that sinful humanity may become redeemed and justified humanity. Faith alone suffices to enter the Church, but faith alone does not suffice to remain in it as one ought. Whoever does not transform himself thereby places himself outside the Mystical Body, passing from legality, which does not justify, to inconsistency, which condemns, and sometimes to perdition.

To this doctrine of the purpose of the Church is connected that other doctrine of the necessity of belonging to it as a condition of salvation. Not only did Jesus Christ say to the Apostles: «He who despises you despises me; and he who despises me despises Him who sent me» (Lk 10:16), but He added: «He who believes will be saved; he who does not believe will be condemned» (Lk 16:16; Mt 10:14). St. Ignatius the Martyr frankly tells the faithful: «Do not deceive yourselves: he who lives separated from the society of the faithful and from the doctrine of Christ will not attain the heavenly inheritance» (Ad Philadelphians, 3:3). Origen (3rd century) formulates the saying, which has become classic: «Outside the Church there is no salvation» (Homily on Joshua, 3:5), a phrase which must be understood of those who culpably remain outside the Church, while even a sincere desire suffices to belong to it morally.

Thus the Church is an instrumental cause of sanctification, inasmuch as it teaches the doctrine of Jesus Christ, communicates His grace in the Sacraments, and renews souls, disposing them for the final phase of the Kingdom of God, which is eternal life. Its function is divine, exercised in this world in view of the next, militant today in its first phase, glorious tomorrow in its supreme and final phase. This is not a casual purpose, born of circumstances, as if it were an arbitrary expedient; rather, in contrast to human weakness and by means of supernatural means that only God could provide, the Founder has firmly established a renewal of souls as a necessary condition of salvation for eternity. No mere man would have had the capacity to conceive such a vast and lofty horizon, much less the capacity to bring it about.

The efforts of some critics to reduce this finalism of the Church to a merely natural minimum are at odds with history and remain merely arbitrary and false.
V. CONSTITUTION OF THE CHURCH -

2. Hierarchy

As various attempts have been made to deny the immediate institution of the Church by Jesus Christ, especially in the Protestant world, so too has there been an effort to confuse the true constitution of this divine society, in order to conclude with that individualistic subjectivism which is in full contrast with the Gospel.

Some deny that Jesus Christ intended in His Church a ministerial and jurisdictional power, such that there would be a true distinction between clergy and laity, with the obligation to respect or obey the commands of an authority which would be of divine origin. They then force and exaggerate the meaning of the words of St. Peter (1 Pt. 2:1), who calls the Christian people "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession," to conclude that all Christians are priests. Others, confusing the nature and function of the charisms mentioned by St. Paul and which flourished in the primitive Churches as a supernatural and varied effusion of the Holy Spirit, affirmed that with the disappearance of these charisms, which were of a transitory nature, hierarchical grades were substituted by human agency.

Instead, Catholic doctrine, more clearly formulated at the Council of Trent, teaches that in the Church, by divine institution, there exists a hierarchy composed of bishops, priests, and ministers.

Referring to the relevant entries for a more detailed description of individual topics, it can be documented from the Gospel that Jesus Christ did not intend to initiate an amorphous and individualistic movement without a constructive hierarchical order, but rather a true society, called the Kingdom of God, the Church, the Mystical Body, the House of the Lord.

No one can deny that Jesus Christ revealed His doctrine to the Apostles and invested them with divine powers for the sanctification of souls and the governance of the Church: “You did not choose me, but I chose you” (Jn 15:16); “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (Jn 20:21); “Whoever listens to you listens to me; whoever rejects you rejects me” (Lk 10:16); “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age” (Mt 28:18-20).

Here, a power of teaching, ministry, and governance is clearly indicated and conferred, along with the promise of protection that will never fail.

The conduct of the Apostles practically illustrates the words of Jesus. The Apostles founded individual churches as an expansion of an organic whole, which is the Church of Christ, and governed them in His name and as His ministers; they transmitted their powers to others who would succeed them, so as to prevent any initiatives that could not be justified by the teaching and authority received from the Divine Master. They taught, celebrated the mysteries of grace, governed the peoples won over to the Gospel, punished the rebellious, performed miracles as proof of the divine mission they fulfilled, died as witnesses to the revealed truth and out of love for the Savior.

At the end of the 1st century, a rebellion broke out in the Church of Corinth. Some bold young men deposed the elders and took their place. The matter was referred to the bishop of Rome, who, in the person of Clement, intervened with the Letter to the Corinthians, accusing them of injustice against those venerable priests who, by legitimate succession, governed that church, and against whom no one had the right to rebel.

The Apostolic Fathers of the 2nd century, and especially the bishop and martyr St. Ignatius of Antioch, describe the hierarchy of the Church with the clarity of today’s theologians. They are learned and holy figures who bear authoritative witness both in what they narrate and in the fidelity with which they act. Heresy, always at odds with them, has never been able to catch them in error, and here emerges an irrefutable argument of prescription. How did that hierarchy arise if it does not correspond to the teaching of Jesus? To suppose that at the beginning of the ChurchThe triumph of the enthusiasm of the disciples and the failure of the power of the Apostles, as if everything were charismatic and nothing jurisdictional, is to falsify history.

The Epistles of St. Paul are too well documented to deny the value of his testimony and his pastoral practice. Bishops succeed the Apostles with the characteristic of being able to transmit priestly powers, and of residing in their own see, whereas the Apostle had as his diocese all the Churches he founded. One may raise questions about the details of the presbyteral college and ask how the monarchical episcopate practically manifested itself; but that the hierarchy of the Church goes back to the Apostles and is of divine origin is not only a dogma of faith but a historically demonstrated truth.

Man is always a social being, and only in society does he more easily attain his perfection in every field. Providence, which in the economy of its gifts and demands takes account of the native disposition of its creatures, provides for our religious needs by making us citizens of a spiritual homeland which is the Church, in which we more surely know the truth and practice goodness than if we were left to our individualism. God confers upon us the honour of collaborating in His work of sanctification; the priest becomes the "auditor Domini" and the saviour of his brother, the faithful man feels himself drawn closer to God through the ministry of a fellow traveller.

The hierarchy ensures the connection of all who compose the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, and the multitude of the faithful feels itself united and incorporated spiritually with the supreme High Priest. In the Church there is no place for pride; honour flourishes in humility. All of us receive from Christ truth and grace, but we help one another in the conquest and application of His merits. The hierarchy does not substitute itself for the freedom of love, but cooperates with it as the physician does with the health of the sick man. One does not live in the Church with a rubricated legalism; the life of the spirit does not flourish in a scornful solipsism. The life of the spirit necessarily has three aspects which call one another to mind: adherence to the source, which is love for Christ, progressive interior renewal of the soul, and a luminous and joyful discipline within the society of the faithful. The union of these three aspects signifies the convergence of all the virtues of the Christian life. This is the mission of the hierarchy.

3. Social perfection of the Church

The hierarchical constitution of the Churchfa sorgere la questione of its social perfection, because to the shortsighted gaze of the critic it seems a cumbersome duplicate of civil society, and to the pride of rulers it seems to be part of the State.

Heresy, which easily allies itself with tyrants, almost always arises with a nationalistic stamp, and always ends by failing to recognize and denying the true constitution of the Church.

When we Catholics speak of the perfection of this divine society, which bears the name of Church, we mean to assert that it possesses within itself all the means necessary to attain its end, which is the sanctification of souls and salvation, and that it does not juridically depend on any other.

As a supernatural society it presupposes all that man naturally possesses in the individual and social sphere, but this does not compromise its perfection. Just as the human organism does not cease to be relatively perfect, although it needs light, air and food; just as the State is a perfect society in its own order, even though it needs international commerce; so the Church must be acknowledged as perfect, in the sense that it possesses the means necessary for its life or has the right to take them where they are, without depending in this on any other authority.

To demonstrate this doctrine it is enough to consult the Gospel, from which it appears that Jesus Christ founded the Church independently of civil society, invested it with autonomous power, and commanded it to exercise that power without rendering account to the lords of the world: “You shall be hated and persecuted for my name’s sake: do not be afraid, for I have overcome the world” (Jn 16:33; cf. Mk 13:9; Lk 21:12). Jews and Arians immediately proceeded to persecute these unarmed missionaries of the Gospel, who had only one answer to give: “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29), and did no more than render to God what is God’s, recognizing Caesar’s what is Caesar’s.

The whole history of the Church is a struggle to recognize the rights of God in contrast to the pretensions of man, in defence of the freedom of the Gospel against the enslavement of every human tyranny.

In ch. 15 of De regimine principum St Thomas gave the philosophical and theological reason for this independence of the Church in the face of civil power. The essential finalism of social life determines the hierarchy of isti-

To these institutions belongs the care of the ultimate end, and therefore those to whom the care of intermediate ends pertain must be subject to them... “Thus the smith makes the sword so that it may be fit for battle, and the builder must design the house so that it may be fit for habitation.” It follows that civil power, ordered to the common human good, is subject to ecclesiastical power, ordered to the spiritual good and to the ultimate end. This reasoning is opposed to the sophistries of the passions and of all the cupidities of men, but it is perfectly logical, founded on the nature of man and on the absolute primacy of God.

To say that the Church has no territory of its own, no weapons to enforce her right, and that her members are citizens of the State, is to misunderstand the spiritual character of the Church herself, which is not a duplicate of civil society but surpasses and transcends every temporal and human end; and while her mission is the attainment of an absolute and eternal good, she elevates even the social activity that does not invade it but presupposes and transcends it, requiring that civil powers not deny what is connected with the spiritual good.

The misunderstood and calumniated indirect power of the Church is summed up precisely in these three propositions: “1° For the temporal end one must not impede the supernatural end; a good, to be such, must preserve the hierarchy of ends and must not oppose the higher good; 2° the society that pursues the temporal end must aid that which tends to the supreme destinies of man; 3° the latter therefore has the right to demand from civil society what, by indirect connection with the spiritual, is necessary to men for the higher good. In other words, Church and State must cooperate for the good of the same subjects in what most concerns them above all” (A. Ottaviani, *Luce di Roma cristiana nel diritto*, Città del Vaticano 1943, pp. 39-40).

Even a non-Catholic State can and must recognize the authority of the Church, not only because it in no way contradicts what is legitimate and reasonable in the defense of civil power, but also because the Church has titles that must be recognized by all, has a beneficent mission for all, and everyone is obliged to become aware of this and to adhere to II. Every persecution directed against the Church, before violating the rights of Catholicism, violates the rights of reason itself, beginning with the trial of Jesus Christ and extending to that of the last persecuted believer.

3. *Indefeasibility of the Church.* – The question whether the Church is changeable in her constitution or can fail at some period in history is not new.

Two are the accusations in this field: one from many who complain because they do not see the Church marching at the head of all modern errors and reproach her for her static or fixed adherence to traditional positions; the other from those who reproach the Church for her too many changes, so that she is no longer recognized as the primitive Church founded by Jesus Christ.The extremism of these recriminations suggests the perennial modern relevance of the Kingdom of God, whose hallmark is indefectibility.

By indefectibility is meant the uninterrupted duration of the Church until the end of the world, the substantial immutability of its doctrine, means of sanctification, and hierarchy, and an intrinsic, indefatigable vitality grounded in the promises of Jesus and the presence of the Holy Spirit. This unshakable stability of the Church is an object of faith and, at the same time, a motive of credibility, for it is humanly impossible to explain the Church’s life in the world without a positive intervention of God to sustain II. This teaching is founded upon the words and presence of the Saviour. For “upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Mt. 16:18); “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world” (Mt. 28:20); “I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever” (Jn. 14:16).

After such clear words of the Gospel, it is no longer necessary to invoke the testimony of the Fathers, who attest to this intrinsic invincibility of the Church despite its natural weakness, and the perennial incarnation of the capital vices within the ranks of its persecutors, who change their weapons but retain their guilty spirit.

The problem, which ever arises anew in the history of men, finds in theology its linear solution. St. Thomas, addressing the question whether the Church of the Apostles is the same as the Church of today, answers in his discreet Latin: “It must be said that numerically the same Church exists now as then, because the same faith and the same sacraments, the same authority, and the same profession [of faith] exist.” And all the changes that may be noted merely indicate that “the state of the Church is now different from what it was then, yet it is not another Church” (Quodl., XII, q. 13, a. 19).

Against the pretensions of Montanus, the Manichees, Joachim of Fiore, the Jansenists, and the Modernists, he demonstrates that the New Law must endure until the end of the world and cannot change “according to the diversity of law,” because “no state of the present life can be more perfect than the state of the New Law,” which “immediately introduces one to the ultimate end.” The attitude of men toward the New Law may change “according as men relate to it differently, more or less perfectly.” At one time laws are better observed, at another they are neglected, but “it is most foolish to say that the Gospel of Christ is not the Gospel of the Kingdom,” “no other law is to be expected that is of the Holy Spirit” (Sum. Theol., 1a-2ae, q. 106, a. 4).

This doctrine reveals the secret of the Church’s fidelity to the content of divine revelation in an attitude grounded in tradition and the transmission of the divine message without arbitrary alterations or manipulations; yet it also reveals that generous effort to understand ever more deeply the treasure of revelation in that dogmatic progress which is the triumph of soundest theology, and in the ardour of an ascetic life that bespeaks the coherence of love for the truth known, the flowering of grace in the practice of all the virtues.

St. Thomas lays down the fundamental principles for a proper understanding of this progress in sacred science, saying that “as regards the substance of faith, there has been no increase through the succession of time,” but “as regards its explication, the number of articles has grown because certain truths were known explicitly by later generations which were not known explicitly by those who came before” (Sum. Theol., 2a-2ae, q. 1, a. 7).

The Church is thus necessarily both traditional and progressive. The invisible presence of its Founder within its organism is the source of those inexhaustible founts of thought and love that ever blossom forth in light and conquest. The Holy Spirit inflames a pope, raises up a saintly reformer, and forthwith a new Pentecost flames forth. It is not heretics who reform, though they may serve as occasions for precious rebirths; it is not revolutionaries who cause the Church to advance toward Tabor, but the indomitable spirit of Jesus, which invisibly blazes and renews the heavens of the Church and of the world.

Fra Girolamo Savonarola warns: “It is irrational to suppose that a better [religion] is to come, for no better end can be found or imagined, nor better and more certain means to attain it, nor a more perfect life, nor greater and more wonderful things.”

of those which Christian religion predicts, no other religion can come that may surpass it" (Trionfo della Croce, ed. Ferretti, Firenze 1913, p. 391).
VI. POWERS OF THE CHURCH – From what has been said above, the great mission of the Church emerges, namely, to continue the work of Jesus by applying Redemption to souls throughout the world and at all times.

Three are the characters of the Saviour which clearly appear from the Gospel: He is the Divine Master, the Eternal Priest, the Peaceful King.

As Master, Jesus revealed the mysteries of God, promulgated the laws of sanctification, and presented Himself to the world as the revealer of the Father’s will. This character is strongly marked throughout the New Testament. As Priest, Jesus Christ abolished all ancient sacrifices, substituting His own, giving His life in redemption, and founding a new priesthood with new and virtuous rites. As King, Jesus Christ founded a perfect society, well-organized, which lives by His life, in faith and love, constituting a renewed unity that renders to God the honour and glory which sin had compromised in the world. The characters and powers of the Church correspond to those of her Founder, and are the power of teaching, the power of ministry, and the power of governance.

4. Power of Teaching

The Church is a living teaching. The mandate to teach all nations is affirmed at once in apostleship, in the catechesis of apostolic times, in the spread of Christianity, in councils, and in missions. It is both a duty and a right which the Church exercises by promulgating the divine Revelation, keeping it untainted in the face of the manipulations of rationalism and heresy, and defending it against deniers and aggressors.

The Code of Canon Law expresses this power effectively: “Christ the Lord entrusted to the Church the deposit of faith, so that, with the constant assistance of the Holy Spirit, it might faithfully guard the revealed doctrine and expound it faithfully. It is the duty and the right of the Church to teach all nations the Gospel doctrine independently of any civil power; all are bound by divine law to know and embrace the Church of God. With divine and Catholic faith, all must believe everything contained in Scripture and Tradition and proposed by the Church as revealed, whether the Church teaches this through solemn magisterium or through the ordinary and universal magisterium” (canons 1322-23).

Solemn magisterium is that of definitions emanating from general Councils with the Pope or even from the Pope alone when he speaks ex cathedra; ordinary magisterium is that of papal encyclicals, of the ordinary documents of the Congregations, and of the body of bishops.

The Apostles immediately regarded themselves as missionaries, as envoys of Christ to the nations to announce the Gospel, the truth that liberates from sin and from every tyranny, ambassadors of God to men. St. Paul had such a vivid consciousness of being a faithful teacher of divine truth that he could say to the Galatians: “Even if an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be anathema” (Gal. 1:8).TITUS is commanded “to speak and to exhort and to reprove with all authority” (Tit 2:15).

The author of the Letter to Diognetus, writing in the second century, speaks as the Second Vatican Council would: “It is not a human invention that has been entrusted to them, nor is it considered a mortal invention that they guard so jealously, nor that they have been invested with the administration of human mysteries… Since He revealed and made manifest to us, through His beloved Son, what had been prepared for us from the beginning, He at the same time placed all things within our reach and allowed us to share in His benefits, to discover and grasp realities that none of them could ever have imagined… He appointed many disciples of the Apostles; I have become a teacher of the nations. To those who have accepted entry into the school of truth, I faithfully impart what has been transmitted to me… It is by virtue of the Son of God that the Church grows in wealth, imparts intellectual light, reveals mysteries, and exults in the joy of the faithful” (Ad Diognetum 7, 8, 11).

This teaching office is first and foremost traditional, in the sense of fidelity to the genuine content of its divine source, to the deposit entrusted to the Church and transmitted to the faithful. From this treasury of wisdom there always emerge truths both old and new, because it is inexhaustible in its abundance, reflecting the substantial truth of the Word. It is an infallible teaching office, because the very indefectibility of the Church would fail if, by hypothesis, it could teach falsity. The invisible presence of Jesus Christ as the governing head within the organism of the Kingdom of God, and the presence of the Holy Spirit sent on the day of Pentecost as the support and soul of Christ’s work, guarantees the Church against every defection, beginning in the doctrinal sphere (see INFALLIBILITY).

5. Power of ministry (potestas ordinis)

Alongside the power of teaching, the Church must also be recognized as possessing the power of ministry, which is a sacramental power conferred by the sacrament of Holy Orders validly administered, directed to the worship of God and the sanctification of the faithful.

If the teaching office instructs in truth, points out the path to be followed, and the supernatural ideal to be attained—an ideal impossible to human strength alone—the ministry confers grace and thus the strength to put those doctrines into practice in life, from faith up to the heights of transforming charity and heroic sanctity.

This power includes first of all the Sacraments (see SACRAMENTS), which are “the principal means of sanctification and salvation” (CIC, 731) entrusted by Jesus Christ to the Church. Beyond the practice of the Sacraments, the obligatory observance of the evangelical precepts must be considered, embracing the whole of Christian morality. The Ten Commandments of the Old Testament acquire in the New Testament a new breadth and deeper understanding, and they express the coherence of the entire life of faith.

This divine legislation takes systematic form in theological treatises on the virtues and is realized in the concrete conduct of each day, in the practice of the theological and cardinal virtues. These are not mere programs but the actualization of salvific law, the ascent of souls along the paths of justice, the flowering of grace in the ascending degrees of virtue, duty, and beatitude.

It is not enough to believe; one must love supernaturally and invest all individual and social virtues with this love, regarding ourselves as citizens of a single Kingdom—that of Christ—and as members of a Mystical Body, namely the Church, so as to oppose proud and revolutionary nationalisms with the kingship of the children of God.

It is easy to fall short of this divine life, to tear virtue to shreds in order to clothe ourselves more comfortably, to seek pale analogies in the history of religions and in pagan virtues for an uninspired syncretism. In truth, “what the soul is in the body, that are Christians in the world” (Ad Diogn. 6).

6. Power of governance

From the indefectible hierarchical constitution of the Church there necessarily follows a third power, that of governance, of jurisdiction, which directs the will of the faithful according to the demands of the common good.

Catholic doctrine teaches that “potestas iurisdictionis seu regiminis ex divina institutione est in Ecclesia” (CIC, 196); “the Roman Pontiff, successor of blessed Peter in the primacy, has supreme and full power of jurisdiction over the universal Church, in matters concerning faith and morals as well as in those

"the discipline and governance of the Church spread throughout the world" (CIC, 218). "(To bishops) belongs the right and duty to govern the diocese, both in spiritual and temporal matters, with legislative, judicial, and coercive power to be exercised in accordance with sacred canons" (CIC, 335). "It is the Church's innate and proper right, independent of any human authority, to coerce its subjects who transgress with spiritual as well as temporal penalties" (CIC, 2214).

Throughout history, there have always been those who have denied or diminished this jurisdictional power in the Church, either to please the State's excesses or to reduce the Church's social efficacy in civil matters. But Jesus Christ explicitly entrusted this power to the Church, both through the words: "whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven" (Mt. 18, 16), and through the command to teach all nations with authority the practice of His precepts (Mt. 28, 20).

The Apostles founded Churches, which they governed either directly or through representatives, as documented in their, especially pastoral, letters.

Moreover, if the Church is a true society, distinct and not subject to any civil power, it cannot lack this governing power, without which no society can be conceived.

The legislative power was clearly exercised at the Council of Jerusalem when the Mosaic observances were abolished, as narrated in Acts 15. St. Paul, in 1 Cor. 7, 12, promulgates that law known as the "Pauline privilege."

The evangelical laws, applied in different times and places, entail a variety of adaptations, which can be seen exemplified in the CIC. Too many laws can be a defect, but without legislation, there is death. Fundamental concepts that govern the life and practice of souls in the infinite demands of faith and perfection require a code, a legislator ever vigilant and intelligent who, between stagnation and revolution, ensures the progress of good.

The judicial power is necessarily connected with the first: the magistrate is the living and operative law in society. Jesus Christ indicated this power when He outlined, in a few strokes, the process of correction that goes from secret admonition to the Church's tribunal with the consequent sanction (Mt. 18, 15).

St. Paul gives an example of the exercise of this power over the incestuous man of Corinth (1 Cor. 4, 18) and when instructing Timothy on how to deal with those who accuse priests (1 Tim. 5, 19). The bishop is necessarily a legislator and a judge.

The coercive power accompanies the judicial power. The law is coercive in the sense that it obliges in conscience when properly interpreted and imposes corresponding sanctions. The Church's sanctions are in keeping with the spiritual and supernatural nature of the Church, thus they are especially of a moral and spiritual character. St. Paul also exercised the coercive power, showing by his example how the citizen of the Church must be held to the faithfulness of his commitments, not only by the profound sense of his moral responsibilities before God but also by the threat of ecclesiastical penalties (v. PENA).

It must be admitted that ecclesiastical authority has the right to inflict even temporal penalties, albeit always with a view to a spiritual good. Why should a heretic not be deprived of the freedom to propagate his errors when he attacks the faith of Christians? Why should a bad priest or a bad Christian not be punished in a tangible way when justice and the common good demand it?

The Church, a spiritual society directly ordered to its ultimate end, has the right to ask for and obtain from the State all those material goods necessary for the fulfillment of its mission, and to use honestly those material means which the wisdom of its governance suggests.

In this delicate sector of ecclesiastical law, two possible oversteps exist: that of one who would exaggerate the coercive right of the Church, intruding unduly into territory not its own, and that of one who denies the Church any right, even indirect, over temporal goods and sanctions of a temporal order. Theology clearly delineates the boundaries within which faith and reason preserve the finest hierarchical order of the two societies.
VII. THE RECOGNITION OF THE TRUE CHURCH — Many Churches exist today in the world that call themselves Christian: which of these is the true one? For an educated Catholic the question is not difficult: he finds it in his Catholicism; but for a rationalist seeking the path to faith, for a Protestant or schismatic who wishes to orient himself in the religious field and not fail in his relations with God, the matter is very different. The Vatican Council teaches that we have the duty to embrace the true faith and to persevere in it steadfastly: “for this God instituted the Church with manifest signs so that all may recognize it as the guardian and teacher of revelation” (Denz-U, 1793).

7. The notes

What are these notes or seals that enable us to recognize the true Church?

For the Easterners in general, the sufficient and necessary note would be fidelity of doctrine to the ancient teaching, to the ancient Church of the Fathers and of the first seven ecumenical councils. But this fidelity is no longer a note of the true Church that one seeks; in a certain sense it may also be found in a schismatic Church, and finally it is not possible authoritatively to know whether a newly proposed doctrine corresponds and is conformable to the doctrine of the true Church of Christ (R.-M. Schultes, De Ecclesia catholica praelectiones apologeticae, Paris 1926, p. 165).

Protestants propose two different notes, which are the sincere preaching of the word of God and the legitimate administration of the Sacraments.

But there is no doubt that in order to understand when and by whom the word of God is preached sincerely and the Sacraments administered legitimately, it is necessary to know the true Church, so that such notes are more obscure than they should be to make known the Church. Apologists never construct a defense of the institution starting from the doctrine taught; on the contrary, they understood that the doctrine was true because it was taught by legitimate authority.

That the Protestant notes do not help to find the Church of Jesus Christ is proved by the tangle of the Reformed Churches and is documented by Bossuet in his History of Variations in his polemics with the minister Jurieu.

Catholics present four notes that are traditional: unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity, and they reason thus: the Church of Jesus Christ must bear these marks, these evident properties. Where we find them again, we shall recognize the true Church of Jesus Christ; where they are lacking, we shall understand that we are on the wrong path.

They are found hinted at in the Gospel, variously used by the Fathers and ancient writers, presented in series in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Symbol (A.D. 381), explained by St. Thomas in his little work on the Apostles’ Creed, and strongly illustrated by Pius IX in his encyclical to the English bishops (1864).

These notes are evidently connected with the nature of the Church, of which they are evident properties; they are

interconnected in such a way that one cannot exist without implying the other; and they are easier to know than the Church herself, so much so that they serve us as signs or seals of her existence and nature.

8. Use of the notes

These notes can be used in a twofold manner to recognize the true Church. One is that indicated by the Vatican Council, and which so pleased Cardinal Dechamps. It is formulated thus: «The Church, by reason of her admirable propagation, her most holy character, and her inexhaustible fruitfulness in every kind of good work, her Catholic unity and her invincible stability, is a great and abiding motive of credibility and an irrefutable witness to her divine mission» (Denz-U, 1794).

In this argument, the starting point is taken as the unity of faith, of her worship and of her government, her invincible constancy in defending the sacred patrimony throughout the world and her inexhaustible fruitfulness in every abundance of good, her propagation from the origins to the present day, despite all obstacles of force, sophistry, and malice.

Once this fact is established in all its breadth, the question arises as to how the few disciples of the Lord could have achieved this result. If it is recognized that the work of the Church was continually accompanied by miracles, so that «to the internal aids of the Holy Spirit must be added the external arguments of Revelation, namely, divine facts and especially miracles and prophecies which, by manifestly displaying the infinite knowledge and omnipotence of God, are most certain signs of divine revelation and suited to every intelligence» (Denz-U, 1790), then one has the invincible argument of the divinity of the Church.

But even apart from other miracles and remaining in the fact of the Church persecuted and victorious, poor and beneficent to the whole world, united and compact, despite heresies and schisms and persecutions, one must say that this very fact is a motive, an argument that leads every honest intelligence to believe in the divinity of the Church. When a historical effect before our eyes transcends and contrasts with the natural efficacy of the known cause, one must conclude that God has intervened. It is precisely the fact of the Church, in the splendor of her properties and resplendent aims.

This argument has always been present in Christian consciousness. St. Thomas, in the Summa contra Gentes (I, 6), illustrates it thus: «This so wonderful conversion of the world to the Christian faith is a most certain sign of the miracles of the past. Thus it becomes unnecessary to repeat them, since they are luminously confirmed in their effects. It would indeed be the greatest of absurdities if the world had been induced to believe in the aforesaid truths, to perform such difficult deeds, and to hope for such high rewards, without miracles, at the word of simple and ignorant men.»And yet even in our own times God does not cease from the work of wonders to confirm the faith through His saints.”

There is another way of studying and using these notes to arrive at an understanding of what is the true Church of Christ, both in law and in fact. One must search the Gospel and the primitive Christian sources for the essential properties, the genuine imprint, the visible notes of the Church as Jesus Christ willed and established it, for it cannot even be conceived that the true Church should lack an unmistakable and recognizable face if one wishes to follow the Saviour. With this portrait firmly and clearly fixed in the mind, one can and must examine the various Christian confessions that history presents at all times, in order to discern which of them bears the imprint of Jesus and which are counterfeit, mutilated, or disguised, having thus forfeited every right to appeal to Jesus Christ.

Reading the Gospel, one cannot fail to see that Jesus Christ impressed upon His Church a seal of unity, so that it should be in itself undivided and distinct from every other. Unity, therefore, in the content of faith, unity in the means of sanctification, unity in the governance of that society destined to perpetuate in the world the salvation wrought by the Saviour. The Divine Master who declared that every kingdom divided against itself must perish, every city divided against itself cannot stand, could not but impart this character to His work (v. UNITY).

Holiness is the perfection of love of God, which withdraws the soul from sin and unites it intimately to the Lord. It may remain inward and hidden in the soul, yet it can shine forth in the triumph of all the virtues and in the splendor of miracles (v. HOLINESS).

Catholicity is a property of the Church inasmuch as, being one, it appears conspicuously and recognizably throughout the world in great numbers. The Apostles are sent to all nations (Mt 28:19), and the presence of the Saviour is promised to them until the end of the world (v. CATHOLICITY).

Apostolicity is a property of the Church inasmuch as, in the uninterrupted succession of its shepherds, it traces back to the Apostles and proceeds from them in the identity of faith, worship, and governance. It was upon Peter that Christ founded His Church (Mt 16:18); it was to the Apostles that He made the promise of His presence until the end of the world (Mt 28:19); it was upon the Apostles that the Holy Spirit descended at Pentecost, and in them were communicated the powers of teaching, of forgiving, of saving, and so forth (v. APOSTOLICITY).

These four notes, within the scope of theological teaching, are certainly infallible marks of the Church of Christ, and that religious confession which possesses them unaltered and most fully realized can certainly proclaim itself Christian and vindicate its legitimacy. One may formulate a discriminating criterion thus: wherever heresy and schism shatter the unity of teaching, nationalize religion, dry up the sources of heroic and prodigious holiness, and sever the apostolic succession and mission, there is no true Church.The Church of Christ, but a human construction, even if made with the stones of a ruined Christian building.

With this criterion it is easy to understand how the dissident Eastern Church cannot claim the titles of the true Church of Christ. Having separated from the Catholic Church, of which it had been an honored part for ten centuries, it lost the hierarchical unity that ensures the unity of faith and worship, and set itself in contrast with itself by denying that Roman primacy which it had recognized in various previous councils. Although it has preserved the sacraments, and many of its dissidents are in good faith, one cannot deny that the effort of a most solemn cult contrasts with the poverty of Christian practice, which does not flourish in heroic sanctity. In matters of catholicity, the heterodox Eastern Church has failed. Restricted almost exclusively to the Slavic peoples and divided into a series of patriarchates and sects that do not even form a federation, this once-glorious Eastern Church destroyed itself with schism, and the wretched life it leads proves that it has been cut off from its source. Its apostolicity is compromised. As for the Sacrament of Holy Orders, the hierarchy of this Church traces back to the Apostles; but by its rebellion against the supreme Pastor it has lost its apostolic mission, it has lost the power of jurisdiction, it is like a suspended priest who continues to celebrate to the offense of God and the Church.

By the same path one can easily recognize how Protestantism is not at all the Christian Church, as an organized movement of secession from the Catholic Church in the 16th century.

It lacks doctrinal and hierarchical unity, by virtue of that free examination which justifies every individualism and

Every aberration. The so-called Lutheran Reformation was a radical deformation of the Church of Jesus Christ, reduced to various forms of nationalism, false doctrines, denied sacraments, and unrecognized hierarchy; it was a general upheaval. Holiness in members of good faith may exist in contrast to heresy and schism, but not by virtue of the alleged Reformation, which presents nothing but a boundless proliferation of sects, a propaganda that bears fruit neither in great virtues nor in miracles. Catholicity has no place because there is nothing organic and vital whose universality can be sought. Individualism is exalted as a triumph of freedom, but here it is arbitrariness and bewilderment, nothing more.

Apostolicity is radically denied. Apostolic succession is lacking, every connection with the Church of Christ is missing, which is counterfeited and denied in countless ways. The strong German intellect flaunts its inventive and convoluted skill in shaping paradoxical systems and constructions, which are well understood only when they are dismantled.

Proceeding with the investigation, we arrive at the Roman Catholic Church.
VIII. ROMANITY OF THE CHURCH — At this point a question arises which seems extremely grave, namely, how Christianity became Catholicism. The simplest answer would be to say that true Christianity has always been Catholicism, and if a historical problem presents itself, it is precisely that of understanding the different ways and the proximate cause of those movements of people who, separating themselves from Catholicism and arbitrarily grouping themselves together, have called themselves Christian confessions.

But among the churches of the world there is the Roman Church with a primacy evident to all eyes, and to investigate with a pure eye what is concealed under this name of Romanity of the Church is precisely the secret of all ecclesiastical logic.

From a methodological point of view at least, it is advisable not to consider Romanity as a note of the Church, because everyone may be persuaded that the true Church will bear the four previous notes, but only those who have found and recognized this Church concretely will be able to understand that it is Roman. Therefore, more than a means of investigation, this Romanity is a result, an achievement, and cannot be taken as a starting point.

In the second place, Romanity does not mean a prestige which the capital of the Roman Empire would have projected onto the episcopal see of Rome, conferring upon it a primacy which would then have imposed itself on the whole Church. This is the thesis of E. Renan in the volume *Conférences d’Angleterre* (Paris 1880), in which he developed and falsified the theme of the relations between Rome and Christianity. With varying nuances, A. Sabatier expounded the same concept in *Les Religions d’autorité et la religion de l’esprit* (Paris 1890), and A. Harnack in *Das Wesen des Christentums* (Leipzig 1900). In Italy this error resounded in the words of N. Tommaseo, who in the volume *Roma e il mondo* dared to affirm that “the schism and the many abuses in the Church gave the bishops of Rome an influence which, in the absence of this, they would never have acquired.” Alfredo Oriani in *Il Matrimonio* echoed the same opinion: “Without the real unity of Rome, the ideal unity of Christianity would have broken apart. Only Rome could, by transforming it into Catholicism, keep it united.”

To this inconsistent theory, even Loisy in *L’Évangile et l’Église* (Paris 1902) took exception, declaring that if “the importance of the city contributed to the importance of the Roman see...,” one cannot say that it created II.
When that heretical expression was repeated in the Italian Parliament, Pius XI, in a letter to Cardinal Gasparri (30 May 1929), authoritatively recalled that “the mandate to all nations is prior to the call of St. Paul; prior to this is the mandate of St. Peter to the Gentiles; universality is already found in law and in fact at the very beginnings of the Church.”and of apostolic preaching; this, through the work of the Apostles and apostolic men, soon became much vaster than the Roman Empire, which, as is well known, was by no means the whole of the known world. If one wished merely to recall the providential usefulness of the Roman Empire’s organization for the spread and organization of the Church, it would suffice to recall Dante and Leo the Great, two great Italians, who in a few magnificent words stated and engraved the substance of what countless others later expressed with more or less abundant erudition, often interspersed with inaccuracies and errors, especially under Protestant and Modernist influences.”

The title of “Roman” given to the Church in so many papal documents, from St Gelasius I (493) to the encyclical of Pius XII on the Mystical Body, does not give the Church a nationalistic colouring, nor does it mark a boundary but rather indicates a centre, which is the principle of a firm and harmonious organization. Only a shortsighted and biased gaze could twist the meaning of this Romanitas to express a narrow nationalistic and partisan spirit, whereas in the best traditional and serious usage, when one says “Roman Church” one means the Catholic Church.

In a positive sense, it must be affirmed that the notes of unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity belong only to the Roman Church, and that consequently the Romanitas of the Church is the concrete and historical realization of the unmistakable features of the Church of Christ. It is easy to observe how the constitution of Catholicism is perfectly unitary and compact. Unity of doctrine without deviation, unity of sanctifying ministry without arbitrary individualism, unity of government and universal jurisdiction are such striking features of the Church of Rome that they are often reproached as signs of oppression and authoritarianism. Instead, dogmatic progress and holy freedom of the children of God exist only in the Catholic Church; while stagnation and mortal rigidity are found in heretical and schismatic churches, which, by withdrawing from religious authority, fell under political power. Contrasting with the apostolic mission, they lost contact with Jesus Christ.

The holiness of the Roman Church is evident not only in all its doctrinal and practical content but also in the efficacy of its intimate and divine transformations, which flourish in the heroic virtue of its saints and missionaries, in the charism of miracles that often accompany the heroic degrees of love and find their scientific recognition in canonization processes.

Although holiness is intimate and not always or easily recognizable, the Christian sense of the Church acknowledges the saints even to the point of anticipating their proclamation, and Providence takes it upon itself to break the silence of men and tombs to crown with glory the brows of so many who lived unknown and often despised in the world.

The universality in space and time is recognizable in the Roman Church with the most evident proofs. Although it is not a physical catholicity in the sense that the Church occupies every point on earth, it shines forth throughout the world in such a way that it is easy to know and make contact with II. No human power has been able to confine it within the sphere of national interests or compress it into partisan aims.

By being acclaimed by every people, it has not become the slave of any: its missions are the commentary on the command of the divine Master: “Go and preach to all nations.” Even numerically, it counts followers in a proportion vaster than all the churches that call themselves Christian. Expansion does not compromise unity; rather, unity facilitates expansion. In Rome, the Congregation and the Athenaeum of Propaganda Fide are the most eloquent symbol of this universality, not only in law but also in fact. Along the paths of explorers and conquerors, the missionary preaches the faith and awakens love, and through his merits often makes people forget the wrongs of those who, by force, opened the way for him. The harshest modern ideologies highlight all the more the benefit of the Church’s catholicity.

The apostolicity is the most evident note of the Roman

mana. It does not merely speak of conformity with the ancient Church but of continuity in the hierarchical succession of the Apostles down to our own bishops, all united to the Pope, just as he is united to Jesus Christ. This succession from St. Peter to the present day, and the union of the other Churches with the Roman Church, is enough to confound all those who walk in crooked paths. St. Irenaeus says this explicitly: “It is necessary that every other Church agree with this Church (the Roman) because of its more exalted primacy, for in it the apostolic tradition is preserved” (Adv. haer., III, 3).

The argument of the succession of the bishops of Rome, from St. Peter to Pius XII, is the keystone of the uninterrupted apostolic tradition, the center of unity and diffusion, the driving force of every renewal and progress. Thus the notes of the Church of Christ, recognized in the study of its sources, are practically verified in the one Roman Church, which consequently is the one true Church to which all must belong. The first meaning of the Roman character of the Church is precisely this: the historical realization of the notes, hence the synthesis of the distinctive features of the Mystical Body of Christ. In a theological sense, the Roman character of the Church is the correspondence and identity of today’s Catholic Church with the Church founded by Jesus Christ, made evident by the perennial realization of the four fundamental notes.

The Roman character of the Church also signifies the primacy of St. Peter and the Roman Pontiffs in its perpetual and universal historical framework.

If St. Peter had not died as bishop of Rome after exercising in that city the office of Prince of the Apostles, Rome would certainly have been an illustrious see, the center of a great diocese like Milan or Paris, but no more; and the Catholic Church could not be called Roman, just as today it cannot be called Parisian or Milanese. It is not the greatness of Rome as capital of the empire that gave St. Peter the primacy of jurisdiction over all the Churches, but rather this primacy of St. Peter, transmitted to his successors in the Roman See, that made the bishop of Rome the bishop of all the Churches and Rome the center of the Christian world, by virtue of that infallible magisterium and that indefectible and sovereign ministry which Jesus Christ conferred upon St. Peter and his successors.

Rome, capital of the Christian world, has not Italianized the Church, but has helped to place the barque of St. Peter at the center of the seas and continents, channeling toward the entire Christian world the rivers of all nations.The authority of the Roman See ensures the unity of the Church, which we have seen shattered every time peoples or individuals have withdrawn from that magisterium; it has rendered the Church compact by rejecting heretical and dissident factions, and by employing what might otherwise dissipate into the indeterminate, it has glorified the holiness of the Church, which is the coherence of human freedom with revealed truth and the untainted sources of supernatural life; and finally it has guaranteed the apostolicity of the Church in that succession which runs from St. Peter to Pius XII and in the connection of every episcopal see with the Roman See. The perennial stability of the Church’s government is ensured solely by the continuity of the succession of the Bishops of Rome.

That the consular roads aided the mission of the Apostles and the preachers of the Gospel, that Roman law was treasured in the formation of canon law, that classical literature and philosophy influenced the writings of the Fathers and Doctors, that the Latin language became the official tongue of the Church, and that the same Roman Empire, after attempting to kill the Church in blood, was converted to the Gospel by a great moral miracle—all this belongs to the history of the Church, a Latin and Roman hue upon the mantle of the Catholic Church; but it must not be confused with the Church itself, which is not Roman merely for what it found in Rome or could have assimilated from the culture and institutions of the Empire, but is Roman principally for what it brought there and implanted there: the revelation of the mysteries of God, the founts of grace, the promulgation of love, and that apostolic succession which securely unites us with Jesus Christ in faith and in all of life.

It is understandable how the first Christian apologists pointed to the Roman See in defending all the Churches, and how Tertullian exclaimed: “If you go to Italy, you have Rome, whence comes to us authority. O happy Roman Church, to which the Apostles entrusted the entire doctrine sealed with their own blood!” Fra’ Girolamo Savonarola, in his book *Trionfo della Croce*, echoed St. Leo the Great thus: “Since, therefore, the Roman bishops are the successors of Peter, it is manifest that the Roman Church is the mother and teacher of all others, and that all faithful Christians must unite themselves to the Roman Pontiff as to their head. Therefore, whoever separates from the unity of the Roman Church undoubtedly separates from Christ. But all heretics separate from this doctrine, because they refuse to abide by the determinations of the Roman Church and stubbornly follow their own fancies; hence they are not Christians, as they falsely claim.”

It follows logically that adherence to the Roman Church is not an act of conformity, more or less obligatory before men, but obedience to Jesus Christ living in His one true saving Church. And the problem of the ChurchesSeparation does not dissolve itself with a more or less dreamed federalism, but with the reinsertion into that throne from which, on an ill-fated day, it separated itself.

It is useful here to recall the cardinal titles of the Roman churches. By this means all the cardinals, even if from distant regions, officially and juridically constitute the Roman clergy. According to a method in use in the primitive Church, this clergy, during a vacant see, gathers to elect its bishop, the Bishop of Rome. The newly elected, precisely because he is Bishop of Rome, is immediately the successor of St. Peter in the primacy of jurisdiction and Vicar of Jesus Christ. He may be overwhelmed by the strangest events: one day a slave in Avignon, another day a prisoner of a despot like Napoleon; but he is always Bishop of Rome and, precisely because of this, immediately and necessarily Bishop of the universal Church.

St. Thomas expresses this fact by saying that Jesus Christ «unam potestatem magis ostenderet, in ipsa Roma, quae caput mundi erat, etiam caput Ecclesiae suae statuit, in signum perfectae victoriae, ut exinde fides derivaretur ad universum mundum» (Sum. Theol., 3ª, q. 35, a. 7, ad 3; De regimine principum, I, 14).

St. Catherine wrote to Gregory XI urging him to return to his obligatory see (Epist., 106), and of Rome she said: «Here is the head and the principle of our faith» (Epist., 362); «Consider that this land is the garden of Christ blessed and the principle of our faith» (Epist., 347).

The bold phraseology of the Sienese finds its justification in the theological reasoning of Melchior Cano (De locis theologicis, VI, 7), which can be summarized thus: «Either the Roman Pontiff is he whom Jesus Christ left to continue the mission of Peter, or the promise of the Gospel has failed. But do we not see every day the promise of the Lord fulfilled in the Church of Rome? All have assailed this citadel of truth, all weapons have been aimed against her, but the Pontiff was not conquered, and his authority could not be transferred to others. Whoever departs from Rome becomes a dissenter throughout the Church. If the Roman Pontiff were to fail in his dogmatic teaching, in the government of souls which the Supreme Shepherd entrusted to him, how could we recognize Christian truth, where could we seek the secret of the Kingdom of God, the proof in fact that the Revealer did not deceive us? To this Romanity is connected the apostolate, so true that the separated churches are no longer called apostolic; to this Romanity are invincibly attached in history the characters of the true Church of Jesus Christ.»

Practically, whoever comes to Rome to visit the Palatine, the Forum, the Capitoline, is a traveler investigating the memories of men; but whoever enters Rome to see Peter and to assure himself of the doctrine that comes from Christ is Abercius of all ages, the pilgrim who does not seek merely to orient himself in the ways of the world, but especially in the ways of God.

The Church militant has here the center of its battles: “Rome, center of Catholic unity” (Leo XIII, Letter to Cardinal De Luca); “As the See of Peter is the center of the Church, so the city where that See was established is the center of Christendom” (v. FORNARI, VITO, Vita di Gesù Cristo, III, Turin 1930, p. 143). Whoever approaches Christian Rome, watered by the blood of the martyrs, just as Abercius saw it “beautiful in golden” stole and golden sandals, feels within his soul a joy of moral resurrection and becomes, as it were, a noble freedom of revealed truth; he experiences, as his own, the honor of the Church, that of always suffering for the same cause that made his Master die” (Lacordaire).
IX. DUTIES TOWARD THE CHURCH – I. Every intelligent person stands before the Church in an attitude very similar to that which one takes before Jesus Christ. If the Church has no divine rights to assert, that is, if it is not invested by God with supernatural powers over humanity, then there are no religious duties to be fulfilled, and all apologetics for the Church and all criticism of primitive Christianity are merely erudite and insignificant skirmishes.

If the Church has the mission to continue and apply to the nations the Redemption accomplished by Jesus Christ, it cannot lack the characteristics and proofs necessary to make itself recognized and to legitimate its work. At the same time, every enlightened and honest intelligence must be able to acquaint itself with those proofs and understand the duty and honor of recognizing and embracing the Church.

The Church is a living magisterium, an operative ministry, a supernatural social organism; to understand it, intelligence, rectitude, and grace are required. The harmony of these three gifts of God is not easily achieved, especially when one considers that we can do nothing to merit faith, while we can do much to forfeit II. Yet it is at least a duty for all to acquaint themselves with what the Church is in its intimate structure, not to judge it without having known it, and not to believe that one has known it through a superficial glance at the failings of men. Even the history of heresies and schisms can be valuable for recognizing the truth, but the fool takes more pride in his errors than in the humble and beneficial recognition of the truth.

2. From the solution of the preceding question arises either the duty to obey the Church or the duty to repudiate II.
To have the right to repudiate the Church, one must demonstrate that it is false, that it is a human construction and not a divine work, that the heroic virtues of the saints are natural, that the miracles are not authentic, that the history of twenty centuries of Christianity has no value.

As long as an intelligent person has not made this demonstration, no hostility or indifference can be legitimate or reasonable. But no one has been able to make it to this day, however strong the intellect and aggressive the will may have been; no one will ever be able to do so “because of the contradiction that does not allow it.”

Once the truth of the Church and its divine mission in the world are recognized, everyone has the duty to obey Jesus Christ and to fulfill His commandments. No society so luminously justifies its titles, none has sanctions so great: it is a question of salvation or perdition: “He who hears you hears me; and he who despises you despises me. And he who despises me despises him who sent me” (Lk.Nor is duty confined to the external discipline of those who would preserve the juridical aspect without the inwardness of the soul: here duty, love, and freedom are fused; what is done out of love is done with freedom, while what is done without love has no value before God.

Pharisaic legalism and mystical arbitrariness are radically denied; autocephalous individualism as much as pantheistic corporatism are unchristian.

3. The Church does not interpose itself between God and us as something we must overcome in order to approach divinity, but rather it places us in contact with God, inserting us spiritually into the Savior as the branches are to the vine. From this union arises the sanctification of souls throughout the redeemed world; and to assure ourselves of the realism of this insertion we appeal to the apostolicity of the Church as a guarantee against pseudo-mystical individualisms. At this point our life in the Church is an adherence of faith based on the authority of the Revealer, a practice of love in the fulfillment of the New Law of freedom, a regal and divine conduct according to the formulation of the first Pope: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people set apart to proclaim the virtues of Him who called you from darkness into His wonderful light” (1 Pt. 2:9).

I. The Church in patristic texts and paleo-Christian monuments.

The Apostle Paul greets the Church ἀγαλώς and presents the Church as a chaste virgin to Christ (Eph. 5:27). Christ is the spouse of the Church, writes Irenaeus (Fragment 30 in H. Jordan, Armenische Irenäusfragmente, Leipzig 1913). The Church is the virgin mother, as read in the letter of the faithful of Lyons from 177 (Eusebius, Hist. eccl., V, 1, 45; V, 2, 6). Clement of Alexandria affirms that the Church is virgin and mother, without stain like a virgin, beloved like a mother who has her children around her and nourishes them with holy milk (Paed., I, 5-6). Tertullian often calls her “Sposa Christi” (De exhort. cast., 5, 1; Adv. Marcionem, V, 18; De monogam., 6, 1; De fuga, 14; De pudic., 1, 8); Christ Jesus is the “vir ecclesiasticus” (De cor., 14); the Church is the “mulier Christi” (Adv. Marc., V, 12). Hippolytus will repeat this as well (In Gen., fr. 7; In Daniel., 14; De Antichristo, 16). So too St. Cyprian (Ep., 74; De habitu virgin., 3; De Eccl. unitate, 6).

The expression from the second letter of St. John, “electa dominae et natis eius” (2 Jn. 1), is taken up by Tertullian in these words: “domina mater Ecclesia de uberibus suis” (Ad martyres, 1).

Cf. F. J. Dölger, Domina Mater Ecclesia und die Herrin in zweiten Johannesbrief, in Antike und Christentum, 5 (1936), pp. 211-17.

This concept of the Church as mother is the one most frequently encountered in Christian literature. Thus Irenaeus (Adv. haer., III, 38, 1), Clement of Alexandria (Paed., 5, 3, 15; Stromata, IV, 21, 130), Origen (In Gen. hom., 10, 1), Tertullian (De praescr. haeret., 42, 10; De carne Christi, 7; De monog., 7; De pudicit., 5, 14; Ad martyr., 1; De orat., 2; De Baptismo, 20; De anima, 43), Cyprian (Ep., 10, 1, 15, 2; 16, 3; 41, 2; 44, 3; 45, 1, 3, 46, 1, 2; 47, 4; 8, 3; 52, 2; 59, 13; 73, 19, 24; 74, 6; 75, 1, 4). He repeats that «habere non potest Deum patrem qui ecclesiam non habet matrem» (De eccl. unit., 6; Ep., 7, 7). Later, Ambrose (De obitu Valent., 75), St Augustine (De cath. rudib., De Symb. ad cat., 2, 13; In ep. ad Parth., 3, 1), St Jerome (Ad Eustoch., Ep. 22, 13), Ennodius will also confirm the same concept.

Origen writes that «nos sumus ecclesia Dei» (In Is. hom., 2, 1) «de gentibus congregati» (In Cant. Cant. hom., 2, 3; 45, 22). Tertullian will call the Church «corpus Christi» (De monog., 13), and Cyprian declares that «Ecclesia in episcopo et clero in omnibus stantibus est constituta» (Ep., 33).

The famous epitaph of Abercius (v.) repeats the Pauline concept (II Cor. 11, 2) and presents the Church as a chaste virgin «Ἰαμβάνης ἀγνή»; «she is accustomed to set before her friends as food the great pure fish from the spring, and offers it to eat every day, having excellent wine which she mingles with water together with bread».

To indicate the entire community of the ancient Christian Church in the well-known inscription of Caesarea in Mauretania (Cherchel), it is said: «ecclesia fratrum» (CIL, VIII, 958, 20958). St Augustine also explains the name Church in the material sense of the building frequented by the assembly of the faithful: «ecclesia dicitur locus quo Ecclesia congregatur. Nam Ecclesia homines sunt de quibus dicitur ut exhiberet sibi gloriosam Ecclesiam» (Ephes. 5, 27). «Hoc tamen vocari etiam ipsam domum orationum idem apostolus testis est» (I Cor. 11, 22; Quaest. in Heptateuchum, III, 57; PL 34, 703).

The same Doctor then shows that in his time ecclesia was synonymous with basilica: «sicut ergo appellamus ecclesiam basilicam, qua continetur populus qui vere appellatur ecclesia, ut nomine ecclesiae, id est populi qui continetur, significemus locum, qui continet» (PL 33, 863).

In general usage in ancient Christian epigraphy, the most common attributes for the Church are sancta, sacrosancta (E. Diehl, Inscriptiones latinae christianae veteres, III, Berlin 1930, p. 346); one also finds florens (ibid., n. 1024), veneranda (ibid., n. 1051); more often catholica or catolica in contrast to heretical ones (CIL, III, 8259; VIII, 5176, 9710, 2371, 20905; X, 7972). It is sometimes also called mater in the same sense indicated by ancient Christian literature. Damasus employs the verse «tempora quo gladius secuit pia viscera matris» precisely to indicate the bloody period of persecution in his poems in honor of Sixtus II, Tiburtius, Hippolytus, the 62 martyrs of the new Salarian Way, and St Saturninus (A. Ferrara, Epigrammata Damasiana, Vatican City 1942, nn. 17, 31, 35, 43, 46). An inscription in the Lateran Christian Museum of a «Magus puer innocens» reproduces some passages from St Cyprian, including the following: «Quam te laetum excipit mater ecclesia de hoc mundo revertentem», taken from the treatise De lapsis, 14 (O. Marucchi, I monumenti cristiani del Museo Pio Lateranense, Milan 1911, tav. LII, n. 31; L. Bayard, Note sur une inscription chrétienne et sur des passages de st Cyprien, in Comptes rendus de l'Acad. des inscr. et belles lettres, 1913, pp. 63-64).

On the architrave of the basilica of St Lawrence in Damasus could be read the verse: «cunctis porta patet quis por-

In the scene of the Adoration of the Magi on the triumphal arch of S. Maria Maggiore, the second seated female figure on the right, enthroned and holding a figured scroll in her left hand, has received various interpretations; among these, it should be recalled that G. B. De Rossi considers her the “ecclesia ex circumcisione,” while L. De Bruyne identifies her as the “ecclesia ex gentibus,” correlating her with the Magi.

At the base of the triumphal arch of S. Maria Maggiore, the two cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, indicated by their names Bethlehem and Hierusalem, personify the two Churches of the Jews and the Gentiles. The same representations of the two cities will later be found in the apse prospect of S. Sabina, in the apse of SS. Cosmas and Damian in Rome, at S. Vitale and at S. Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna.

At the center of the triumphal arch in S. Maria Maggiore, flanking the throne with the “insignia Christi,” stand the apostles Peter and Paul, each holding a book. De Bruyne has emphasized how, in both S. Sabina and S. Maria Maggiore, the books held respectively by the “ecclesia ex circumcisione” and by St. Peter are in characters proper to Hebrew, while those held by the “ecclesia ex gentibus” and by St. Paul are in a continuous, flowing script allusive to the Western style (Nuove ricerche iconografiche sui mosaici dell'arco trionfale di S. Maria Maggiore, in Riv. di archeologia crist., 13 [1936], pp. 254, 260-63).

In both the Gospels and the Apocalypse, the lambs symbolize the faithful; thus, in the allegory of the lambs emerging from the two cities, Jerusalem and Bethlehem, so often represented in Roman churches, the concept of the universality of the faithful—coming from both the “ecclesia ex circumcisione” and the “ecclesia ex gentibus”—is implied.

Later, with the apse of SS. Cosmas and Damian (Wilpert, Musacii, tav. 102), the representation of the triumphant Church begins. In the Middle Ages, the Church is mostly depicted in the portals of churches in contrast to the Synagogue, which is portrayed with blindfolded eyes. — See Plates XC–XCI.

III. THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH
OUTLINE:

I. In the apostolic age

II. The first seven heretical sects

III. The struggle with the Empire

IV. Peaceful relations with the Empire

V. The great theological controversies

VI. The Church and the barbarians in the West. Charlemagne. — VII. In the Danube valley. Islam. —

VIII. The Byzantine schism

IX. The Church and the German Empire; new forces

X. The Turkish peril and the division of the West

XI. The Catholic Reformation

XII. Recent times.

I. IN THE APOSTOLIC AGE

On the fiftieth day after the Saviour’s Resurrection, having received the promised Holy Spirit, the twelve Apostles, with Peter at their head, began the ministry to which Christ had called them: “You shall be my witnesses even to the uttermost parts of the earth” (c. 30 A.D.). Witnesses, that is, of His doctrine and works, of what they had seen and heard from Him, and therefore executors of His commands: to remit sins, to renew the august mystery of the Last Supper, and to preach the good news to all. Thus the day began with an act of proselytism, and three thousand souls on that very day formed the first nucleus which, together with the Apostles, constituted the Church.

The work began in Jerusalem and among the Jews, at the foot of Mount Calvary. It began with baptism and with gatherings in houses to celebrate the new Sacrifice, which repeated the Sacrifice of the Cross. Yet at first the Temple was not abandoned—the Temple in which the true God had been worshipped. The Apostles went there to pray, to make Christ known as the Son of God, training themselves ever more in polemics against the Jews, and thus becoming the object of the first contradictions that soon turned into persecutions.

The apostolic work unfolded among Palestinian Jews, Sadducees and Pharisees alike, among Jews who had spread throughout the civilized world and particularly among those who had been in direct contact with the Greek world (Hellenists), though these were often more fanatical in their original nationalism than the former; it also reached the few proselytes who had, so to speak, become naturalized Jews, and the many sympathizers who, though remaining Gentiles, did not feel estranged from the allure of Mosaic and prophetic teaching. For some years, however, the Gentiles were not the immediate object of missionary care: the Jews were to be the first to receive the new word, and in this milieu—especially among those who had seen and heard Christ—the first helpers of the Apostles and the first missionaries were formed. The zeal of one of these, Philip, carried the preaching even into Samaria; others gradually pushed on to Damascus and Antioch, though they preached only to Jews. Yet it was necessary, in obedience to Christ, to win the Gentiles as well. Peter was the first to admit a first group of Gentiles to Baptism in Caesarea of Palestine, moved by a special divine command and overcoming the prejudices of his countrymen without obliging them to submit to the observance of the Mosaic law. But even the unknown missionaries of Syria were beginning to do likewise. It was for this reason that the Apostles sent to Antioch one of their trusted men, Barnabas, who went to Tarsus to fetch Saul, a Pharisee miraculously converted while on his way to stir up persecution against the faithful in Damascus.With him he organized the new community of Jews and Gentile converts, and there they were called Christians.

SAULO, immediately called PAUL, without abandoning the conversion of the Jews, took as his specific task the evangelization of the Gentiles, undertaking a series of journeys that, through Asia Minor and Asia (Corinth), led him as far as Rome.

However, a movement had formed among the converted Jews in Palestine and abroad that demanded adherence to the Jewish law for all new believers. It became necessary for Peter and the Apostles, together with Paul and the envoys from Antioch, to gather in Jerusalem and solemnly sanction the right to Christian freedom (c. AD 32). Yet a portion of these converted Jews remained irreducibly attached to their intolerance, forming the party of the Judaizers, who, under the names of Nazarenes and Ebionites, continued their opposition to the new Church until, amid the divisions and wars that devastated the Jewish nation, they faded into obscurity. The better part, however, soon amalgamated with what some like to call the great Church.

While James called the Less remained constantly in Jerusalem, where he was put to death by fanatics shortly before the city's destruction, the other Apostles dispersed among the peoples of the East. Peter, however, after a stay in Antioch and the surrounding regions, made his way to Rome, where he was put to death, like Paul, as a result of a legal decree issued by Nero in AD 64, by which the profession of the Christian faith was declared unlawful. Thus, after the Jewish persecutions came those of the Empire. In vain, however; Christianity had already organized itself: the Apostles had appointed representatives in the cities where there were groups of believers, and these, under the name of bishops, remained their successors with the task of continuing their work. The communities were led by a college of elders and servants (presbyters and deacons) who were subject to the Apostle's call; Rome, where the successor of Peter exercised from the beginning a supremacy that met with no opposition except from those who separated from ecclesiastical unity.

The major urban centers from which the missionary activity sprang most vigorously—Antioch, Thessalonica, Ephesus, Corinth, soon also Edessa and Alexandria—and where Christian penetration was also broader and more robust

They also exercised supervision over the provinces that lay around them, thus taking the first steps toward provincial or metropolitan organization.

In this period there is also found a class of travelling personnel who, alongside the hierarchy of individual places, contributed through their exhortations, their testimonies, their learning, and their virtue, forming a channel of harmony and communication between the various places through which they passed.

The diversity of language and custom, however, did not fail to influence the life of the Christian communities. The communities that arose in the principal centres around the Mediterranean may first be distinguished into two main districts: the Hellenistic East and the Latin West, the latter including the entire Danube valley. In these two districts two languages were spoken: Greek and Latin. Hellenistic civilization, without absorbing them, influenced the neighbouring peoples of inner Syria, Arabia, and Armenia (Antioch) as well as Nubia and Ethiopia (Alexandria); Latin civilization, with much greater difficulty, extended itself toward the seemingly impenetrable regions of the north and toward Africa (Carthage), holding its own against the tribes of the desert and the mountains. Hence arose the two principal Christian literatures, in Greek and in Latin.

II. THE FIRST SEVEN HERESIES

In its early centuries the Church had to contend with two major struggles: the first against what St Paul already calls φευθώζου μος γνώσις, “false knowledge,” which so troubled St John the Evangelist because of the dangers it posed through its alluring propaganda. These are conceptions of Eastern theologies which in varying degrees appropriate Christian concepts, philosophical speculations of the Alexandrian school which, through a contaminated Platonism, focus on revealed and moral doctrines in order to adapt them to their own systems. To our eyes, these are acute and extravagant syncretisms, yet they claimed to explain creation, suffering, and sin.

These heterodox conceptions would come to be collectively designated as Gnosticism, against which Neoplatonism would prevail in the 3rd century with attempts at mysticism openly at odds with the supernatural conception of Christianity. To this movement, characteristic of an intellectual aristocracy, was added an exaggerated spiritualism based on energetic principles that culminated in the systems of Montanism, Marcionism, and Manichaeism. It was a full-scale assault. To these external struggles were added those that arose within: with heretical and schismatic little churches, such as that of Novatian at Rome in the mid-3rd century against Pope Cornelius, which gained followers not only in the West but also in the East.

III. THE STRUGGLE WITH THE EMPIRE

The second struggle, from the earliest decades of the Church, was with the Empire. It took on different aspects over the first three centuries. The Neronian disposition that relegated Christianity among the illicit religions continued to be in force throughout the 2nd century. The concern of the better emperors was to prevent any popular uprising provoked by fanatics or interested parties so as to keep persecution within legal forms, and at the same time to avoid massacres by granting impunity to apostates. Christians were barred from public offices and the higher ranks of the military, with the constant danger of being accused before the courts; while it depended on the zeal of the magistrates to indulge the public spirit, which was always unfavorable to Christians and easily inflamed against them, due to the calumnies that circulated. It was especially Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-emperor, who intensified the application of the laws. At the beginning of the 3rd century Septimius Severus particularly targeted the catechumens and neophytes in order to discourage new affiliations with the Church. Maximinus Thrax, in hatred of Alexander Severus, who had shown a kind of tolerance, directed his severity especially against the bishops and the clergy with the intent of disorganizing the communities. Decius took an apparently indirect path: he imposed on all citizens the obligation to participate in sacrifices to propitiate the gods amid the disasters that threatened the Empire; refusal was considered a capital crime. The persecution thus became general and total. But, despite many defections, especially among wealthy and powerful Christians, the Church was not shaken and soon reconstituted itself. Valerian renewed the edicts against the clergy and forbade assemblies under penalty of death. Finally, after a period of legal tolerance, Diocletian and his colleague Maximian issued, beginning in 303, a series of edicts ranging from the confiscation of churches and sacred books to the punishment of all who refused to abandon Christianity. The persecution was subject to various vicissitudes and, especially in the East, had longer-lasting consequences. Imperial legislation on the matter came to an end with an edict of tolerance in 311 by Galerius, confirmed in 313 by Constantine and Licinius in a very favorable sense. After this, the Empire not only ceased to persecute, but, except for a brief period of ill will under Julian the Apostate, inaugurated a period of protection that, with the progressive disfavor toward paganism, led Christianity to become the religion of the State. Paganism, having lost all importance, was reduced to the religion of those who could not detach themselves from traditional life.

IV. PEACEFUL RELATIONS WITH THE EMPIRE

Certainly the change in relations with the Empire greatly accelerated the pace of conversions to Christianity. The bitter isolation of the upper classes and the turbid and immoral attachment to vice and superstition among the rest continued, as before, to maintain in civilized society a spirit of reaction against Christianity; but the truth now struggled with greater force than before against indifference and prejudice. Even cults that had enjoyed favor and diffusion in the preceding age, such as that of Isis in the Hellenistic world and that of Mithras in the East and later in most of the provinces of the Empire, and others of lesser importance, soon lost popular favor. Instead, Christianity not only deepened its conquests where it had barely begun them but also extended them into new lands, forming ever larger communities, especially at the extreme margins of the West, where it had remained stagnant in comparison with the East. It is therefore no wonder that among these new adherents, not screened by rigorous selection, there were an excessive number of individuals more endowed with vices than with virtues, imperfectly stripped of a sensual paganism and of philosophical and juridical preoccupations that ill accorded with the purity of the Gospel.

Thus the struggle was now waged against the enemy within, while political upheavals, civil wars, and, particularly in the West, barbarian invasions made the education of Christian generations more difficult.
Already in the 3rd century, once the theological fantasies that had attributed to Christ either a purely apparent body or a momentary sojourn in a real body had been overcome, the problem arose of how Jesus could properly be called Son of God, once His humanity could not be denied. This problem necessarily entailed the question

As to how the divine Trinity should be conceived—whether as a threefold subsistence or merely as a mode of expression—against the Modalists, who went so far as to deny any real distinction among the divine Persons, it seemed a good polemical expedient to employ terms familiar to ancient Platonico-Philonian philosophy, terms that were in themselves imperfect and therefore dangerous. In particular, the divine Word was given attributes far removed from the Johannine conception, likening Him, in Gnostic fashion, to a demiurge mediating between the unbegotten Father and creation. Despite any contrary intentions, the Son-Word thus appeared manifestly inferior to the Father and as His creature. At the beginning of the 4th century, Arius, a priest of Alexandria, took up this manner of conceiving the Trinity and became its propagator; but his bishop, Alexander, expelled him from the Church, though without being able to prevent many bishops of Hellenistic Orient from immediately becoming his supporters, thus stirring up the intellectual milieu.

Constantine, who at this moment had also become master of the East, intervened to restore peace and allowed himself to be persuaded to convoke a great ecclesiastical assembly of bishops for this purpose. Thus, with Pope Sylvester presiding through his legates, the bishops gathered at Nicaea in Bithynia, in the presence of the Emperor, and the first Council, called ecumenical because it represented all Christian regions, was held (325). It produced a formula that completed the Apostles’ Creed, declaring that the Word was *homoousios* (consubstantial) with the Father, not inferior to Him.

The Arians, however, did not yield. Having gained the favor first of Emperor Constantius and then of Valens, they kept the East in turmoil with councils, formal persecutions against Catholic champions—especially St. Athanasius of Alexandria—and even succeeded in having Pope Liberius exiled, while attempting to draw the West along with them by installing the Arian bishop Auxentius in Milan. Such a schism, which once endangered the unity of Christendom, came to an end through the intervention of Emperor Theodosius. A Council held at Constantinople in 381 (later regarded in Catholic tradition as ecumenical) condemned heterodox formulas, returning to that of Nicaea, and proclaimed that the Holy Spirit, whom the Arians had made a creature of the Son, was consubstantial with the Father and the Son. Thus the Trinitarian doctrine, admirably expounded by St. Gregory Nazianzen and St. Basil, achieved its definitive victory.

Soon another theological problem arose in the East that required resolution: Arius had not explicitly treated of the union of the divine Person of the Word with the humanity of Christ.APOLLINARE, bishop of Laodicea in Syria, in his struggle against the Arians, advanced the proposition that the Word occupied in the person of Christ the place of the human soul; in this way Christ would no longer be consubstantial with our human nature. Such a doctrine, cleverly presented, found credence in Alexandria, but was immediately opposed in Syria, where instead the teachings of Diodorus, bishop of Tarsus, began to prevail, leading to conclusions diametrically opposed: according to these, in the humanity of Christ the Word would dwell as in a temple, would act as in an inspired prophet; consequently the Virgin Mary could not be proclaimed Theotokos (Deipara) but only Christotokos. This consequence, publicly proposed by Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, met with the resolute opposition of Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, who, in full agreement with Pope Celestinus, condemned it (428) and then at an ecumenical council convened at Ephesus in 431 had both the doctrine and the person of Nestorius condemned, proposing the true Catholic doctrine of the one divine person in Christ. Nestorius, defeated for the moment, later found defenders who succeeded in establishing an independent Church in Mesopotamia, which still exists today.

After the death of St Cyril (444), a tendency developed among his disciples that was to lead to the worst consequences. Indeed Eutyches, a Constantinopolitan monk, favored at the court of Theodosius II, began to defend the principle that in the divine person of Christ there was to be recognized a single operating nature (μία φύσις, whence the name Monophysites for adherents of this doctrine); and since the divine nature of the Word could not be subject to change, the integrity of human nature had to be sacrificed in the divine union: to what extent Eutyches did not say, but he saw no other way to explain the divinity of Christ. He immediately encountered opposition from Flavian, bishop of Constantinople, who was in agreement with Pope Leo I, but had the support of Dioscorus, Cyril’s successor in the see of Alexandria. Eutyches and Dioscorus, backed by the court, held a council at Ephesus, which on account of the violence and injustices committed was called the Latrocinium: Flavian and Pope Leo were condemned and the doctrine of Eutyches approved (449). However, after the death of Theodosius II and the accession of Marcian, a truly ecumenical council was convened at Chalcedon (451), presided over by the legates of Pope Leo, in which his doctrine was fully approved and Dioscorus and Eutyches condemned. Once again all the West was in agreement with Leo; in the East, however, the fanaticism of those who claimed to be followers of St Cyril rebelled.Indeed, long years of discord ensued, and through the actions of heretical monks fierce and bloody struggles raged especially in Egypt and Syria. During these conflicts, the steadfast constancy of the Apostolic See in upholding the truth stood in contrast to the continual retreats of imperial policy, which sought to impose a religious peace founded on compromise. The result was that by 519, when the Byzantine East accepted a dogmatic formula proposed by Pope Hormisdas, the Monophysites had already firmly established themselves in Egypt and Syria; Armenia was gradually drawn into heresy as well, and religious unity in the East could never be restored. This was also a malady for the cohesion of the Empire, and few resources were left for the most desperate attempts, not excluding the use of force or the most unfortunate compromises.

Emperor Justinian, hoping to win over the Monophysites, had the Three Chapters condemned at the Fifth Ecumenical Council (Second Council of Constantinople) in 554—namely, certain persons and writings particularly offensive to them—compelling Pope Vigilius to ratify this condemnation and thereby provoking resolute opposition in the West, which gave rise to prolonged disputes, especially in Italy. Later, Emperor Heraclius, with the same aim, promoted (around 640) the spread of the Monothelite doctrines advocated by Patriarch Sergius, which held that Christ possessed a single will and salvific operation. Only at the Sixth Ecumenical Council (Third Council of Constantinople) in 681 was peace restored with the definitive condemnation of Monothelitism, though without extinguishing Monophysitism.

During this long period, discord also arose in the West: the first was the Donatist schism, confined to Africa, which arose from disputes that matured toward the end of the Diocletian persecution and threw the entire region into turmoil. Despite the zeal of St. Augustine, it persisted until the Vandal invasion. In Spain, disputes arose from the teachings of Priscillian at the end of the 4th century. From the British monk Pelagius and his disciple Celestius came teachings that denied the nature of original sin and the necessity of grace for spiritual life. These doctrines, which occupied St. Augustine’s efforts in the final decades of his life, found followers not only in Africa but also among the clergy of southern Italy (Julian of Eclanum), in the patriarchate of Aquileia, and in Dalmatia. They left no lasting trace after the mid-5th century.

The disturbances provoked in Italy during the second half of the 6th century by the schism of the Three Chapters lasted beyond the 7th century in the see of Milan and until the end of that century in that of Aquileia.
VI. THE CHURCH AND THE BARBARIANS IN THE WEST. CHARLEMAGNE. — The solid organization attained by the Church during the Constantinian period enabled it in the West to withstand victoriously the onslaught of the barbarian invasions that had raged for centuries within the provinces of the Empire: the Vandals succeeded in establishing themselves in Africa, unleashing a cruel persecution there, the Visigoths in southern Gaul and then in Spain, the Burgundians

In eastern Gaul, the Rugi in Noricum and the Ostrogoths in Italy established short-lived kingdoms tainted by Arian heresy. The Franks, who had descended into Gaul, became Christian at the end of the 5th century and established stable rule there. The Lombards, who entered Italy in 568, converted at the end of the 7th century. A special task of the popes, particularly St Gregory the Great, was to keep free from Lombard domination that central territory in Italy which was under the influence of the two capitals, Rome and Ravenna; to defend it at a critical moment they appealed to the intervention of the Franks; thus Stephen III invoked the aid of Pepin, and Adrian I that of Charlemagne. Thus the Lombard kingdom fell, the Papal State was established, and Charlemagne was crowned emperor on Christmas Day 800 with the office of protecting the Roman Church. Thus began that Holy Roman Empire around which the political and religious life of the West revolved throughout the Middle Ages.

While the provinces of the Empire that had fallen under barbarian rule were being restored to civilization, the work of Christian conversion was also begun among those peoples who had remained outside the direct influence of Roman civilization. First to be won were the Scots, inhabitants of Ireland, through the work of St Patrick in the 5th century, and the inhabitants of northern England. At the initiative of St Gregory the Great, towards the end of the 6th century, provision was made for the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons settled in Britain. Through the efforts of St Willibrord the Frisians were brought to Christianity. By mandate of Gregory II, St Boniface preached the faith in Hesse and Thuringia in the 8th century. In the following century, St Ansgar began the evangelization of Denmark and Sweden; from there the faith spread to Norway, Iceland, and, towards the east, to Finland and Livonia. In all these places the Catholic hierarchy was established and monastic institutions promoted.

Monasticism, which had first arisen in Egypt at the beginning of the 4th century as a profession of chaste, poor, and solitary life, had spread widely throughout the East in its two main forms, the eremitical and the cenobitic. The West was not left untouched by this movement; but it was especially at the beginning of the 6th century that, through the work of St Benedict and with a cenobitic organization, it began to follow a Rule which, by combining prayer and manual labour under a strict discipline of obedience to the abbot, created, beginning at Monte Cassino, an ever-widening network of foundations in which Christian piety, love of learning, and charity towards one’s neighbour greatly contributed to the growth of the new Christian civilization. With admirable adaptability, indeed, the Benedictine Rule not only found a way to spread in already civilized lands and in those newly conquered, but also to take on those tasks and adaptations which the progress of the times demanded.
VII. IN THE DANUBE VALLEY. ISLAMISM. - It was indeed a matter of establishing the Christian civilization of the new Europe, since missionary activity needed to extend not only toward the north but also toward the East, targeting above all the Slavic peoples who were pressing beyond the Elbe and the Julian Alps from the Baltic to the Balkans. On the Elbe, the contacts between the Slavs and the Germanic kingdom established under Louis the Pious were troubled, marred by repeated invasions and uprisings, and only after centuries of struggle did the Germans succeed in imposing their dominance and establishing the Catholic hierarchy there. Through the efforts of the sees of Salzburg and Aquileia, beginning in the 8th century, the Slavs of the Drava and Sava were gradually converted. In Dalmatia and western Illyricum, especially among the Croats, missionaries from the coastal cities had been active since the 7th century. During the 9th century, the two great apostles Cyril and Methodius, in full agreement with the popes, evangelized the great Moravian kingdom that had arisen in Pannonia. In the 10th century, the Christian kingdoms of Bohemia and Poland were established. From Moravia, the disciples of St. Methodius brought the Gospel to the Bulgars, who had been pressing for two centuries beyond the Balkans against the Eastern Empire. Byzantine missionaries from Constantinople and Thessalonica evangelized the Serbs, who, adopting the Byzantine rite, preserved their national language in the liturgy, as had occurred among the Bulgars. The same happened among the Russians of Kiev, whose evangelization took place toward the end of the 10th century. The Hungarians, who, like the Bulgars, were not Slavs, supplanting the Moravians in the center of Illyricum, established a kingdom that became Christian through King St. Stephen and under the direct influence of the Pope toward the end of the 10th century.

Meanwhile, however, a new and terrible assault was launched from the East against the entire Christian civilization, through the agency of Muhammad, who, having conquered the national sanctuary of Mecca in Arabia, gave religious and political unity to the Arab tribes of the region, imposing upon them a monotheism of which he presented himself as the prophet. The caliphs (lieutenants) who succeeded him after 632, fueled by the fanaticism kindled by Muhammad and aiming to extend their dominion over all the East through the new faith, soon conquered Syria with Damascus (636), Jerusalem (637), and the Persian kingdom of Mesopotamia. In 641 they conquered Egypt, and in the following decades all of North Africa; then, beginning in 711, they initiated the conquest of Spain, from which their expeditions into Provence posed a serious threat to Frankish rule. Around 830, Sicily fell under their power, and, threatening not only the Ionian regions of Italy, they repeatedly attempted to establish themselves in central Italy, plundering Rome and the surrounding territories. Constantinople and all of Asia Minor were in even greater danger, though the Byzantine emperors, through fluctuating fortunes, managed to resist the invasion.

Yet all the southern coast of the Mediterranean was lost to Christian civilization, while the dissident churches of Syria and Egypt fell into rapid decline, and the assaults on the northwestern islands and coasts unfortunately contributed effectively to the disorder of Europe in the 10th century and to its progressive detachment from the East.

VIII. THE BYZANTINE SCHISM

The Church of Constantinople succeeded, from the 4th century onward, in making its direct supremacy felt not only over Thrace and Asia Minor, but also over what remained of Orthodox Christianity in Syria and Egypt (Melkite Christians) and over Eastern Illyricum (Thessalonica and Greece). Evangelization, which had spread under its influence into Serbia, Bulgaria, and Russia (Kiev), had extended its jurisdictional area. Its importance was further enhanced by the fact that it was based in the capital of the Empire; and since the Empire proclaimed itself ecumenical, Constantinople likewise claimed the title of ecumenicity. Church and Empire conceived of themselves as closely linked, thereby placing themselves in contrast with ancient Rome, which had fallen under barbarian domination. Constantinople went so far as to recognize for Rome only a primacy of honor and to demand that all Christian life conform to Eastern customs. A first strong clash on this matter occurred in 726, due to the edicts of Leo III the Isaurian against the veneration of images (iconoclasm), which were not accepted in the West. The Second Council of Nicaea (the Seventh Ecumenical Council, in 787) resolved the controversy in accordance with the directives of Pope Hadrian I against the edicts of Leo III, which had been renewed by his son Constantine V Copronymus; but the long-standing dispute did not cease until 842, through the efforts of Patriarch Methodius, who restored relations with Rome. A few years later, the

They renewed their opposition when Pope Nicholas I refused to recognize Photius as the legitimate patriarch, imposed by Michael III after the unjust deposition of the rightful patriarch Ignatius (861). This led to a new schism, aggravated by Photius’s proclamations (866) against Western canons, against the insertion of the *Filioque* into the Creed, and against the doctrine that the Holy Spirit proceeds as from a single principle from the Father and the Son. A political upheaval that brought Basil the Macedonian to the throne led to Photius’s downfall, deposed at the Eighth Ecumenical Council (Fourth of Constantinople, 867), and to Ignatius’s rehabilitation; yet, owing also to political turbulence, relations between Rome and Constantinople grew ever rarer and more strained, until in 1054 they erupted into open rupture because of the aggressive stance of Patriarch Michael Cerularius, who, reviving long-standing accusations, especially assailed the Western use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist. Thus in the East there arose that Church which proclaimed itself Orthodox in contrast to the Latin Church, which it forthwith accused of heresy.

The Crusades, launched by the popes beginning with Urban II in 1096 to free Christ’s sepulcher from Muslim control and at the same time to protect the Eastern Empire, failed in their purpose; the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem founded in 1099 and later the Latin Empire of Constantinople established in 1204 proved short-lived and only embittered relations with the East. It is understandable that a union with the Constantinopolitan Church, solemnized at the Second Council of Lyons (1274), should soon collapse amid fresh outbursts of hostility and distrust toward the Latins.

IX. THE ORTHODOX CHURCH AND THE GERMANIC EMPIRE; NEW FORCES

After the fall of the Carolingians (887) and the disorders that followed, the Western Empire was refounded by Otto I of the Saxon house in 962 with a distinctly Germanic character. With the extinction of the Saxon line in 1024, the Franconian house succeeded under Conrad II, and during his reign the feudal system reached its peak not only in Germany, Italy, and Burgundy but soon also in France and England and then in other nations as they attained civilization. Bishoprics and abbeys acquired political authority over wide territories and took a direct part in public and social life, while the emperors arrogated to themselves the right to invest them not only with secular but also with ecclesiastical authority.

Even the election of the Roman pontiffs was left to the emperor’s discretion, creating an immediate threat to the freedom of ecclesiastical life.This in turn, because of the harshness of the times, had become corrupted by the spread within the clergy, along with ignorance and roughness, of simony and corruption; this forced the popes to engage in a struggle with the Empire which was called the Investiture Controversy, since investitures were considered the most dangerous abuse and the principal cause of other evils as well. The struggle had as its chief champion Pope Gregory VII (1073–1085) and came to an end under Callistus II with the Concordat of Worms and with the First Council of the Lateran (the first ecumenical council held in the West in 1123), through which the liberty of the Church was guaranteed and its good relations with the State secured. A series of disciplinary canons was also initiated for the proper governance of the Church in the face of new needs that were arising. The series was continued in the Second Council of the Lateran (1139), held to extinguish the last consequences of the schism provoked by the antipope Anacletus II in 1130, and in the Third Council of the Lateran, convoked in 1179 at the close of the struggle begun in 1154 by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa against the popes Adrian IV and Alexander III.
These struggles could not fail to have special consequences for the very fabric of the Church. The misconduct of too many ecclesiastics, while arousing contempt for them, led many to turn their sympathies toward a current of errors which, linking itself to the old Manichaean tradition, presented itself with its own organization of initiates and simple believers in contrast to that of the Church and was called the Cathar or Albigensian heresy, finding numerous supporters especially in northern Italy and southern France. Another reaction of fanatics, without going so far as the Cathars, aimed to reform the Church outside the Catholic hierarchy, appealing to the right of free preaching under the direct inspiration of the divine, and to the practice of poverty: these were the Arnoldists, who took their name from Arnold of Brescia, and the Poor Men of Lyons or Waldensians, disciples of Valdes. Against these heretics in particular were directed the efforts of Innocent III and the Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215, and then of Gregory IX and the tribunal of the Inquisition which he promoted for the purpose of searching out errors, recalling defenders and supporters to penance, and punishing the obstinate.

This work was effectively seconded by the new orders of friars called Mendicant, because they could possess nothing either individually or in common. The initiator of this new form of religious organization was St. Francis of Assisi (d. 1226), preacher of poverty and peace under the guidance of the Roman Church, while at the same time St. Dominic of Osma (d. 1221) was initiating his followers into an austere life of poverty and study, directed especially to preaching against heretics. To the Franciscans and Dominicans were added in that same century the Augustinian Hermits.Agostino, the Servants of Mary, Carmelites; while the reforms of the monastic Orders continued to flourish, such as that of the Cistercians, begun at the beginning of the previous century, of the Silvestrines, and the older ones of the Camaldolese, the Avellites, the Vallombrosans and others.

It was precisely in this age, with the universities of Paris (philosophy and theology) and Bologna (law) organized under the patronage of the Church, that the first systematic treatises of the sacred sciences appeared and Scholasticism reached its full maturity, of which the most distinguished representatives were St Albert the Great, St Thomas Aquinas and St Bonaventure of Bagnoregio. And under the guidance of the popes, the two great mendicant Orders began a new missionary activity directed toward the mysterious regions of Persia, India and China, which was cut short too soon by the political vicissitudes of those lands.

A new struggle between Papacy and Empire, which culminated in the excommunication launched against Frederick II at the Council of Lyon in 1245 and ended with the fall of the Hohenstaufen family in 1254, reduced Europe to a complex of nationalities over which Germany had no more than a theoretical supremacy. The common bond remained the profession of the Catholic faith; yet the dignity and authority of the Roman pontificate seemed to be obscured when Boniface VIII (d. 1303) had to endure the violence of Philip the Fair, king of France, and when his successor, Clement V, did not leave France where he was when elected. At Vienne in the Dauphiné he convened an ecumenical council in 1309, and his successors established their see at Avignon, to the great displeasure of all Christendom; only in 1377 did Gregory XI return to Rome; but the following year, after Gregory’s death, in the matter of Urban VI’s election the French cardinals provoked the Great Western Schism by opposing him with the French antipope Clement VII, whom they had elected at Fondi. Christendom was divided into two obedientiaries, which later became three in 1409 when a third pope was elected to end the schism. To restore unity, at the

The Council of Constance was convoked in 1414 by Emperor Sigismund, within which the new pope Martin V was elected in 1417 and universally recognized. The schism, however, had weakened the bonds of ecclesiastical discipline, multiplied grave abuses, and fostered the conviction that the Council possessed superiority over the pope. The effects of this were seen in the Council of Basel, convened in 1431, which in 1438 rebelled against Pope Eugenius IV and dared once more to oppose Felix V as another antipope. Meanwhile, in England the rebellion of John Wycliffe (d. 1384) had arisen, which in turn gave impetus to that of John Hus, who for many years stained Bohemia and the neighboring regions with reckless reformist pretensions and the entrenchment of a fanatical religious nationalism that paved the way for a deeper fracture in the spiritual unity of Europe.

X. THE TURKISH THREAT AND THE DIVISION OF THE WEST

During these events, a most grave danger was increasingly looming from the East. Toward the end of the 14th century, the Turks of Asia Minor crossed into Europe, occupied Thrace, and pushing through Serbia and Bosnia, threatened Hungary, reaching with their raids as far as the Julian Alps. The Byzantine Empire appealed to Europe for aid; at the Council of Florence in 1438–39, through the efforts of Eugenius IV, an agreement was reached for a union of the Eastern Church with Rome; but the lack of harmony among Western princes prevented effective action against the Turks despite repeated efforts by the popes: in 1430 Thessalonica fell, in May 1453 Constantinople, and the Empire ceased to exist. In the following years, war again erupted in Hungary, while the Aegean islands fell one by one: lastly Rhodes in 1522, defended in vain by the Knights of St. John. In 1481, the Turks had attempted an expedition in Apulia against Otranto and menaced Friuli. The constant and untiring care of the popes, until the early decades of the 18th century, was to ward off the Turkish threat both by sea and by land, and it did not cease until the danger appeared to be averted.

Such a threat, however, did not prevent the development of Christian civilization. The revival of culture and in particular of the humanities, the progress of the sciences, and the new discoveries created that movement known as the Renaissance, but they did not proceed in step with disciplinary reforms and good morals. The Fifth Lateran Council (1512–17), which had set itself such a program, failed to achieve its goal, in some ways justifying the complaints raised everywhere, especially beyond the Alps. The preaching of indulgences for the construction of St. Peter’s in Rome (1517) provided Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar, with the pretext for rebellion against the Church and the spread of new doctrines on original sin and justification; other teachings regarding the nature of the Sacraments were advanced by Ulrich Zwingli in Switzerland, by John Calvin in Geneva, and by others in the Rhenish cities. All were united in suppressing the Catholic hierarchy and placing religious institutions in the hands of princes and city councils. The rebellion spread from Germany to the northern countries, from Switzerland to the Netherlands and Scotland, and seriously endangered Catholicism in France, Poland, and Hungary. In England, Henry VIII proclaimed himself head of the Church, maintaining the local hierarchy; but under Edward VI and Queen Elizabeth, the English Church leaned toward Calvinist doctrines. The Catholic unity of Europe was shattered, and for a time it seemed that Catholicism was confined to Italy, Spain, and part of Germany.

XI. THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION

To reaffirm sound Catholic doctrine and to effect an effective reform, Paul III convened the Council of Trent in 1545, which, through various vicissitudes, lasted until the end of 1563, thereby giving rise to that complete reorganization of discipline and, with it, to that revival of Christian life which was inappropriately termed the Counter-Reformation. There were established those congregations of regular clergy which set themselves special spiritual tasks and benefits, first that of the Theatines, then of the Barnabites, the Somaschi, the Camillians, and particularly important, that of the Jesuits.

At the same time, the discovery of new lands opened the field to immense missionary activity, especially sustained by the Franciscans, the Dominicans, and the Jesuits, through which the faith was firmly organized in South and Central America and in Mexico and spread widely in India, the Philippine Islands, the Moluccas, and reached Japan and China.

The multiplication of sects among the Protestants and the disorders they provoked gave occasion to princes to arrogate to themselves the right to intervene increasingly in religious matters; and since, after the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), many Catholics found themselves within Protestant countries and vice versa, even Catholic princes claimed not only to settle the disputes of Protestants but also to regulate the status of Catholics independently of the pope. Thus was increased the tendency known by the name of "caesaropapism" or "Febronianism" in Germany and of "Gallicanism" in France, by which it was sought to create national Churches very weakly connected with their center: Rome.

XII. THE RECENT AGE

It was not enough: the weariness provoked among Protestants by the resurgent controversies and among Catholics by the Jansenist and jurisdictional struggles was followed by a discredit of Christianity itself and the rise of systems that, appealing to philosophy, claimed to direct society with purely natural principles. This tendency, which had its principal origin in England and from there at the beginning of the 18th century spread throughout Europe, took the name of encyclopedism in France from the celebrated Encyclopédie published there by a group of unbelievers, and of Enlightenment (Aufklärung) in Germany.

These principles then found their practical application in the French Revolution (1789) under the triad: liberty, equality, fraternity; and they could no longer be restrained either by Napoleonic autocracy or by the Holy Alliance of the reactionary period that followed it (1815).

The religious opportunism that sometimes poorly concealed political and social concerns, while proving powerless to suppress the spread of irreligious and revolutionary principles preached as the rights of science, of the freedom of peoples, and of the elevation of the lower classes, continued to hinder the freedom of the Catholic Church under the pretext of preventing abuses. Concordats were concluded, following the example of the Napoleonic one of 1801, with the aim of defining the practical relations between Church and State on bases that respected the substantial rights of the Church and of its Head; but the complete secularization of the State was the goal pursued in the more advanced countries of Europe, in order to mature, under the aegis of science and progress, the apostasy of humanity from the revealed Word.

The reaction to this disintegrating activity against Christian civilization, which had not been lacking in the popes of the 18th century, became more active especially with Gregory XVI and culminated in the Vatican Council (1869–70), which, after addressing the most radical errors and in the expectation of not being able to complete the work begun, hastened to proclaim the infallibility of the Supreme Pontiff in matters of faith and morals, almost as if to bind Catholicism ever more firmly in disciplined unity in its struggle against its adversaries.

The capture of Rome (20 Sept. 1870) and the end of the temporal power, at a moment when a terrible war seemed about to mark the end of France, were greeted by many merely as the completion of Italian national unity, while by others

As a powerful blow to the vitality of the Church, there was indeed a hardening of anticlericalism: masonic and vulgar in the new Kingdom of Italy, political and cultural in Germany with the movement of the Kulturkampf and the Old Catholics. In France, the laicism of the Second Republic led in 1905 to the denunciation of the Concordat of 1801, with the consequent separation from the Church and the almost total suppression of religious congregations. Thus, in the feverish development of modern society, which claimed to do without every supernatural element, it seemed there could no longer be room for a revealed religion like Catholicism; and this state of mind was expressed in the Latin nations by what was called modernism, which, in seeking to coordinate with new ideas, came to undermine the structure of traditional teaching.

Almost contemporaneous with the condemnation of modernism (the encyclical Pascendi of 1907) was the organization of a movement for the union of Churches, prompted by the growing disorder among non-Catholic Christian confessions, with the aim of establishing some common doctrines to serve as a bond and prevent their total dissolution. But the arbitrary origins of those confessions and their functioning, along with the compromises between their doctrinal tendencies, could not lead to an effective agreement. The Eastern schismatic Churches participated in this more in appearance than in reality. Catholicism, while not reproaching the dissidents for the crime of keeping alive discord born of turbid passions, continued on its way, all the more so because, despite the spirit of the age, its kingdom was expanding and taking root in distant regions such as North America and Australia, new institutes were arising from its midst, and ancient religious orders were reviving with new life. The missions among the infidels, reduced almost to ruin at the beginning of the 19th century, though constrained by the political forces opposed to Protestant missions, regained vigor ever more deeply after Gregory XVI began to revive their spirit.

Nor did the manifold evils of various kinds provoked by the great wars of this century have the strength to strike deeply into its doctrinal and hierarchical structure. None of the recent defections had the force to create movements comparable to the great errors and schisms of the past. Recent attempts to create, above it, a climate of union, that is, of catholicity among all the separated Christian communities, by means of mutual doctrinal and hierarchical compromises, seemed to find the Catholic Church indifferent; but it, convinced that *unum ovile* cannot be composed without *unus pastor*, can do nothing other than open its doors to all those who, abandoning useless recriminations or nationalistic concerns, set out to seek serenely and humbly the Christ who is ever at work in the institution he founded, defended, and illumined by his charisms.

IV. THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE CHURCH

OUTLINE:

I. Definition

II. Task

III. Method

IV. Sources

V. Auxiliary sciences

VI. Division

VII. History of the Church.

I. DEFINITION

The historiography of the Church sets itself the aim of investigating and reconstructing in a reasoned and scientific manner the events which the Church itself has undergone in the different countries during the centuries of its existence. It presupposes that Jesus Christ founded the Church as a true visible society of all believers destined to endure until the end of the ages, and it conducts its inquiry by employing the scientific methods of the most enlightened modern criticism, constantly keeping in view the supernatural nature of its origin and of its purposes, which are to lead all men to eternal life.

II. THE CHURCH’S TASK

Almost as a continuation of biblical studies, the history of the Church has the function of “preparing the real historical basis necessary for the entire edifice of theological science.” First of all it concerns itself with external development, namely: 1) the spread of Christianity over the earth: within the sphere of Hebrew, Hellenistic-Roman, and later Germanic civilizations, in the successive course of centuries and across the five parts of the world (history of missions); 2) the various attitudes that the Church has maintained toward converted peoples, toward States, and toward the leaders of these States (Church policy, relations between Church and State); 3) the attacks and persecutions to which it has been subjected by hostile forces, the struggles it has sustained, and the limitations it has faced in relation to non-Christian or schismatic confessions. Of even greater importance is the history of internal development, deriving from the structure given by Christ and from the forces and laws that he has established in it, and it comprises: 1) the enunciation of doctrine and theology (while on the one hand dogma is in its essence immutable, its formulation can change and develop: history of dogma and of theology); 2) the organization of the Church (history of its monarchical-hierarchical constitution and of its law); 3) worship and liturgy; 4) customs and ecclesiastical discipline; 5) the Church’s cultural activity in relation to the sciences, the arts, literature, and secular culture; 6) the Church’s beneficent activity in relation to the various needs that arise, whether individual, national, or social, as a result of wars, famines, oppression of the weak, persecutions, etc.
### III. METHOD.

The method of the history of the Church is determined by the general norms of historical research, always taking into account the supernatural character of its subject. The history of the Church must therefore be reconstructed using a critical method: relying on the most direct, reliable, and trustworthy sources; examining them, verifying their authenticity and credibility, and comparatively assessing their value. It must be objective, that is, impartial, with the most rigorous respect for truth.

Finally, it must be pragmatic-genetic, meaning it must follow events in their genetic development, reveal their internal connections, investigate their causes and effects (of course avoiding the dangers of naturalistic determinism), highlight the motives of the agents involved, identify the psychological forces that, in individuals or collectivities, have contributed to these events, and, as far as possible, reconstruct their developmental trajectory. This pragmatism, moreover, is in no way an obstacle to the critical rigor of scientific inquiry, for it is grounded in reality and truth, and the Catholic scholar aims for a representation free from extraneous preconceptions and in harmony with the truth.

IV. SOURCES

Sources are divided with respect to their origin into divine (Sacred Scriptures) and human; with respect to their value into direct and indirect sources; with respect to their content into monumental (archaeological remains and intact monuments) and literary (traditions); and finally, with respect to the position of the authors, into public and private. All these sources have been collected by numerous scholars and critically illustrated. United in large collections, they are easily accessible to all. Only the principal ones are noted here.
A) MONUMENTAL SOURCES. - I. EPIGRAPHY: G. B. de Rossi, *Inscriptiones christianae urbis Romae VII saec. antiquiores* (I-II, I, Rome 1861-88); Suppl., ed. G. Gatti (fasc. I, ibid. 1915); Nova series, ed. A. Silvagni (2 vols., ibid. 1922-1935); E. Diehl, *Inscriptiones latinae christianae veteres* (Berlin 1924-31); *Inscriptiones latinae* (ibid. 1912 [50 tavv.]).
- 2. Archaeology: G. B. de Rossi, *La Roma sotterranea cri-

stiana (3 vols., Rome 1864–77); G. Wilpert, *Le pitture delle catacombe romane* (2 vols., Rome 1903); id., *Die römischen Mosaiken und Malereien der kirchlichen Bauten vom IV.–XIII. Jahrhundert* (4 vols., Freiburg 1916); id., *I sarcofagi cristiani antichi* (4 vols., ibid. 1929–36); *Corpus Basilicarum Christianarum Romae*, ed. R. Krautheimer (fasc. I, ibid. 1937; fasc. II, ibid. 1939, in course of publication in Italian and English); *Realencyklopädie der christlichen Altertümer*, ed. F. X. Kraus (2 vols., Freiburg in Br. 1882–86); *DACL*, directed by F. Cabrol and H. Leclercq (Paris 1907 ff.).

3. LITURGY: L. A. Muratori, *Liturgia Romana vetus* (2 vols., Venice 1748); J. A. Assemani, *Codex Liturgicus Ecclesiae universae* (13 vols., Rome 1749–66; anastatic ed., Paris-Leipzig 1902; new reprint, ibid. 1922 ff.); G. M. Drewes and Cl. Blume, *Analecta hymnica medii aevi* (55 vols., Leipzig 1886 ff.); U. Chevalier, *Repertorium hymnologicum* (6 vols., Brussels 1892–1920); F. Cabrol and H. Leclercq, *Monumenta Ecclesiae liturgica* (Paris 1902 ff.); E. Renaudot, *Liturgiarum orientalium collectio* (2 vols., ibid. 1916); *Liturgiegeschichtliche Quellen*, series directed by K. Mohlberg and A. Rücker (Münster in W. 1918 ff.); *Liturgiegeschichtliche Forschung*, series directed by F. J. Dölger, K. Mohlberg, A. Rücker (ibid. 1919 ff.); *Jahrbuch für Liturgiewissenschaft*, directed by O. Casel (ibid. 1921 ff.); J. Braun, *Liturgisches Handlexicon* (Regensburg 1924).

4. ACTS AND PONTIFICAL ANTIQUITIES: *Epistolae Romanorum Pontificum… a s. Clemente usque ad Innocentium III*, ed. P. Coustant (the single volume issued, Paris 1721, stops at 440); *Epistolae Rom. Pont… a s. Hilario usque ad Pelagium II*, ed. A. Thiel (the single volume issued, Braunsberg 1868, stops at 523); *Corpus iuris canonici*, ed. Aem. L. Richter (Leipzig 1839; 2nd ed. by Aem. Friedberg [2 vols., ibid. 1879–81]); *Regesta Pontificum Romanorum a condita Ecclesia ad annum post Christum natum 1798*, ed. Ph. Jaffé (Berlin 1851; 2nd ed. by F. Kaltenbrunner, P. Ewald, S. Löwenfeld [2 vols., Leipzig 1885–88]); *Regesta Pontificum Romanorum inde ab anno 1798*, ed. A. Potthast (2 vols., ibid. 1874–75); completing Jaffé: J. V. Pflugk-Hartung, *Acta Pontificum Romanorum* (to 1198; 3 vols., 1881–88); *Bullarium diplomatum et privilegiorum sanctorum Romanorum Pontificum* Taurinensis edition, ed. A. Tommasi, with masters and a group of Roman theologians and canonists (24 vols. in 4°, Turin 1857–72 [extends to 1740]). A *Continuatio* from Clement XIII to Gregory XVI (1846) was edited by A. Barbèri, A. Spezia, and R. Segreti (19 vols., Rome 1835–57); another *Continuatio* from Benedict XIV to Pius VIII (1830) was published in 10 vols. at Prato 1843–67; P. Fr. Kehr, *Regesta Pontificum Romanorum: Italia Pontificia*, I–VIII, Berlin 1907–1935; *Germania Pontificia*, I–II, ed. A. Brackmann, ibid. 1910–35; *Regesta Pontificum Romanorum medii aevi inde a saec. XIII* edited by the *Schola Gallica Romae* and the *Institut historique Belge* in Rome (*Bibliothèque des Écoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome*, Paris 1884 ff.); *Analecta Vaticano-Belgica* (1st series, 17 vols., Rome-Brussels 1906 ff.); *AAS, Commentarium officiale* (Rome 1909 ff.); *Codex iuris canonici* issued by order of Pius X and promulgated by Benedict XV (ibid. 1917); *Codicis iuris canonici fontes*, ed. Card. P. Gasparri (8 vols., ibid. 1923–38); *Codicis iuris canonici interpretationes authenticae* (1917–1930, Rome 1935).

5. COUNCILS: J. D. Mansi, *Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio* (31 vols., to 1439, Florence and Venice 1759–98); anastatic ed. with acts of other Councils to modern times (55 vols., Paris 1901 ff.); Ed. Schwartz, *Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, 431–879* (Berlin 1914 ff.); *Concilium Tridentinum…*, ed. by the Görres Society (13 vols., Freiburg 1901 ff.); *Collectio Lacensis, Acta et decreta SS. Conciliorum recentiorum* (7 vols., for Councils from 1682 to 1870, Freiburg in Br. 1870–90); F. Walter, *Fontes iuris eccl. antiqui et hodierni* (Bonn 1862); Ph. Schneider, *Fontes iuris eccl. novissimi* (Regensburg 1895); E. Eichmann, *Quellensammlung zur kirchlichen Rechtsgeschichte und zum Kirchenrecht* (3 vols., Paderborn 1912 ff.); *Ecclesiae occidentalis monumenta iuris antiquissima*, ed. C. F

D) General historical sources, bibliographies, annual reports, encyclopedias, and reference works. — A. Porthast, *Bibliotheca historica medii aevi* (2 vols., 2nd ed., Berlin 1896); U. Chevalier, *Répertoire des sources historiques du moyen âge: Bio-bibliographie* (2 vols., 2nd ed., Paris 1905–1907); *Topo-bibliographie* (2 vols., Montbéliard 1894–1903); *Histoire littéraire de la France* (35 vols., Paris 1733–1921); E. Calvi, *Bibliografia generale di Roma* (I [476–1499], Rome 1906; Suppl., ibid. 1908); Bibliography of the *Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique*, 1900 ff.; *Kirchenlexicon oder Encyklopädie der kathol. Theologie*, 2nd ed., ed. J. Hergenröther and Fr. Kaulen (12 vols., with index, Freiburg 1882–1903); *LThK*, ed. M. Buchberger (10 vols., ibid. 1930–38); *DHG* publ. by A. Baudrillart, A. Vogt, U. Rouziès, R. Aigrain, P. Richard (ibid. 1909 ff.), from vol. IV (1250) directed by A. Meyer and E. Van Cauvenberg; *The Cath. Enc.* (15 vols., with 1 vol. of indices, New York 1907–1914; Suppl., I, ibid. 1922); H. Hurter, *Nomenclator literarius theologiae catholicae* (5 vols., Innsbruck 1903–13); R. Streit, *Bibliotheca Missionum* (11 vols., Münster in W. 1916 ff.); M. Grabmann, *Die Geschichte der kathol. Theologie seit dem Ausgang der Väterzeit* (Freiburg in Br. 1933, Italian trans., Milan 1937). Also *Bibliografia storica nazionale*, Rome 1942 ff.

V. Auxiliary sciences

Particularly necessary are: philology (v.), palaeography (v.), diplomatics (v.), epigraphy (v.), numismatics (v.), geography (v.), chronology (v.), statistics (v.).

VI. Division

The vastness and variety of the subject matter, together with the progress of research, have led to the formation within the overall history of the Church of specialized disciplines, each with its own particular treatment.Such distinctions are commonly made: patrology, the history of theological literature, the history of dogma, the history of liturgy and institutions, and the history of missions.

Within the broader framework of the general history of the Church, certain topics have given rise to specialized studies, such as: the history of the Popes, of councils, of saints, of monasticism, of religious Orders and Congregations; separately treated are also the history of Christianity in individual regions and dioceses, the life of particular institutions like parishes and monasteries, or even the biographies of individuals of particular importance. The organization of this entire field is structured in relation to the general history of the Church, both in terms of subject matter and chronology, since chronology is always a fundamental element in historical study.

A particularly debated issue is the chronological division into historical epochs and periods. In general history, the division into three great epochs—ancient, medieval, and modern—was first introduced in the 17th century (Ch. Cellarius, *Historiae antiquae, mediae, novae nucleus*, Jena 1675–76). In the history of the Church, this tripartite division has been in use since the 19th century. Although very broad and with poorly defined boundaries, this threefold division is maintained for practical reasons.

There is no general agreement on distinguishing the various ages of the Church. However, it is commonly agreed to identify as the first era Christian antiquity, that is, the age of the Church’s origins, of its early preaching, and of its first establishment in the face of the pagan Roman state and heresy. This age is divided into two major periods: the first up to the Edict of Constantine (Milan, 313); the second up to the barbarian invasions.

The second era comprises the medieval age, whose boundaries historians dispute. It roughly spans the period from the evangelization of the barbarians, through the development of the new civilization, up to the Protestant Reformation (16th century).

The Renaissance closes the Middle Ages and opens the modern age, which can be divided into two periods: one lasting until the 18th century, the other from the 18th century to the present day.

VII. HISTORIANS OF THE CHURCH — 1. Christian antiquity.

a) The narrative of Church history begins with the Gospels, particularly the Gospel of Luke, and with the Acts of the Apostles, which, based on direct sources, provide the history of the founding and spread of the young Church. Historical information is found in the fragments of Papias’s work on the Sayings of the Lord, in the authentic Acts of the martyrs, and occasionally in apocryphal writings, in the *Hypomnemata* (commentaries) of Hegesippus of Jerusalem (c. 170 AD), in the chronicles of Julius Africanus and Hippolytus of Rome, of which more or less extensive fragments survive (cf. A. Harnack, *Die Überlieferung und der Bestand der altchristlichen Literatur bis Eusebius*, Leipzig 1893).

b) Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea in Palestine (d. 339–40; v.), rightly regarded as the father of Church history, composed a *Universal Chronicle*, which begins with the birth of Abraham and ends

The most ancient manuscript containing Eusebius’s *Historia ecclesiastica*, dated by Ed. Schwartz to the 6th century. Testimony of Gaius (II, 25) regarding the tombs of SS Peter and Paul — Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Greek ms. 1430, f. 27.

In the year 303 (continued by St. Jerome up to 378), and the noted Historia ecclesiastica, in ten books, which extends from the origins to the year 324. It includes: the life of Christ, the beginnings of the Church, the persecutions from Nero to Galerius, the victory of Constantine the Great, and constitutes a milestone, both as a pragmatic exposition of the history of the Church and as a collection of an extremely rich documentary material. Due to the large number of documents reproduced in full or in excerpt, this work is of incalculable value; the best edition, with the Greek text and Rufinus’ translation, is that of Ed. Schwartz-Th. Mommsen in the Corpus Berolinense (9, 3 vols., Leipzig-Berlin 1903, 1908, 1909). Eusebius also wrote on the martyrs of Palestine and a Life of the Emperor Constantine (4 books, in encomiastic tone). The ecclesiastical history of Eusebius was continued, starting from the 5th century, by three authors, the so-called synoptics, who wrote almost contemporaneously: Socrates, whose work in 7 books extends from 305 to 439 (ed. in PG 67); Sozomen, whose history in 9 books covers the period from 324 to 425 (ed. in PG 67); Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus (d. 458), whose history in 5 books extends from 320 to 428 (PG 82; new ed. by L. Parmentier, Leipzig 1911). Theodoret also wrote a history of monks and heretics. In the 6th century, there are three other Greek ecclesiastical historians. The first is Theodore Lector, who continued Socrates’ history up to the reign of Emperor Justin I (527): PG 86. The second is Zacharias, of whose work only 19 chapters survive in a Latin translation (PG 85, 1149 ff.). The last is the Antiochene lawyer Evagrius. His Ecclesiastical History, in 6 books, extends from 431 to 594 (PG 86), and is especially important for the history of the Nestorians and Monophysites. Of the Ecclesiastical History of Philostorgius, who was an ardent Arian and died after 425, only fragments remain: it was in 12 books, covering the period from 300 to 425 (new ed. by J. Bidez, in Corpus Berolinense, 21, Leipzig-Berlin 1913). Besides these general histories, mention should be made of the heresiological works of St. Epiphanius (d. 403), Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and Leontius; the Alexandrian Oriental Chronicle, which extends to 628; the Lives of the Saints; and the Byzantine Chronicles, which, together with political history, also deal with that of the Church.

c) Alongside the Greek authors, Syrian and Armenian ones should also be mentioned. Of the Ecclesiastical History of John of Ephesus, a Monophysite bishop (d. 588), fragments still remain (covering the period from 561 to 585), which constitute an important source for the profane and ecclesiastical history of the Eastern Empire in the 6th century. Among the Armenians, the most renowned writer is Moses of Khorene, whose History of Greater Armenia, completed in 480, also describes, among other things, the evangelization of this country. In this history are found the famous letters of Abgar.

d) The Latin West, in the field of ecclesiastical historiography, remains inferior to the East. Its ecclesiastical historiansdepend on the Greeks, and their works are nothing more than translations or compilations. St. Jerome translated a part of Eusebius’s Chronicle into Latin (PL 27; Corpus Berolinense, 24, 34, Leipzig-Berlin 1913, 1926), continuing it up to the year 378; and with his De viris illustribus he gave the first example of a Christian literary history. Rufinus of Aquileia, in 403, translated Eusebius’s History, abbreviating it and not without errors, and continued it in two books up to the death of Theodosius the Great (395: PL 21). This continuation, however, as has recently been demonstrated (cf. Th. Mommsen, Die lateinische Übersetzung des Rufinus, Leipzig 1903), is nothing more than a reworking of the History of the Church by Gelasius, bishop of Caesarea in Palestine (d. 395), which has since been lost. His contemporary Sulpicius Severus wrote in 403, in classical style and not without critical acumen, a Historia vel sacra Chronica in two books, which extends from the creation of the world to the end of the 4th century (CSEL, I), and beyond this, a Life of St. Martin of Tours. More a secular than an ecclesiastical historian was the Spanish priest Orosius. His Historiae adversus paganos libri VII (PL 20), composed under the inspiration of St. Augustine, extend from the universal flood to the year 416, and aim to refute the pagan accusation that the Christian religion was responsible for the ruin of the Western Empire and the evils that had struck it at that time (CSEL, V). The same purpose guided St. Augustine in composing the De civitate Dei, in 22 books, written between 413 and 426 (PL 20). With this work St. Augustine is the first Christian philosopher of history, and his thought exercised an enormous influence on medieval historical conceptions. The Historia ecclesiastica tripartita (PL 69–70) of M. A. Cassiodorus (477–580) is nothing more than an excerpt from the first three continuators of Eusebius of Caesarea, but it was the most popular manual of Church history throughout the Middle Ages. The first part of the Liber Pontificalis, a meager and not always accurate history of the popes in biographical form, probably dates to the 6th century, and more precisely to the pontificate of Boniface II (530–532); the compiler made use of the so-called Catalogus Liberianus of the popes contained in the Roman Chronography of Dionysius Philocalus of 354. From the 6th century onward the Liber Pontificalis becomes a contemporary source, since it was gradually continued throughout the Middle Ages as an unofficial record

The individual pontificates are almost like separate works. The edition by L. Duchesne also includes the Lives composed later up to Martin V (d. 1431). The life of the first bishops Agnello (v.) the Ravennate (9th cent.) in the Codex Pontificalis Ecclesiae Ravennatis (new ed., RIS, II, 1).

9. The history of the Church in the Middle Ages

While in ancient times Greek writers predominate over Latin ones, in the medieval period the latter take second place.

a) Among the Greeks, mention should be made of the Chronography of Theophanes the Confessor (up to the 9th cent., with extensive later continuations); the historical works of Leo the Deacon (10th cent.), Anna Comnena and others. In general, however, the ecclesiastical history of the Greek authors proceeds alongside that of the Byzantine Empire. The most notable ecclesiastical historian of the Greek Middle Ages is Nicephorus Callistus, librarian of the church of St. Sophia in Constantinople around the mid-14th cent. His principal work, in 18 books, extends to the death of Emperor Phocas (610). It is written with care, but not without inaccuracies and fables; it also contains a list of Byzantine emperors and patriarchs. Valuable historical works were also composed in this period in the Church of Syria, where the Ecclesiastical History, already mentioned, of John of Ephesus, found learned continuators. The Annals (583–843) attributed to the Monophysite patriarch Dionysius of Tell-Mahrē are only one-quarter his own work, but they are a useful source for the ecclesiastical and secular history of the first half of the 9th cent. The Chronicle of the Monophysite Jacobite patriarch Michael the Great Qindasī (1126–99), beginning with the 6th cent., constitutes one of the best sources for the history of the Eastern Church, especially for the period of the Crusades, of which the author was an eyewitness. This work survives both in an Armenian translation of the 13th cent. (French trans. by

V. Langlois: Chronique de Michel le Grand, Venice 1868) and in the original Syriac, as well as in an Arabic version edited by J

B. Chabot, Chronique de Michel le Syrien, 3 vols., Paris 1900–10. The greatest Syrian historian, in general opinion, is Gregory Abū ’l-Farağ, also called Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286). Among his numerous works, the foremost is a great World Chronicle in three parts, of which the first is secular in character, the second deals with Jewish high priests and Roman pontiffs, and the third is almost exclusively devoted to the history of the Antiochene and Jacobite patriarchate, which a continuator carried down to 1493; the third part is a history of the Church.dei caldeoortodossi, nestoriani and giacobiti, from the apostle Thomas until 1282, and continued by another hand until 1469 (Gregorio Bar-Ebreo, Chronicon ecclesiasticum, ed. J. B. Abbeloos et Th. Lamy, 3 voll., Louvain 1872-77). Important notices on the history of the Greek Church are found in the long line of profane and imperial Byzantine historians, from 500 to 1500. The best edition is the Corpus scriptorum historiae Byzantinae, 49 voll., Bonn 1828-55; cf. also PG.

b) Medieval historians in the West never saw or wrote history merely as history, but in it and for it they always aimed at religious, ethical and theological ends. Under the influence of St Augustine’s De civitate Dei, they saw above all in the course of history the struggle between the two kingdoms of good and evil, and animated by eschatological and apocalyptic hopes, they almost always based themselves on the same historical division into six ages and four kingdoms or monarchies. In a brief outline of the historiography of the Church in the Latin Middle Ages, three fundamental categories may be distinguished: α) works on the history of individual peoples without any separation between secular and ecclesiastical material; β) general histories of the Church; γ) annals, chronicles and biographies.

α) The first author of the first category who stands at the threshold of the Middle Ages is Jordanes (also Jornandes), who wrote, at the invitation of Pope Vigilius, De summa temporum vel origine actibusque gentis Romanorum, a kind of universal history from Adam to 551, and De origine actibusque Getarum, in which he abridges the homonymous work of Cassiodorus in 12 books, and inserts many valuable notices on the history of the Church (ed. in MGH, Auct. antiquiss., V, i; RIS, I).

The father of Frankish history is Gregory of Tours (d. 594), with his Historia Francorum in 10 books (PL 71; critical ed. by W. Arndt and B. Krusch, in MGH, Scriptores rerum Merov., I, Hanover 1884), the fifth of which begins the history of his own time from 575 to 591, narrated on the basis of his personal experience and recollections. Gregory lacks mastery of his material and the ability to give it a pragmatic presentation, but in compensation he strives to be faithful and truthful.

A history of the Visigoths (PL 83) up to 621 was written by Isidore of Seville (d. 636), the encyclopedic writer of the late antique age, of whom the Chronica maiora should be recalled, later abridged in the Chronica minora (PL 83).

The father of English historiography is St Bede, known as the Venerable (d. 735), of whom we possess the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum in 5 books (PL 95; ed. with English translation, in 2 voll., by F. E. King, London 1930). The part before 596 is nothing other than a compilation from Paul Orosius and the

Nache, by Prosper of Aquitaine and Gilda. The original and larger part of the work is devoted to the evangelization of Britain, undertaken at the initiative of Pope Gregory the Great by the bishop Augustine (596-731).

The history of the Lombards was narrated by Paul the Deacon (Paulus Diaconus), a Lombard of noble birth who long resided at the royal court in Pavia. Retiring to Monte Cassino, he wrote the history of his people in six books, extending to the year 744, which remains the sole source for both the religious and secular history of the Lombards. After his death (799), his work was continued by an unknown author up to the year 774, and in the 9th century, with regard to the Duchy of Benevento, by the monk Erchempert, who carried the narrative forward to the year 889 (PL 95; critical ed. by G. Waitz, in MGH, Script. rer. Langob., pp. 234-264). During a brief stay at the Frankish court, Paul also composed, at the request of Charlemagne, the *Gesta episcoporum Mettensium* (MGH, Scriptores, II, p. 260 ff.).

For national and local ecclesiastical history, special mention must be made of Flodoard of Reims (d. 966), archivist of his city, who wrote a *Historia Ecclesiae Remensis* from its origins to 948. This work is highly valuable for the history of the Church and the French state due to the documents it contains (PL 135; MGH, Scriptores, XIII).

To the category of national historians also belongs Adam of Bremen, a canon and member of the chapter of Bremen from 1069, who shortly after 1072 wrote a *Historia ecclesiastica* or *Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae pontificum* in four books, as well as a history of Scandinavian Christianity and, in particular, of the bishoprics of Bremen and Hamburg from 788 to 1076. This work, a primary source, forms the foundational basis for the history of the Nordic countries (MGH, Scriptores, VII). Half a millennium later, Albert Krantz, canon of Hamburg (d. 1517), wrote a history of the Church in northern Germany (Bremen, Hamburg, Lower Saxony, and Westphalia) in twelve books covering the years 780 to 1504, titled *Metropolis seu historia de ecclesiis sub Carolo M. in Saxonia instauratis* (Frankfurt 1576).

β) Among the authors who in the Middle Ages attempted to narrate the general history of the Church, first in chronological order must be mentioned Haimo, bishop of Halberstadt from 840 to 853, author of a *Breviarium historiae ecclesiasticae* in ten books, summarizing the history of the Church in the first four centuries. The work is little more than an excerpt from Rufinus and the *Historia tripertita*, but it is written in good Latin for its time. Almost contemporaneously, Anastasius, librarian of the Roman Church, wrote a *Historia ecclesiastica seu Chronographia tripartita*, which is a compilation of the histories of Theophanes, Nicephorus, and George Syncellus. The work is not, from a chronological standpoint, as well ordered as the *Historia tripertita* of Cassiodorus; the excerpts from the three Byzantine authors stand rather side by side without cohesion, with most of the material drawn from Theophanes (Corpus script.Historical works of Byzantium, 40, Bonn 1841). Besides this work, Anastasius translated into Latin the Acts of the Councils: VI (680-81), VII (787) and VIII (870) (Mansi, XII and XVI). Around 1142 Oderic Vitalis, abbot of St-Evroult in Normandy, wrote an Historia ecclesiastica in 13 books, from Christ to 1141; a work which reveals great love of truth and rich experience, and is especially important, not only for the ecclesiastical events of that period, but also for the history of the Normans and the Crusades (PL 188; new ed. by A. Le Prevost, 5 vols., Paris 1838-55). Vincent of Beauvais O.P., in the 31 books of his Speculum historiale (up to 1244), which forms the fourth part of the Bibliotheca mundi, the great encyclopedia of the 13th century, collected much material, but also many fables (of the many editions one may see that of Venice in 1591). James of Vitry (d. 1240), a canon regular, preacher of the Crusade against the Albigensians (1213) and of that for the Holy Land, bishop of St. Jean d'Acre and cardinal, has left us in his Historia occidentalis and also in his precious letters valuable information on the University of Paris and on the religious Orders of his time, especially on the origins of the Franciscan Order, on circumstances of the history of Italy and of the Curia of Innocent III, on the spiritual and moral situation of the crusader state and on the events of Damietta. His Historia orientalis, on the other hand, being a simple compilation, has less value as a source. His Vita Mariae Oigniacensis is an important contribution to the history of mysticism and piety at the beginning of the 13th century (cf. Ph. Funk, Jacob von Vitry, sein Leben und seine Werke, Leipzig 1909). The famous inquisitor Bernard Gui O.P., besides a Practica inquisitionis hereticae pravitatis (ed. C. Douais, Paris 1886; G. Mollat, 2 vols., ibid. 1926-27), composed a Catalogus seu Chronicon summorum pontificum usque ad Ioannem XXII, a kind of history of the popes, of particular value for the period of the Avignon exile. A contemporary and fellow Dominican of Bernard was Bartholomew of Fiadoni (d. 1327, bishop of Torcello in Venice) who wrote an Historia ecclesiastica in 24 books from Christ to the beginning of the 14th century, later continued up to 1361 by Henry of Diessenhofen, a reworking of older works of little critical value (RIS, XXII). Last for this period comes the Summa historica in 3 folio volumes by St. Antoninus (archbishop of Florence), which extends from the Creation to 1457 (Quétif-Echard, I, cols. 813-19; II, col. 311; F. G. Walker, The «Chronicles» of St. Antoninus, Washington 1933). Of little originality, it diligently utilizes older works.

γ) It is in the field of chronicles and biographies that the Middle Ages exercised its greatest historiographical activity. Almost every bishopric, every city, every religious order had one or more chroniclers: personalities, and especially saints, had one or more biographers. The concept of chronicle at that time is hardly distinguishable from that of annals; there are, however, chronicles in which the material is arranged and presented for longer or shorter periods of time, such as the years of the reign of an emperor or a pope. Nor are there wanting, here and there, chronicles which offer a relatively complete and unified narrative: such, for example, are the Annals of Lambert of Hersfeld. The model for all medieval chronicles was the chronicle of Eusebius, known in the West through St. Jerome. It is found either in full or in summary at the head of almost all the great medieval chronicles.

Among the most valuable chroniclers it will suffice to recall: for the Merovingian and Carolingian age: Fredegarius and his continuators, Einhard, the authors of the Annals of Lorsch, of St-Amand, of Murbach, of Pétris, of Salzburg, of Metz; for the 10th and 11th centuries: Regino of Prüm (d. 915, PL 132), Liutprand of Cremona (d. c. 970) whose Antapodosis, although tendentious and scandal-mongering, constitutes one of the principal sources of his time, Hermannus Contractus, monk of Reichenau (1013-54, PL 143), Rodulfus Glaber (d. c. 1056) of the abbey of Cluny (PL

142), Eckhard of St Gall (d. 1060; Casus S. Galli), Bernold of Constance (d. 1100), monk of St Blaise at Schaffhausen (PL 148), and above all, as his literary successor, Lambert, monk of Hersfeld (d. after 1078), who in his Annals openly takes the side of Gregory VII against Henry IV (MGH, Scriptores, III); the various authors of the Libelli de lite imperatorum et pontificum, written in the 11th and 12th centuries (MGH Libelli, 3 vols., 1891–92–93); for the 12th century: Sigebert of Gembloux (1030–1112), Balderic, bishop of Dol (1047–1130, PL 162), William of Malmesbury (d. c. 1145), Otto of Freising (d. 1158) with his Chronica seu historia de duabus civitatibus in eight books (MGH, Scriptores, XX), William of Newburgh (1136–98), whose principal work is the Historia rerum anglicarum, and various compilers of monastic libelli. One must also recall Roger of Hoveden, who wrote the Annales regum Angliae from 731 to 1201 (ed. W. Stubbs, 4 vols., London 1868–71), Alberic of the Three Fountains (d. after 1251), author of a world chronicle down to 1251 (MGH, Scriptores, XXIII), Burchard of Ursberg (MGH, Scriptores, XXIII), Matthew Paris, Salimbene of Parma, a Franciscan friar whose chronicle (MGH, Scriptores, XXXII) is also one of the most lively and singular literary works of the 13th century (cf. B. Schmeidler, Italienische Geschichtsschreiber des XIII. und XIV. Jahrhunderts, Leipzig 1909), Martin of Troppau (Oppaviensis) O.P., also called Martin the Pole (d. 1278), whose Chronica summarum pontificum imperatorumque ac de septem aetatibus mundi reaches to 1277 (MGH, Scriptores, XXII) and is a compendium of the history of popes and emperors that enjoyed immense circulation and, though lacking historical or literary value, helped spread many legends; it was continued in various recensions down to the 15th century; Thomas of Pavia O.F.M., who composed his chronicle about 1279; Paulinus of Venice O.F.M. (v.), bishop of Pozzuoli, one of the most important chroniclers of the religious orders in the 14th century, whose chief historical works are the Historiarum epitoma (a universal chronicle from the creation of the world to Boniface VIII), the Satyrica historia, and a Chronologia magna or Compendium that constitutes the first attempt at a comprehensive view of world history. During the struggle between Louis the Bavarian and Pope John XXII a rich polemical literature flourished (v. SCHOLASTIK, Unbekannte kirchenpolitische Streitschriften aus der Zeit Ludwigs des Bayern, Rome 1911). The 15th century includes Ulrich of Richental, who wrote a Chronicle of the Council of Constance (ed. Buck, Leipzig 1895); Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, who later became Pope Pius II, and whose works include, besides others of a historical-geographical character, a Historia Conciliorum Basileensium in two books.(Basilea 1515); Giacomo Filippo (Foresti) da Bergamo, Augustinian, whose *Supplementum chronicorum*, first published in Venice in 1483, was continued; Bartolomeo Sacchi, known as Platina (1421–81), who composed the widely circulated *Liber de vita Christi ac omnium pontificum* (covering the years 1–1474, Venice 1479, new ed. in RIS, III, II), later continued by Onofrio Panvinio. Alongside the chronicles of this period, and also of varying critical value depending on their authors, stand the innumerable lives of saints and celebrated figures. A magnificent comprehensive overview of all these chronicles, annals, and biographies, illustrated by rich critical commentary, can be found in G. Wattenbach, *Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter bis zur Mitte des XIII. Jahrhunderts* (6th ed., 2 vols., Berlin 1893–94) and O. Lorenz, *Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter seit der Mitte des XIII. Jahrhunderts* (3rd ed., 2 vols., ibid. 1886–87). For biographies, see A. Potthast, *Bibliotheca historica medii aevi*, a guide to historical works of the European Middle Ages from 375 to 1500 (ibid. 1892). Italian historians and chroniclers from 500 to 1500 have been collected by L. A. Muratori in his monumental *Rerum Italicarum Scriptores*, of which a new revised and expanded edition is underway. Cf. U. Balzani, *Le cronache italiane del medioevo* (4th ed., Milan 1909); U. Chevalier, *Répertoire des sources historiques du moyen age: Bio-bibliographie; Topo-bibliographie* (4 vols.; cf. above, n. IV, D).

10. The history of the Church in the modern age

Modern critical historiography of the Church has its origins in the age of Humanism and the Reformation. The Humanist movement laid the foundations of historical criticism and applied new critical methods to annalistics, which in many respects lacked critical sense, leading to a notable intensification of historiographical work. The invention of printing and a deeper knowledge of Greek literature in the West also contributed greatly to this. Finally, a powerful impetus to historical studies came from the so-called Reformation of Luther. Protestant historiography arose entirely from the needs of confessional polemics and resulted in a corresponding Catholic effort to demonstrate, on the basis of historical sources, the traditional truths.

a) Works of the age of the Reformation. — The first major attempt to narrate the history of the Church from an exclusively Protestant perspective was made by the Magdeburg Centuries around the middle of the

Sec. XVI. Its passionate character and lack of objectivity are admitted even by Protestant scholars such as F. Chr. Baur (*Die Epochen der christlichen Geschichtsschreibung*, Tübingen 1852, pp. 39 ff.) and provoked a whole series of works on the Catholic side. Of these, the most important is Cesare Baronio’s *Annales ecclesiastici* (v.). The work had various continuations: first that of Abraham Bzovius O. P., who in 9 volumes carried the narrative from the year 1198, where Baronio had stopped, to the year 1572; the work appeared in Rome between 1616 and 1672. Shorter is the continuation composed by the convert and later Bishop of Pamiers, Henri Sponde (Spondanus), who reduced Baronio’s 12 volumes into 2 folio volumes (Paris 1639) and added 3 more covering the years 1547 to 1640 (ibid. 1641, Lyon 1678). From 1598 to 1565 extends the continuation by the Oratorian Odorico Rainaldi, published in 9 volumes in Rome between 1649 and 1677, and is among all the continuations the best. To Rainaldi were added Giacomo Laderchi and Agostino Theiner, both Oratorians, the former reaching in 3 volumes the year 1571 (Rome 1728–37), the latter, in an equal number of folio volumes, the year 1585 (ibid. 1856 ff.). A critical revision of the *Annales* was made by the Conventual Antonio Pagi (d. 1699) in a work entitled *Critica historico-chronologica in universos Caesaris Baronii Annales*, which was continued by his nephew and confrere Francesco (Antwerp 1705). It was inserted into the edition of Baronio by G. D. Mansi in 38 volumes (Lucca 1738–59). New editions, with all the continuations, appeared at Bar-le-Duc and Paris in 1864–83, in 37 volumes. For a century, Baronio’s *Annales*, violently attacked by Protestants (among others the Reformed Samuel Basnage), constituted the basic work for Catholics, from which material was drawn both for controversies regarding the history of the Church and for new studies about II.
b) Church historiography in France. — A magnificent flowering of historical works on the Church occurred in France in the 17th and 18th centuries. Maurists, Oratorians, Jesuits, Dominicans, and theologians of every persuasion vied with one another in publishing and critically studying sources, in promoting new auxiliary disciplines of history, in thoroughly investigating individual problems, and in reworking the interpretation of the Church. The series of great French ecclesiastical historians is opened by Antoine Godeau, Bishop of Vence (1605–72), with his *Histoire de l’Église* in 5 volumes (Paris 1653–78). It narrates in elegant form the history of the Church in the first eight centuries and was translated into German and Italian (by Speroni). A collection of the acts of the Councils was made by Philippe Labbe (*Sacrosancta Concilia... Ph. Labbei et G. Cosarti*, 18 volumes, ibid. 1672). New paths were opened by Jean Bolland (d. 1665), initiator of the *Acta Sanctorum*, and by Luc d’Achery O.S.B. (d. 1685).Other scholars followed in their footsteps, such as St. Baluze, who compiled the lives of the Avignon Popes (new ed. by G. Mollat, in 4 vols. with the addition of documents and notes, ibid. 1915-22), Du Cange, compiler of the famous glossary, and J. Mabillon O.S.B., founder of diplomatics and author of the *Annales Ordinis S. Benedicti* (6 vols., ibid. 1703-39). Louis Maimbourg (d. 1686) wrote an entire series of specialized historical works, such as the history of Arianism (ibid. 1673), and that of the Greek Schism (ibid. 1677), the history of the decline of the Empire up to Charlemagne and of the struggle between emperors and popes from the Carolingian age to 1356 (ibid. 1679), the history of the Great Western Schism (ibid. 1678), of Lutheranism (ibid. 1680), and of Calvinism (ibid. 1682).

A deeply elaborated work is that of the Dominican Natalis Alexander (d. 1724; v.), entitled *Selecta historiae ecclesiasticae capita etc.* in 24 vols., which extends to the Council of Trent, and to which six more vols. on sacred history of the Old Testament were later added. The work, however, was placed on the Index by Pope Innocent XI for its Gallican tendencies and for the lively opposition it sometimes displayed against Rome. The new edition, corrected by the cleric regular Roncaglia (9 vols. fol., Lucca 1734), is not included in the Index. Another edition with notes was also prepared in Lucca in 1749 by the celebrated archbishop G. D. Mansi. Continued by an anonymous writer who added two more volumes, it was reprinted in Venice in 1778.

For educated people of every condition, the history of the Church from the Ascension of Christ to the year 1414 was written in 20 vols. by Claude Fleury (1640-1723), printed in Paris between 1691 and 1720. Unlike Alexander, Fleury is an elegant and flowery narrator; he therefore had many admirers, some censors (he was a moderate Gallican), and several continuators.

Among the most eminent French historians must be counted the secular priest Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont (1637-98), with his *Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire ecclésiastique des six premiers siècles* (16 vols., Paris 1693-1712), in which the most important texts are coordinated, assembled, and elucidated by critical commentary. This work is partly complemented by his other *Histoire des empereurs et des autres princes qui ont régné durant les six premiers siècles de l'Église* (6 vols., ibid. 1693-1712).

A monumental work of critical research on the history of the dioceses of France was that undertaken by Denis de Sainte-Marthe: *Gallia Christiana in provincias ecclesiasticas distributa* (ibid. 1715-25), of which he composed the first three volumes, with others continuing it; it was later republished. L. Duchesne, *Fastes épiscopaux de l'ancienne Gaule* (3 vols., 2nd ed., ibid. 1907-15), composed “as a revision of the *Gallia sacra* with regard to the earliest age of episcopal series.” A new series under the title *Gallia Christiana novissima* was instead published by J. H. Albanès and U. Chevalier (ibid. 1895-1911).

Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux (1627-1704), is remembered for his *Discours sur l'histoire universelle* (ibid. 1681), a kind of compendium of world history from its origins to Charlemagne, which constitutes the first modern Catholic attempt at a philosophy of history. Also historical in character is his *Histoire des variations des églises protestantes* (1688), which offers an interesting and often profound investigation into the history of the Waldensians, Albigensians, Wycliffites, Hussites, Lutherans, and Calvinists. Of much inferior value are the historians of the Church of the 18th century; they lack criticism, precision, and study of sources.

First among these is François-Timoléon, Abbot of Choisy (d. 1724), who wrote an *Histoire de l'Église* (ibid. 1706 ff.) in 11 vols. in 4°. Also worth recalling is Gabriel Ducreux for his *Les siècles chrétiens* (9 vols., 8°, ibid. 1775). Very widespread, because of its easy readability, was the *Histoire de l'Église* (24 vols. 12°, ibid. 1778-90) by Bérault-Bercastel S.J. (1722-94), which had many translators and continuators.

The historians of the first half of the 19th century also remained inferior to those of the 17th.

Si have in France, indeed, very widespread historical works, but they are generally lacking in originality and criticism. Around the middle of the century, however, there was a notable improvement, especially in works of a particular nature. The *Histoire universelle de l'Église catholique* (29 vols. in 8°, 3rd ed., Paris 1842-49) by Abbot R. F. Rohrbacher (1789-1856), which extended from the origins to 1852, also found readers and translations. It was continued by J.-L. Fèvre up to 1872 (ibid. 1878-83). Of lesser value is the *Histoire générale de l'Église* by J. E. Darras (d. 1878), continued by J. Barcille and completed by J.-L. Fèvre: in 24 vols. in 8°, it extends to 1846 (ibid. 1862-89). Less extensive is the *Histoire de l'Église* (6 vols., ibid. 1870-89) by Vladimiro Guettée. Among recent French historians of the Church, mention should be made of P. Allard and B. Aubé. True innovators in the various branches of Church history were Luigi Duchesne (1843-1922), Pierre Batiffol (d. 1929), and the Benedictine Germain Morin (d. 1946), who deservedly achieved world fame. The best Catholic historians now collaborate on the *Histoire de l'Église depuis les origines jusqu'à nos jours*, directed by A. Fliche and V. Martin (Paris 1934 ff.). Particular mention should be made of the school of Louvain (G. Kurth) and the *Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique*, founded in 1900 by A. Cauchie, the Bollandists College (v.) and the abbey of Maredsous with the *Revue bénédictine*, and, for monastic history, Ursmer Berlière (d. 1932). Finally, mention should be made of the *DHG*, in the course of publication in Paris, begun in 1909, but vol. I bears the date 1912 ff.

c) Church historiography in Germany. — The first regular chairs of Church History were established in Protestant universities, which, from the mid-17th century onward, gradually became more numerous. Johann Lorenz Mosheim (1694-1755) is normally considered the father of modern Church historiography, especially for his four books *Institutionum Historiae ecclesiasticae antiquae et recentis* (Helmstedt 1755). But the most widespread Church history of this period is the *Christliche Kirchengeschichte* of his pupil I. M. Schröck (d. 1808; 45 vols., Leipzig 1786-1812). In the 19th century, A. Neander (d. 1850), under the influence of Schleiermacher, provided an account of Church history full of sentiment based on a good knowledge of the sources, seeing in the Church of Christ the proof of divine power (*Geschichte der christlichen Religion und Kirche*, 5 vols., Hamburg 1825-45; II VI, ibid. 1852). In general, however, the anti-Catholic prejudice prevails among Protestant historians to the point of even the most unjustified accusations. But German historiography was soon overwhelmed by the rationalist critical tendency, represented in particular by the Tübingen school, of which the leading figure was F. C. Baur (d. 1860). From it broke away A.Ritschl, who had among his disciples the most illustrious representatives of the most recent critical school, such as R. A. Lipsius, Hilgenfeld, and particularly A. Harnack. The main field of this school is the history of the origins of dogmas and of ancient Christian literature (cf. the series Texte und Untersuchungen and the periodical Neues Archiv). Among the representatives of the Reformed Protestant tendency should be mentioned J. J. Herzog, founder of the Realenzyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, an work which in its third edition, directed by A. Hauck, collected and united the various Protestant trends. A pupil of Ritschl may also be considered E. Troeltsch, author of Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen (Tübingen 1912).

In Catholic universities, on the other hand, the study of history was cultivated only in the course of the 18th century, due to the traditional approach to teaching that persisted in them. Only following the reform of studies carried out by Maria Theresa (1752–73) was the history of the Church, definitively separated from secular history, raised to the rank of an independent discipline. The works of L. A. Muratori contributed to its development; however, rather than adhering to a rigorous critical method, most Church historians were influenced by the atheistic or at least anti-Christian movement of the Enlightenment. Even the manual of M. Dannemayr (d. 1805), Institutiones historiae ecclesiasticae N. T. (Vienna 1788 and 1806), bears the mark of this tendency. At the beginning of the 19th century, by contrast, in the atmosphere of the general Catholic restoration and especially under the influence of Romanticism, the history of the Church was also treated with greater zeal and better method. Count Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg (d. 1819) opened a new era with his Geschichte der Religion Jesu Christi, in 15 vols., 8vo, published in Hamburg and Vienna between 1807 and 1818. To the new impulse given by this work may be attributed in part the Kirchengeschichte of Theodor Katerkamp (d. 1834), a work full of taste and mature judgment that in 5 vols. narrates the history of the Church from its origins to 1153 (Münster 1823–34). Among the authors who particularly distinguished themselves in deepening and perfecting the study of Church history among Catholics in the 19th century, should be recalled J. A. Möhler (d. 1838), and above all Ignaz Döllinger (d. 1890), the greatest of the Catholic Church historians of the 19th century in Germany, whose Lehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte in 2 vols. (Regensburg 1836; 2nd ed., ibid. 1843), is notable for its learning and is a fundamental work. As a Catholic response to Ranke’s history of the Reformation, the same Döllinger wrote: Die Reformation: Ihre Entwicklung und ihre Wirkungen im Anfange des lutherischen Bekenntnisses (3 vols., Regensburg 1846–48). The work Die Papstfabeln des M. A. (Monaco 1863) instead marked the beginning of his later break with the Church. Alongside K. Riffel, J. I. Ritter, I. Alzog, P. Gams, should be mentioned K. J. Hefele, Bishop of Rottenburg (d. 1893), whose History of the Councils, continued by J. Hergenröther and A. Knöpfler, represents one of the greatest and most enduring achievements of Catholic historiography of the Church in the 19th century (translated and extensively annotated by H. Leclercq, to date 10 volumes, Paris 1907–38). Cardinal J. Hergenröther (d. 1891) wrote, among other works, an extensive manual of Church history in 3 vols. (Freiburg 1876–1880), revised once by Kirsch and then again by himself and others but still incomplete (Freiburg in Br. 1930 ff.); at the time it represented the last word in scholarship.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Church historiography shows renewed and lively research activity in all fields. Among the most important German scholars now deceased are: F. Janssen (d. 1891), F. X. Kraus (d. 1901), H. S. Denifle O. P. (d. 1905), Fr. X. Funk (d. 1905), F. Greving (d. 1919), A. Knöpfler (d. 1921), L. Pastor (d. 1928), A. Paulus (d. 1930), Cardinal Fr. Ehrle S. I. (d. 1934), H. Finke (d. 1938), A. Ehrhard (d. 1940), K. Bihlmeyer (d. 1942), G. Schnürer, and many others.

d) The historiography of the Church in Italy — During the Humanist, Renaissance, and Counter-Reformation periods in Italy, studies in Church history developed significantly, especially in the fields of archaeology (e.g., O. Panvinio and A. Bosio) and specialized research. In addition to the already mentioned Cardinal Baronio, who paved the way for all subsequent studies (cf. A. Walz, *Studi storiografici*, Rome 1940), particular mention should be made of Cardinals Noris, Bona, and Sforza Pallavicino (1607–67); the latter, with his *Historia del Concilio di Trento* (ibid. 1656–57), did far more than refute Fra Paolo Sarpi’s work. F. Ughelli (v.) the Cistercian abbot (d. 1670), in his nine volumes of *Italia Sacra sive de episcopis Italiae et insularum adiacentium* (ibid. 1644–62), aimed to provide, through a reasoned catalogue of bishops, information on Italian dioceses; though now outdated, this work remains useful, particularly in its second edition, enlarged and corrected by I. Coleti (1717–33, 10 vols., 8 tomes). It served as a model for similar publications in France and Spain.

In the 18th century, Italy again took the lead in Church historiography, especially through critical research and the editing of sources, in which L. A. Muratori (1672–1750) distinguished himself. In his *Antiquitates Italicae medii aevi* (Milan 1738–42), Muratori collected his studies on the constitutions, ideas, usages, and customs of Italy from the 5th to the 18th century. In his *Annali d’Italia*, from the beginning of the Christian era to the year 1749 (Venice 1747–49), later continued by others into our own century, Muratori surpassed even the best annalists. Alongside these two major works stand countless minor studies and editions, the most famous of which is the *Rerum Italicarum Scriptores ab anno Christi 500–1500* (25 vols., Milan 1723–51; new ed. directed by G. Carducci, V. Fiorini, P. Fedele, ed. N. Zanichelli, Bologna, printed in Città di Castello 1903 ff.). In this work, Muratori made available to scholars the medieval Italian chroniclers and set an example for other great national collections (cf. G. Bertoni, *Il concetto della storia e l’opera storiografica di A. Muratori*, Modena 1922).

Immediately after Muratori’s works appeared G. D. Mansi’s (d. 1769), Archbishop of Lucca, *Sacrorum Conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio* (31 vols., Venice 1759 ff.), an immense compilation of documents and information on all councils up to 1439, richer than the earlier collections of Labbe and Hardouin. While its precision does not match the zeal of its prolific author, the work remains useful even today. Other writers on Church history included the Ballerini brothers (B. and G.), A. Gallandi, F. Bianchini, F. A. Zaccaria, Scipione Maffei, the noted literary historian G. Tiraboschi (1731–94), and the two Eastern scholars educated in Rome, Leone Allatius and G. S. Assemani.The Dominican Cardinal G. A. Orsi wrote a *Historia ecclesiastica* in 20 volumes (Rome 1746–61), continued by F. A. Becchetti, O.P. (17 volumes, ibid. 1770 ff.). The Oratorian C. Saccarelli composed a *Historia ecclesiastica per annos digesta variisque observationibus illustrata* in 25 volumes (ibid. 1770 ff.). The Augustinian L. Berti wrote a *Breviarium historiae ecclesiasticae* (Venice 1761, 1768; Vienna 1774; Augsburg 1762) and three volumes of *Dissertationes historicae* (Florence 1753; Augsburg 1761; Prague 1768).

Italian historiographical research in the 18th century was continued into the 19th. Research and editions of sources and texts in the field of ecclesiastical history and patrology came especially from major libraries and archives, first and foremost the Vatican Library, the Vatican Archives, and the Ambrosian Library, where a strong scholarly tradition prevailed. The Cistercian abbot Angelo Fumagalli (d. 1804) wrote a classic work: *Delle istituzioni diplomatiche*. In the same field, Gaetano Marini (d. 1815) worked on *I papiri diplomatici*. Agostino Theiner (d. 1874), an Oratorian, continued the *Annali* of Baronius in 3 volumes, published collections of sources for the ecclesiastical history of Hungary, Poland, Ireland, etc., works on ecclesiastical status, the *Codex dominici temporalis Apostolicae Sedis*, the history of Pope Clement XIV, the *Acta genuina Concilii Tridentini*, and other works. In the fields of patrology and liturgy as well, the librarians of the Vatican and Ambrosian Libraries conducted major historical investigations and produced editions. Cardinal Angelo Mai (d. 1854) published an immense quantity of unpublished texts relating to classical and Christian literature. The work of Cardinal Mai was continued by G. Cozza-Luzzi (d. 1905). G. B. De Rossi (d. 1894) is recognized as the founder of Christian archaeological science. The historical bulletins of the local Italian provinces, beginning in 1870, and particularly the *Archivio della Società romana di storia patria*, provide much material for ecclesiastical history. Valuable contributions have also been made by numerous and competent scholars of local history. Special mention should be made of the work by F. Lanzoni, *Le diocesi d'Italia dalle origini al principio del sec. VI* (a. 604; 2 vols., Faenza 1927), which is now fundamental for the much-debated period it covers. Among the many recently published works, the Italian version, directed by A. P. Frutaz, of *Storia della Chiesa dalle origini ai giorni nostri*, published in French under the direction of A. Fliche and V. Martin (I, 2nd ed., Turin 1942; II–VII, ibid. 1938 ff.; in the original, 10 volumes have appeared so far), should not be forgotten for its numerous additions, supplementary bibliographies, and rich indices. The *Rivista di storia della Chiesa in Italia*, begun in Rome in 1947, should also be noted.

e) SPAIN. – Spain possesses an excellent source of information in the *España sagrada* of E. Flórez (Madrid 1747), which, with its continuators, reaches 51 volumes. Noteworthy are: Vicente de la Fuente (d. 1889), *Historia ecclesiastica de España*; and the similarly titled but more recent work of Fr. Z. García Villada, S.J.; the major editions by Faustino Arévalo (d. 1824), e.g., of the works of St. Isidore, etc.; and M. Menéndez y Pelayo (d. 1912) with his *Historia de los heterodoxos españoles* (3 vols., 2nd ed., Madrid 1917). For Spanish ecclesiastical historiography cf. P. Kehr, *Papsturkunden in Spanien. Vorarbeiten zur Hispania Pontificia* (Berlin 1926).

f) ENGLAND. – Among historians of the Church may be mentioned Daniel (d. 1823), G. Lingard (d. 1851), who wrote a good work on the ancient history of the Anglo-Saxon Church, and the famous editor J. Stevenson (d. 1895).

burgo in Br. 1933; E. Fueter, Storia della storiografia moderna, trad. it., 2 voll., Napoli 1944 and bibl. cited there; for further bibl.: G. Soranzo, Avviamento agli studi storici, Como 1944. Lucchesio Spätling

V. C. E. STATO.

Difficult indeed, as has already been seen, were the relations between nascent Christianity and the national Jewish state; but no less difficult were those with the Roman Empire, once it became aware of its existence. Like the other empires of antiquity, the Roman Empire could not admit a distinction between political and religious authority: this came only with Christianity. The empire was in itself a sacred thing, and sacred (Augustus) was its head: one swore in his name and offered cult to his image. It availed the first Christian writers little to emphasize, following St. Paul, their own loyalty, for superior to every other human concern remained the teaching of the duty to obey God rather than men, while the empire admitted no laws higher than its own.

A first definitive settlement of relations between the two parties came with the edict of Constantine and Licinius (313), which made a benevolent tolerance programmatic for the empire, soon turning into open favor. Proof of this was seen in the erection of sacred buildings, in copious donations of goods, in protection of persons, in the granting of royal and personal privileges, to which corresponded the progressive disfavor toward the ancient cults. In the 5th century, Christianity was in fact the religion of the Roman state, which was increasingly inclining toward caesaropapism (v.). It was precisely in contrast to this tendency that Pope Gelasius (492–96) launched a programmatic statement to the emperor of the East: “Two are, Emperor Augustus, the powers by which this world is ruled: the sacred authority of the pontiffs and the royal power, and in these the burden of the priests is the more grave, inasmuch as they must render account in the divine judgment even for the kings of men. You know indeed that, although you are superior in dignity to the human race, yet you humbly bow your neck to the prelates of divine things and from them await the causes of your salvation” (PL 70, 42). These words and the whole complex of the letter then became throughout the Middle Ages the most explicit argument for the theoretical-practical formulation of the doctrine of the relations between the Church and the state. For if it seemed that the new barbarian kingdoms tended to absorb the Church into the state to use it in the development of their institutions, and that the genuine juridical concept of their mutual relations grew obscure with the advance of feudalism, it is true, however, that the Church continued to affirm them until making them triumph again through the struggle for investitures. To clarify them recourse was had to similitudes and their explanations, such as that of the relations between soul and body, between moon and sun, and appeal was made to the two evangelical swords (Lk 22:38). The most effective formulator this time was Innocent III (d.It was in 1216) that he wrote, in connection with a dispute between the kings of France and England: “We do not intend to judge the fief that belongs to his (the king of France’s) jurisdiction... but we do decree on the sin that without doubt falls under our censure, a censure that we can and must exercise against any criminal sin to recall the sinner from vice to virtue, from error to truth, and especially when the sin is against the peace that is the bond of charity” (c. 13, X, 2, 1). The papal authority therefore extends to temporal matters ratione peccati, that is, whenever morality is at stake, whether in theory or in practice.

Innocent III also developed the medieval simile in this connection; he wrote to the Emperor Alexios of Constantinople: “You should know that God made two great lights in the firmament of the heavens: the greater light to rule the day, the lesser light to rule the night; both great, but one greater, for by the name of heaven is meant the Church... For the firmament of heaven, that is, of the universal Church, God made two great lights, that is, He established two great institutions in the history of mankind: one civil, the other ecclesiastical.” This dualism found adherents down to the end of the 16th century; the other was that of those jurists who, like Marsilius of Padua (v.), claimed for the imperial authority, conceived according to classical principles, superiority over the Church. It was this second tendency that, while adapting itself to the particular conceptions of individual writers, exercised the greater influence on the movement of ideas in the following age; nor was the influence of Roman law certainly foreign to II.
It is therefore understandable that when St Robert Bellarmine, in his controversy with Protestants and Anglicans, set forth his doctrine of indirect power, he encountered opposition from both opposing tendencies, so that he had against him even Sixtus V, who thought that he was too narrowly limiting the rights of the Church, and aroused the wrath of regalists of whatever confession. Bellarmine’s doctrine was in the end nothing more than a more up-to-date exposition of the medieval doctrine.

Starting from the principle that the end of the Church (namely, to lead men to eternal life by the means appointed by Christ) is by nature superior to that of the State, which is to attain temporal happiness, he concluded that the State is subordinate to the Church. Yet, since both societies are willed by God as sovereign, this subordination cannot be direct and absolute, but only accidental and indirect; and this implies that the attainment of the lower end must in no way hinder the attainment of the higher end, according to the Saviour’s saying: “What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world, but lose his own soul?” (Mt 16:26). On the contrary, the State, so far as necessary, must supply the Church with the means at its disposal for the attainment of its supernatural end; and correlatively the Church has power to remove the obstacles that the State might place in its way, to demand from it the assistance it may need, and indeed to settle by its own authority any conflicts that might arise on the part of the State itself. In this complex of rights of the Church over the State consists its indirect power.

On temporal matters, which are not governed for a temporal end but for a supernatural end, and insofar as temporal matters accidentally interfere with spiritual ones. In the end, Bellarmine was doing no more than expressing in other words the thought of Innocent III.
It must, however, be borne in mind that these accidental matters, so spiritual in nature, must be carefully distinguished from what are called res mixtae, which, though viewed from different aspects, are by their very nature both spiritual and temporal, such as the education of youth and marriage; these, if they concern the State, concern it directly and particularly, and are subject to the Church for the purpose of direct power.

This doctrine, which was also amply set forth by Báñez and Suárez, was formulated at a highly critical moment. From the time of the Councils of Constance and Basel, the interference of princes in ecclesiastical affairs had been active: the national spirit in relation to the supreme ecclesiastical authority grew ever stronger, and complaints against it were publicly voiced. The Protestant revolution went further: it granted to princes the ius reformandi, which in practice meant the right to impose within their territories the religious confession of their choice and to regulate its discipline. Less radical, the Catholic princes claimed the right to oversee the internal affairs of the Church in their states and to defend themselves against what they considered abuses and pretensions of the Roman Curia, in practice limiting the freedom of the Church; the most notorious episode was the proclamation of the Gallican Liberties in 1682, in which every indirect power was forthwith opposed. Instead, those jurisdictionalist doctrines were taught which constrained the freedom of the Church to the advantage of princes, particularly in matters of ecclesiastical property, benefices, and free communication with Rome, ever widening the State’s involvement in the government and discipline of the Church itself; it therefore became necessary to establish, through negotiations and concordats (v.), the limits of civil power which still professed to be Catholic.

With the principles of the French Revolution, religion was reduced to a purely private and personal affair and the Church to a de facto institution toward which the State, the sole authority in law, was to regulate itself at will and according to its interests: indeed, in the name of freedom of conscience, the State was to proclaim itself indifferent in matters of religion, except to combat it when it deemed it harmful. The principle was therefore proposed as opportune and legitimate for government: the maxim of a more or less radical separation of Church and State.from the State, a principle which, while it may seem the lesser evil where various religious confessions contend for predominance and the government is not held by Catholics, cannot but appear an outrage against God where Catholicism prevails, and for this reason Pius X declared it “most false and pernicious” (epist. Vehementer nos, 11 Feb. 1906).

The doctrine of the Church in its relations with the State is set forth with classical clarity by Leo XIII: “All that in the world in any way pertains to sacred things, all that concerns the salvation of souls or the worship of God, whether by its nature or by the end to which it is directed (here the Pontiff certainly intends to refer to indirect power), falls under the jurisdiction of the Church. All other matters which fall within the sphere of civil and political affairs it is right should be subject to civil authority, since Jesus Christ commanded that what is Caesar’s be rendered to Caesar and what is God’s to God” (enc. Immortale Dei, 1 Nov. 1885).

VI. LEGAL POSITION OF THE CHURCH UP TO JUSTINIAN

From numerous literary sources, imperial decrees and archaeological evidence it is established beyond dispute that in the pre-Constantinian age, certainly from the beginning of the 3rd century, ecclesiastical property in immovable goods—i.e., places of worship and cemeteries—existed, no longer private as in the first two centuries, but belonging to the Christian community.

Already Lampridius in the biography of Alexander Severus (222-235) included in the Historia Augusta (ch. 49) recounts that in a property dispute between the guild of innkeepers (“popinarii”) and the Christian community of Rome over a plot of land that had once belonged to the public domain and on which the Christians wished to erect a sacred building, the emperor rejected the claims of the innkeepers and decided the controversy in favor of the Christians. This imperial concession to exploit a plot already part of the public domain is clear proof that the Roman public authority itself recognized in Christian associations the capacity to dispose legally of immovable property. This capacity is likewise confirmed by a rescript of the emperor Gallienus, dating from aboutIn 260, he revoked the edict of persecution issued by his father Valerian and restored to the Christians the places dedicated to religious worship and the cemeteries (cf. Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica, VII, 13). For example, the Catacomb of Callisto on the Appian Way, which belonged to the Christian community of Rome from the early 3rd century, is clearly attested in a passage from the Philosophumena (IX, 12); the Christian community of Dura-Europos possessed the "domus ecclesiae," recently excavated and found to contain a baptistery decorated with paintings certainly dating before 256.

Given this, the question naturally arises: under what legal guise could not only the formation but also the state recognition of Christian property occur, when it is well known that Christianity in the pre-Constantinian age was officially proscribed and from time to time cruelly persecuted?

Various hypotheses have been proposed to resolve this issue and overcome what, at least on the surface, seems an almost insurmountable difficulty. Here are the main ones:

1) De Rossi believed he had found the solution in a peculiarity of the legislation on associations. Immovable property would not have belonged directly to the Church, but to certain associations of poor people whose primary purpose was to secure a decent burial ("collegia tenuiorum"). Such associations formed in every city, and their existence did not require special authorization from the public authority. Christian communities would easily have taken refuge under the protection of the law granted to such collegia.

2) Monti and De Robertis developed De Rossi’s theory, arguing, however, that Christians organized themselves into "collegia tenuiorum" not by subterfuge but legally, since Christian associations would have derived their right to exist from the general presumption of legality favoring all associations that

they might have been formed following the issuance of a senatus consultum in favor of the *tenuiores*.

3) BANDINI, taking up an hypothesis hesitantly advanced by MOMMSEN and LIEBCNAM, has held that since the *collegia tenuiorum* could assume the most varied forms and have aims very similar to those of modern mutual aid societies, the Christian associations, even though not funeral associations, were nevertheless considered legally licit precisely for this purpose of mutuality.

4) DUCHESNE has proposed two entirely different solutions: he has held, namely, that the C. [Christian Church] possessed real estate either by tolerance or by recognition, without any subterfuge, without any legal *fictio*.

5) WALTZING has developed DUCHESNE’s theory of tolerance: the Christian communities would not have had legal personality, would have been associations *de facto* developed almost on the margins of the law, following a tacit permission to live, and would have enjoyed their properties during periods of calm.

6) KRÜGER, for her part, has taken up DUCHESNE’s theory of state recognition, which would have granted the Christian associations the special authorization they would have needed since they were not *collegia tenuiorum*.

7) MARUCCHI, later followed by NEUBECKER, has proposed a new solution: the C. would have held property in real estate through interposed persons. Certain private citizens would have possessed it in its name, and before the civil power they would have been the owners.

8) ROBERTI has entirely denied the problem, since he has not admitted that in the pre-Constantinian age the C. possessed movable and immovable goods legally registered in the name of Christian communities. In any case, the immovable goods could not have belonged to the C., since they could not be registered in the name of entities not recognized by the State.

9) VOLTERRA has proposed that the Christian associations would have had as the foundation of their legal existence the concession made by the State to juridical communities that enjoyed full recognition throughout the Empire. Roman magistrates would have considered applicable to the Christian associations the edicts that granted the Jews the right of assembly and association.

Despite their ingenuity, these theories do not seem to resolve the problem exhaustively or to explain the attitude of political authority toward ecclesiastical property.

The most plausible solution appears to be that which derives from considering the Christian communities capable of freely constituting themselves like other associations, given that—as has recently been demonstrated by SCHNORR VON CAROLSFELD—there never intervened, either during the Republican period or during the Imperial period, a general statutory provision that limited to citizens the faculty of associating.Le comunità cristiane non ebbero quindi bisogno di ricorrere a sotterfugio – come quello di nascondersi sotto la specie giuridica dei «collegia tenuiorum» – né di presentarsi come semplici associazioni «de facto», quasi che si fossero sviluppate in margine alla legge e fossero quindi tollerate da parte dello Stato. Potendo legalmente associarsi è chiaro che potranno godere di tutti i diritti della collettività e quindi anche possedere collettivamente, non corporativamente, giacché, come ha bene messo in luce l'Albertario, quella figura di persona giuridica che è la «corporazione» si è venuta determinando soltanto nel diritto post-classico giustinianeo. In età precedente tutti gli aggregati di diritto pubblico e privato costituirono solo delle collettività di persone fisiche e non furono mai considerati come unità astratte, cioè come soggetti giuridici diversi e indipendenti dalle persone fisiche di cui erano composti.
Bisogna nondimeno rilevare che sebbene le associazioni cristiane di fronte allo Stato passassero per semplici aggregati di persone e sotto quest'aspetto potessero possedere, pure erano animate da un interno spirito corporativo ed imperniate su basi essenzialmente diverse dalle altre associazioni.
Questo interno spirito corporativo per cui la C. si ritenne persona giuridica perenne, non apparve esplicitamente nei primi tre secoli, ma nel periodo giustinianeo, tanto è vero che le disposizioni contenute nel Codice di Giustiniano e nelle Novelle miroarono soltanto, come dice il Roberti, a «codificare uno stato di fatto, ciò che era nella coscienza cristiana un principio di diritto» (v. BENI ECCLESIASTICI; COLLEGIA FUNERATICA).

Although the Apostles, in the early days, did not strictly speaking have such buildings, there is no doubt that even in the apostolic age certain places were set aside for the gatherings of Christians for the exercise of worship, as testified by St. Paul (1 Cor 11:22). Modest and hidden during the period of persecutions were the so-called “domus ecclesiae,” although there were also true and proper public c., which were destroyed in the Diocletian persecution only to rise again splendidly, especially through the work of Constantine. Many pagan temples were transformed into Christian c., which at first took the form of a cross facing east and then the most diverse architectural forms.

The juridical discipline of c. was first formed in a fragmentary and rudimentary manner; then from the 5th century onwards there are some indications of a unified discipline, which gradually extended until the 13th century, when we already find a series of fairly stable principles, especially regarding the relationships between the c. and its founder, the opening to worship, the officiating, the violation, and the immunity.

Can. 1162 §1 stipulates that a c. cannot be built without the express, written consent of the Ordinary, consent which cannot be given by the vicar general without special mandate. Before giving his consent the Ordinary must

Churches, if the means necessary for their construction and maintenance, as well as for the support of the ministers of worship and other related expenses, are available, the Ordinary must seek the opinion of the rectors of nearby churches and must ensure that the rules proper to sacred art are respected in the construction of the church, taking into account tradition and sound modernity, according to the principles of the Code of Canon Law and the norms issued by Pius XI (can. 1162 §§ 2-3, 1164; cf. also AAS, 24 [1932], p. 536 sqq.). Before divine offices are celebrated in it, the church must be consecrated by the Ordinary with certain solemnities or at least blessed; cathedrals, and insofar as possible also collegiate, conventual, and parish churches, must be dedicated to divine worship by solemn consecration; churches made of wood, iron, or other metal may be blessed but not consecrated (can. 1165 §§ 1, 3, 4). Churches that may reasonably be expected to be used for profane purposes due to necessity cannot be blessed or consecrated (can. 1165 § 2). Subterranean parts are also considered part of the church and therefore cannot be adapted for use as parish cinemas or theaters (Authentic Decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, 3546).

With the consecration of the church, the main altar must also be consecrated if it has not already been consecrated; and a secondary fixed altar must be consecrated as well, if the main altar was already consecrated at the time of the church’s blessing (can. 1165 § 5). However, the consecration of a church in which an altar is not consecrated at the same time would be illicit but not invalid (Authentic Decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, 3409, 1).

Churches, whether consecrated or blessed, like all sacred places, are exempt from the jurisdiction of civil authority, as the legitimate ecclesiastical authority reserves to itself the free exercise of its jurisdictional power within them (can. 1160).

A church does not lose its consecration or blessing unless it has been entirely destroyed, or the greater part of its walls has collapsed, or the Ordinary has reduced it to profane use (can. 1170). After consecration, a church may no longer serve for the exercise of divine worship unless it has first been reconsecrated or blessed.

Distinct from consecration is the pollution or violation of a church, i.e., the contamination of its sacred character, which occurs when one of the following acts has been committed in it in a certain and notorious manner: murder, to which suicide is equated; disgraceful and significant shedding of blood (unless the killing or wounding occurs in legitimate self-defense); impious and filthy uses; burial of an unbeliever or an excommunicated person after a declaratory or condemnatory sentence (can. 1172 § 1).Once contaminated in any of these ways, the divine offices cannot be celebrated, the sacraments administered, nor the dead buried until provision has been made for its reconciliation according to the rites described in the approved liturgical books (can. 1173 § 1, 1174 § 1). The effect is immediate and may interrupt Mass if it has not yet reached the Canon. If the contamination arose from the burial of an unbeliever or an excommunicate, reconciliation cannot take place until the corpse has been removed (can. 1175). If the violation of the contamination is doubtful, reconciliation may be performed “ad cautelam” (can. 1174 § 2).

For the effects of interdict with regard to contamination, V. INTERDETTO.

The sacred character of the church implies, on the one hand, the prohibition of carrying on within it any kind of commerce (even if undertaken for a pious purpose) and any other act unbecoming the holiness of the place (can. 1178); on the other hand, the right of asylum (v. ASILO).

Entry into churches to attend sacred rites must be free of charge; contrary custom is not admitted (can. 1181).

There are various categories of churches: an archbasilica is the Constantinian basilica of the Most Holy Saviour, now S. Giovanni in Laterano; patriarchal churches are S. Pietro in Vaticano, S. Paolo fuori le mura, S. Maria Maggiore, and S. Lorenzo in Agro Verano; major or minor basilicas; cathedral churches (patriarchal or primatial, metropolitan or simple cathedrals); abbatial churches; collegiate churches; parish churches; regular churches; recettizie churches (v. RICETTIZIE, CHIESE, CHIESE); palatine churches (v. CHIESE E CAPPELLE); etc.

The administration of goods destined for the maintenance, repair, and adornment of the church, as well as for the exercise of divine worship within it, belongs, in the absence of any special title or legitimate custom to the contrary, to the bishop and the cathedral chapter, or to the collegiate chapter, and to the rector, according to whether the church is cathedral, collegiate, or of another nature (can. 1182 § 1).

With regard to the preservation and restoration of churches, can. 1186, after referring to particular customs and conventions as well as to obligations arising from civil laws, provides that the burden of repairing a cathedral church falls successively upon: the fabrica’s assets, i.e., the patrimony, whether or not constituted as a juridical person, destined for the maintenance of the church and for expenses of worship, excepting the portion necessary for the celebration of divine worship and the ordinary administration of the church; the bishop and canons in proportion to their income, after deduction of what is necessary for their decent livelihood; the diocesan faithful. The burden of repairing a parish church falls successively upon: the fabrica’s assets, as above; the patron; those who draw income from the church, to the extent determined by the Ordinary in proportion to the income received; the parishioners.

Churches moreover, like all buildings open to worship, are exempt from requisition and occupation, except in cases of grave public necessity, when prior agreement with the Ordinary is required, or at least, if there is absolute urgency, immediate communication to him. Likewise, except in cases of urgent necessity, public force may not enter churches, for the exercise of their functions, without having given prior notice to the ecclesiastical authority; nor may any church open to worship be demolished for any cause without prior agreement with this authority (arts. 9–10 of the Concordat).

Pio Cipriotti – Salvatore Marsili

III. CANONICAL-LITURGICAL PRESCRIPTIONS
SUMMARY:

I. Blessing of the first stone

II. Blessing and consecration

III. Anniversary of the dedication

IV. Reconciliation

V. Kinds of churches.

For the historical part, V. PREDICAZIONE.

I. BLESSING OF THE FOUNDATION STONE

Before building a church, the first stone of the foundations is blessed, and a case containing a parchment is inserted in it to commemorate the event. The Code of Canon Law (can. 1163) states that this blessing is within the competence of those who have the faculty to bless sacred places in general; hence the rite is described in the Roman Pontifical (De benedict. et impositione primarii lapidis) if the one blessing is a bishop, and in the Roman Ritual (8, 36) if it is a simple priest. The blessing of the water is not necessary if it is already

**CHIESA**

Blessing of the First Stone of a Church. Miniature from a Roman Pontifical (early 16th century) — Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. lat. 1226, vol. I, fol. 1v.

Water is blessed if the one blessing is a priest (Rit. Rom., loc. cit.); it is required if a bishop is officiating (Pontif. Rom., loc. cit.). After this rite, the place where the cross had been planted for the future high altar is blessed, then the stone itself is blessed. On its surfaces, after the blessing, the bishop inscribes a cross with an iron point. Then, after an antiphon and a psalm, the bishop, assisted by the mason, places the stone in position, reciting a prayer and then sprinkling II. Finally, he sprinkles the foundations or the site where they will be laid, and concludes the rite with the *Veni Creator Spiritus*, and, if desired, with the Mass of the future church’s titular saint. The custom of planting the cross in the place of the altar and thus of the church is, more than an act of devotion, at least in the East, a juridical act signifying under whose authority the new church will fall (v. STAUROPEGIO).

It seems that popes, to take possession of a church, sometimes sent the first stone itself (Callistus II, *Epist.*, 150: PL 163, 1218).

II. Blessing and Consecration — Ordinary Minister
The ordinary minister of the consecration of a church is the diocesan bishop; by privilege, also a cardinal, even if not a bishop (CIC, can. 239 §1 n. 20), anywhere in the world, and a Benedictine abbot (CIC, can. 323 §2) by right within his jurisdiction and by delegation elsewhere. A simple priest cannot be delegated. The consecrator and the one requesting the consecration, as well as the people for whom the church is being consecrated, must observe a day of fasting before the consecration (CIC, can. 1166 §2; Pontif. Rom.: *De eccl. dedicatione*). If the consecrator is a bishop or cardinal (CIC, can. 239 §1 n. 24), even when consecrating outside his jurisdiction, he may grant a year’s indulgence to all who visit the church on the day of its consecration (CIC, can. 1166 §3). At the end of the rite, the consecrator must celebrate Mass; if he is too fatigued (Pontif. Rom., loc. cit.), another priest may do so. To omit the Mass for other than sudden reasons is forbidden without special apostolic indult (Decr. auth. S. Rit. Congr., 2866). It is preferable that the rite take place on a holy day of obligation (CIC, can. 1166 §2; Pontif. Rom., loc. cit.).

The rite of blessing is found in the *Rituale Romanum* (tit. 8, n. 27) and consists of an external and an internal sprinkling of the church, interspersed with the litany of the saints, which is sung while entering the church. It concludes with Mass, though it is not prescribed that the celebrant be the one who performed the blessing.The minister of the blessing is the simple priest, but with the bishop’s permission.

At the moment of the consecration or blessing of a church, it is given a title, namely the name of the saint, or of the Divine Person, or of the mystery in whose honor it is consecrated, and this title adheres irrevocably to the church for as long as its consecration or blessing lasts (CIC, can. 1168 § 1): Decret. auth. S. Rit. Congr., 402; 2719; 3059). The title may also be chosen at the laying of the first stone (cf. Pontif. Rom.: De benedictione et impositione primarii lapidis, Rit. Rom., 8, 26, 4), and it may be changed at the time of the blessing or consecration (A. Blat, Comment. textus I. C. t. III De rebus, Roma 1923, p. 23), because only this act confers immutability on the title (S. Many, Proelectiones de locis sacris, Parigi 1904, p. 55). Without apostolic indult, the blessed cannot be titulars of a church (CIC, can. 1168, § 3). Every year, the feast of the titular with a common octave must be celebrated (CIC, can. 1168 § 2; Decr. auth. S. Rit. Congr. 4023, 1; Brev. Rom.: Additiones et variationes in rubricis generalibus 9, 2), and if it is the cathedral, throughout the diocese by all who use the diocesan calendar, as a double of the first class with a common octave. The titular must also be commemorated in the Oremus of the common commemorations or suffrages, in the place corresponding to his dignity (Brev. Rom. Rubricae generales, 35, 1).

III. Anniversary of the dedication

Among the principal local feasts must be reckoned the anniversary of the dedication.

CHIESA — Dedicazione d’una chiesa. L’aspersione dell’edificio. Miniatura di un Pontificale Romano (fine sec. XV) — Lione, Biblioteca Municipale, ms. 5144, f. 23.

Dedication (not of the blessing) of a church (CIC, can. 1167). It is considered a feast of the Lord, a double feast of the first class with an octave, and is found both in the Roman Missal and in the Roman Breviary under the title of the "Communio" for the tenth anniversary of ecclesiastical years.

The feast, perhaps inspired by the Jewish Dedicatory Feasts, is of very ancient date in the liturgical tradition. The first mention is found in the anniversary of the dedication of the Constantinian Martyrium in Jerusalem, which lasted eight days (Sozomen, Hist. eccl., II, 26: PG 67, 1008 sqq.). St. Gregory Nazianzen has a sermon εἰς τὴν χανῆν κυρίαν (PG 36, 608 sqq.). St. Augustine has three sermons *De dedicazione ecclesiae* (PL 38, 1471 sqq.), and so does St. Caesarius of Arles (S. Caesarii opera omnia, ed. G. Morin, I, 11, Maredsous 1937, p. 852 sqq.).

The Leonine Sacramentary (ed. Ch. L. Feltoe, Cambridge 1896, p. 106) gives the indication: *Prid. Kal. Oct. N(atale) Basilicae Angeli in Salaria*, in which the ancient classical expression indicating anniversaries is found: *Natale* (cf. St. Augustine and St. Caesarius, loc. cit.). Other dedications mentioned in the sacramentaries include: *Natale S. Maria ad Martires* (Sacram. Greg., ed. H. A. Wilson, p. 73); *Dedicatione Natalis S. Nicomedis* (Sacram. Greg. ibid., p. 82). It must be noted, however, that many feasts of saints in Rome owe their origin to the dedication of their respective churches; such are, for example, 1 May (SS. Philip and James), 1 August (St. Peter in Chains), 5 August (St. Mary ad Nives), still celebrated today as the dedication of St. Mary Major.

In ancient times, the anniversary of the dedication of a church gave rise to popular festivals and fairs, as is evident from St. Gregory the Great (Epist., XI, 76; I, 56) and from the German word *Kirmes* (a contraction of *Kirche* = church and *Messe* = Mass, feast), which today is equivalent to a patronal feast or fair.

IV. RECONCILIATION

Whereas a profaned church (q.V. above) regains its sacred character only through consecration, a violated church requires only reconciliation to this end. The Code of Canon Law, having imposed (can. 1174) the obligation to provide for reconciliation promptly and after prescribing (can. 1175) the removal of the corpse if the violation occurred through the burial of an excommunicated person or an unbeliever, distinguishes between the reconciliation of a consecrated church and that of a merely blessed church. Reconciliation of a blessed church may now be performed by the rector of the church or any other priest with his at least presumed permission (can. 1176), using the rite prescribed in the Roman Ritual, tit. 8, cap. 28. Reconciliation of a consecrated church, according to the Code of Canon Law, can. 1176 § 2, with reference to can. 1156, may also be carried out by a simple priest, provided he is delegated; in cases of grave and urgent necessity, delegation is presumed, at least for the rector, who nevertheless remains obliged to notify the local Ordinary of the reconciliation that has taken place (Code of Canon Law, can. 1196, § 3). For such a reconciliation, the rite is prescribed in the Roman Pontifical: De ecclesiae et coemeterii reconciliatione. The Code of Canon Law, can. 1177, adapts the prescriptions of the Roman Ritual, tit. 8, cap. 28, and of the Roman Pontifical, loc. cit., to what has been stated above. The prescription regarding the use of different holy water as required by the two books remains in force, notwithstanding the extension of the faculty to a simple priest to reconcile a consecrated church.

V. SPECIE DI C

Cathedral (v.), metropolitan, primatial, patriarchal is the principal church of a diocese, in which is found the cathedral or throne of the bishop, metropolitan, primate, or patriarch. Abbey church is the cathedral of an abbey where the throne of the abbot is located. Collegiate is one served by a Chapter distinct from that of the cathedral. Parish church is the principal church of the parish, where the baptistery is also found. Regular, conventual, religious church is one belonging to a religious order or permanently entrusted to II. Rectory church is one served by a priest dependent on the Ordinary; often these churches are entrusted to confraternities and the chaplain is its rector. Finally, a subsidiary church is one dependent on another, called the mother church.

VI. ALSO BASILICA.

VII. ART.

OUTLINE:

I. Architecture

II. History

III. Decoration.

I. ARCHITECTURE

The constructive history of the building destined for worship, church architecture, offers us the means to gather, according to some great organic lines, the long and vast evolution of this age-old theme and to verify, through this experience, the possible ways in which architecture has responded to its functional needs.

The organic principles within which the developments of the type of church architecture can be summarized are the following: a) longitudinal, axial buildings (basilican): symmetrical with respect to a single axis; b) central and semi-central buildings: symmetrical with respect to two or more axes; c) buildings resulting from the association of the preceding systems.

In group a are included buildings with multiple naves arranged along longitudinal axes converging toward the end of the sacred edifice: the sanctuary, the altar. In group b are included sacred buildings symmetrically composed around a single center. In group c are included churches that have a front part with longitudinal development of type a, and a part, generally constituting the choir, transept, or presbytery, of a form that is itself symmetrical, of type b, and this often developed to the end and external conclusion of the edifice in the tribune or in the dome. The compositional variants related to each of these primary fundamental conceptions depend, in a strictly constructive and technical sense, on the relationship between the resistant frameworks for support and the distribution of loads and actions deriving from the covering of the spaces; that is, those deriving from the two great possible methods of covering: the architrave, acting by vertical weight on the support, rigid (ashlar, blocks) or elastic (wood, iron, reinforced concrete), and thus generically flat or roofed coverings; and those of vault and dome, in stone, masonry, or elastic materials, determining lateral actions and consequent opposing reactions in various ways and forms of buttressing. These two constructive systems sometimes associate and compose with one another.

I. In a more detailed examination, the buildings of group a, whether with heavy or thrusting coverings, can in turn be grouped, with regard to the constructive organism, according to some fundamentally constant types for each era and each place.

These types are the following: 1) based on a hall: either rectangular or variously symmetrical with respect to two axes; 2) expanded at the head in the form of a T; 3) in the form of a Latin cross; 4) concluded in the apse and the sacrum. As variants of the perimeter, there is 5) the movement of niches inserted into the thickness of the walls or protruding from the line of the wall like expansions functioning as chapels and buttressing in the case of vaulted environments. These are the forms of the most ancient churches in which we still glimpse the architectural plasticity of pagan halls but which are constructed independently in every region of Christendom throughout the Middle Ages and then progressively even during the prevalence of Gothic taste, especially in Tuscany and Veneto, with a persistence in these latter regions that continues through stylistic transformations up to the 16th and 17th centuries. And into this type can also be included the entire development of churches of the Baroque period, especially

Church — Basilica planimetric schemes, longitudinal and association of longitudinal and central systems: a b c d f g h forms more properly medieval; m Byzantine form; c the scheme of the 16th- and 17th-century nave; e Cistercian scheme; n p medieval and Byzantine scheme; q typical Renaissance and Baroque form; s scheme of S. Maria del Fiore (Florence); r I fourteenth-century basilica schemes (Charterhouse and Pavia Cathedral; S. Sebastiano in Siena).

Church — Central planimetric schemes: a b e e f g i l central forms more properly medieval; d h Baroque forms; m r Byzantine forms; n s Byzantine forms; o p q Byzantine and Renaissance forms; t Bramantesque scheme of the basilica of St Peter.

Nordic churches that depart from a Borrominian plan (Propaganda Fide, Filippini, Madonna dei Sette Dolori, S. Carlino alle Quattro Fontane), develop the plastic and spatial theme through curvilinear or mixed perimeters. 1) A volumetric and spatial complication of this fundamental type of hall church is constituted by the Roman conception of the 16th-century church (S. Spirito by A. da Sangallo, S. Caterina dei Funari by Guidetti, S. Marcello, S. Maria in Via, etc.), and this still in the expansion of a transept (S. Maria di Monserrato, S. Gerolamo degli Schiavoni). 2) In the simplest organic development, we consider churches that at the head are expanded by two transverse expansions to form a transept in front of the apse. These are primitive forms of the 5th–6th centuries frequent in Upper Italy (pl. I: a, b, c). 3) The cycle of organisms that, both in plan and in external volume, are composed around the symbolic sign of the Latin cross has examples in the Renaissance (Madonna del Calcinaio in Cortona, S. Maria di Provenzale in Siena, S. Maria degli Angeli in Siena, S. Giovanni Battista in Pistoia; pl. I: d). 4) Traditional and constructive reasons render typical of the church the basilican forms with three or more naves. However, churches with two naves side by side are also known, though as exceptions, in the Illyrian regions. Within the framework of basilican forms, however, some variants can be discerned (pl. I: e, f, g, h, i); these forms, which in section resolve the problem of lighting by the gradual lowering of the naves from the center toward the sides, recur, in terms of planimetry, even in buildings with naves of equal height (S. Maria dell’Anima and S. Giacomo degli Spagnoli in Rome, the duomo of Perugia, the duomo of Pienza). 5) Churches in which the three-nave organism develops into the form of the Latin cross. A typical example is the duomo of Pisa and S. Ciriaco of Ancona; analogous developments occur in the Renaissance, as in S. Spirito by Brunelleschi (pl. I: p, r, t).

2. Similarly, the buildings of group b (buildings with a central plan) must be considered in relation to the two possible systems of heavy and vaulted roofing. They unfold from elementary geometric forms by composing unitary volumes, variously animated by niches or attached chapels (pl. II). The above fundamental schemes become more complex through concentric, annular, and radial solutions. We include in the group of symmetrical buildings also the semi-central oblong forms; such are the elliptical forms so rich in interpretation in the Baroque (pl. II: d, h). As for the round form, a reference can be made to pagan Roman buildings subsequently transformed for Catholic worship (SS. Cosma e Damiano, S. Teodoro, S.Maria ad Martyres—Pantheon). But in the Roman sources sought by Renaissance artists, drawn by the renewed classical culture and the fascination of ancient Rome, it is certain that the inspiration

Campagna at Verona. Similarly, the simple volume unfolding from the octagon finds, beyond the typical baptisterial adaptation, a specific application to worship in the 15th century: S. Maria della Pace in Rome, the Madonna del Pozzo in Empoli, the Omità by Vitoni in Pistoia, and the 16th-century Madonna di Macereto. A Byzantine imprint instead marks the construction of buildings that solve the volumetric and spatial problem by superimposing a variably raised dome on a cylindrical drum over a cubic base (pl. II: a). This form has Renaissance developments in the Pazzi Chapel, in the sacristy of S. Lorenzo, and again in the 16th century in the Sangallo-designed S. Maria di Loreto and in S. Maria Porta Paradiso, in the Sammicheli-designed Montefiascone cathedral, in the Vignola-designed chapel on Isola di Bolsena, in the Richini-designed S. Giuseppe, up to the Baroque church of S. Maria del Pianto by Longhena.

The symbolic appeal of the cross, however, greatly favors the development of churches in Christian East, although it had precedents in martyria and memoriae, and an Ambrosian inscription in the church of S. Nazzaro in Milan reminds us: "Forma crucis templum est, templum victoria Christi, sacra triumphalis signat imago locum."

In the Western tradition, cross-shaped churches are found in Ravenna at S. Croce, in Salona in the basilica. Cross-shaped martyria are in Padua, at S. Prosdocimo and S. Maria Mater Domini, in Vicenza at S. Teuteria and Tosca, in Rome in the oratory of the Cross. The unitary composition that can be inscribed in a pyramidal form, for its development from a base zone with a cruciform plan and thus volumetrically delineated in elevation into symmetrical cross arms converging toward a terminal tiburium or dome, constitutes, by its rigorous unity, an aesthetic ideal of the Renaissance (pl. II: p, q).

S. Sebastian at Mantua by Alberti, the Madonna delle Carceri at Prato by Giuliano da Sangallo, the S. Biagio at Montepulciano by Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, the church of the Innocenti at Siena and so on throughout the 16th century, Raphael’s vision of S. Eligio and the Chigi chapel, and Bramante’s S. Maria della Quercia, and again in the 17th century SS. Luca e Martina, all show this distinctive feature (pl. II: o). The same theme recurs in trilobate or quadrilobate forms (sometimes applied to a central cubic core) as a development of the concept of tricora cells, which are more frequent in the religious architecture of Africa but were taken up in Byzantine architecture (S. Nicola at Nonna), and made more complex in the concentric and annular systems of Asia Minor (church of Koricos), of Amida (Mesopotamia), of Rusapha (Sergiopolis, Syria), of Hadrianopolis, of Pastischa (Philippopolis), and to this embryo, which has its magnificent development in S. Lorenzo at Milan, is linked the Bramantesque conception of the Bramantesque and Michelangelesque S. Pietro. Indeed, it determines the Bramantesque style of the Consolazione at Todi, the choir of the Grazie at Milan, and, in later forms, of S. Maria del Belvedere at Città di Castello by A. Gabrielli (1685).

The insertion of the cross within a square perimeter (pl. II: n, p, r, s) and the consequent organic developments, whereby from the cubic base perimeter one passes through the inward turning of internal cores to external circular forms and thus to the external conclusion of a dome, is a problem solved in Byzantine sacred architecture (v. ARTE). It is transformed in the Romanesque period (S. Satiro in Milan, S. Giusto at Trier, S. Germigny-des-Prés) and finds expression in Renaissance forms in many and varied areas (S. Giovanni Crisostomo) and generally in the translation of Bramante’s symmetry in S. Celso, S. Biagio della Pagnotta in Rome and in the derivations in the church of the Vergine at Macerata, S. Maria Nuova at Coronea, down to the later 17th-century applications in which Bramante’s original solution becomes more richly decorative and fanciful (e.g., S. Geremia at Venice, S. Alessandro at Milan and the Annunziata at Genoa by Alessi). From this initial structural unity all the great Byzantine churches arose, of which S. Marco at Venice offers the closest image. This organic nucleus, though varying in external formal dress, remains constant in the great Venetian architectural tradition even during the Renaissance: S. Salvatore at Venice, S. Giustina and the cathedral of Padua. This concept of a radiating of elements that depart from central nuclei and with these recompose a new unity belongs to the vision of the Renaissance and reaches its apex in Leonardo’s conceptions and their realization in certain buildings, especially in Lombardy (Crema, S. Maria della Croce; Milan, S. Maria della Passione; Siena, S.Sebastiano in Valpietra), and it is favored by the imagination of the Baroque (Piedmontese architectures derived from Guarini, the Salute in Venice).

3. The two systems a and b combine and associate with each other in ecclesiastical buildings, forming the typical basilica with a tiburium and dome characteristic of the Italian architectural tradition (pl. II: q, r, s, t). This form is already foreshadowed in the Cistercian organism when the tiburium rises at the intersection of the naves (Casamari, Fossanova, Ferentino, Vercelli, Chiaravalle), but it also has its beginnings in the Roman period (the original design of Pisa Cathedral, the original design of Siena Cathedral, Piacenza Cathedral, Ancona Cathedral) and in the Lombard churches of S. Babilia, S. Nazaro, S. Simpliciano, S. Pietro in Cieldoro, in Pavia at S. Michele, and in Parma at the cathedral. This type reaches its triumph in Florence Cathedral and remains in the Roman churches of the Renaissance and later periods (S. Maria del Popolo, the Gesù of Vignola, S. Maria in Vallicella, S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini, S. Ignazio, S. Carlo al Corso). It must also be connected to the transformation of Bramante’s plan for St. Peter’s into a longitudinal form through the studies of Raphael and Giuliano da Sangallo, and it is completed in Palladio’s compositions of S. Giorgio and the Redentore. Finally, one must consider the buildings that result from an axial arrangement of spaces, each of which has its own symmetrical unity (S. Maria in Campitelli, S. Atanasio dei Greci, S. Maria della Scala in Rome, the Scalzi in Venice).

In this typology, which summarizes, on the basis of essential planimetric lines and geometric volumetric accents, the experiences of two millennia of religious architectural history, there appears to be an immobility of characteristic functional types in which the perennial nature of Catholic ritual is reflected, and thus the form of a tradition within which, however, the religious spirit lives, transforms, and evolves with infinite variety across time and place. How this spirit has dominated matter to modulate spaces, to make them vibrant with light, color, and plastic artifices, must be studied in the variants that art history discerns in the great historical-artistic cycles. Splendid at all times has been the house of God: splendid in form through human artifice in the invention of architectural plastics; splendid in materials—such were the marbles and stones of St. Peter’s, St. Paul’s, and St. John’s in Rome, such as in the churches of Constantinople, illuminated with color; splendid even when the Franciscan rule of simplicity achieves a splendor of beauty in the harmonious consonance and synthesis of parts and of every element within the whole of the composition. Then the mantle of glory will be given by Giotto.

Vincenzo Fasolo.

II. HISTORY

Regarding the architectural character of the earliest Christian churches, see what has been said on this subject in the article BASILICA as well as in the article ARCHITETTURA ECCLESIASTICA and — for the churches of the East — in the article BIZANTINA, ARTE. In any case, it is appropriate to recall here that already from the 4th century and, with greater determination, from the 5th century, in church buildings — particularly those with a central system — certain architectural features began to appear that were destined to remain at the foundation of all further developments in medieval art. That is to say, in the architecture of the churches of that age, alongside the exaltation of the plastic values proper to ancient art, there emerged in the arrangement of architectural members and decoration a new search for luministic and pictorial values.

Even at the beginning of the 9th century, during that revival of the arts connected with the restoration of the Western Empire, the architectural character of the churches remained substantially unchanged from the most ancient models, despite a certain greater contrast of light and shadow that sometimes seems to foreshadow the rise of the Romanesque age. In that age, especially in Italy through the work of Lombard builders, architectural masses and spaces were subjected to a process of rationalization that involved the construction of vaulted roofs. The supports then took on increasingly complex forms of piers. Balance regulated the organism of the building to the point of making bricks reappear in a function entirely different from that in which they had been used in the first centuries of Christianity; the relatively limited height and the concentration of stresses within the massive walls perhaps conferred an almost entirely new character upon sacred buildings. Yet while this occurred in the architectural environment dominated by Lombard taste — with the most significant models at Milan in S. Ambrogio, at Como, Pavia, Parma, Modena, etc. — there were no lack of various compromises between Lombard innovations and the persistence of Byzantine themes in the Venetian region.

While in Tuscany, Latium, and Campania the ancient traditional taste prevails; here, however, Romanesque robustness is characterized by a more attentive and original sense of proportions, while there is evident awareness of those aesthetic values that had already been exalted during the classical period. That is to say, during the Romanesque period in these latter regions, there is a conscious return to forms proper to the first centuries of Christianity. The Lombard premise finds in France and in the other territories of Central Europe its logical conclusion in the Gothic, which, through an enhancement of Romanesque dynamism, arrives at eliminating in the church all wall masses devoid of constructive significance. However, in Italy imported models had only slight resonance.

The variety of Gothic proper to the builders of the Cistercian abbeys, numerous even in Central Italy (v. CISTERCENSI (SACRO ORDINE CISTERCENSE)), was instead widely received. The originality of Italian church architecture in the 13th and 14th centuries was therefore quite pronounced. Nevertheless, the fact of having in many cases discarded vaulted ceilings, as in the notable example of Santa Croce in Florence, deprived the Gothic organism of its most characteristic element. Through the great richness of forms that modifies three-teenth-century churches from region to region — one need only think of Santa Maria dei Frari or the cathedral of Orvieto — the cathedral of Florence represents the grafting of a central plan onto a three-aisled basilican body, where the dome provides a precise definition of internal space in contrast to the indefiniteness of the Gothic lantern. In this sense, the church of Santa Maria del Fiore clearly anticipates aspects of ecclesiastical buildings of the Renaissance; in which one cannot certainly recognize a pure return to ancient or proto-Christian classicism, but the new product of a creative faculty that interprets the data of tradition differently with a view to a geometric determination of space. The aerial vision of Brunelleschi, in which the wall surface has the pure value of a limit, is enriched by Alberti with values of mass derived from a new deepening of Roman classical architecture. With the rediscovered taste for a musical relationship of plastic masses, interest comes to prevail for construction on a centralized system, the highest aspiration of a Renaissance architect. And after Santa Maria delle Carceri in Prato by Giuliano da Sangallo and the Bramantesque experience of the choir of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, it finds its highest expression in the projects both of Bramante and of Sangallo and of Michelangelo for the construction of the basilica of St. Peter. The Bramantean teaching, moreover, diffuses and unifies individual regional tendencies. And even when practical necessities advised building churches## ARCHITECTURE, SACRED

The longitudinal development with a single or triple nave and side chapels, rather than structural necessities, sacrificed the harmony of spaces and masses in the centralized system due to new trends in taste. The Gesù by Vignola or the churches by Palladio thus respond to the prevailing taste of their time; in those buildings the internal space tends to be enhanced perspectively by the curvature of the apses and the dome, while the chapels, subordinate to the central nave, soon assume the character of a real unity with it, a unity already achieved in Rome at S. Andrea della Valle.

Later, once the critical attitude was overcome in the new creative freedom, central plans returned to express the supreme equilibrium of space and masses. While a large group of architects remained attached to late 16th-century schemes, the new word in ecclesiastical architecture belongs to Borromini in S. Carlino and S. Ivo, to Pietro da Cortona in S. Luca, to Bernini in S. Andrea al Quirinale—buildings linked to one another, despite the diversity of methods employed to achieve it, by a characteristic sense of the perspectival dilation of space. Outside Rome the same trend found new vigor in the art of Guarini, while the church of the Salute in Venice, a work of Longhena, and thus the very basilica of Superga by Juvara, already lie outside that most vital current of architecture.

Then that spatial unity which in sacred buildings of the Baroque age had been achieved in its finest moments as an expression of absolute stylistic coherence tends to resolve itself uniformly into a series of architectural episodes linked by a perspectival rationale. The 17th-century Roman church of S. Maria in Campitelli is perhaps the noblest example of this intuition, which extends through much of the 18th century.

The rationalism of the 18th century is also reflected in architectural forms, beginning with a particular interpretation of 16th-century models and especially the works of Palladio, taken as a model of classicism, a process of revision capable of giving a new interpretation of the ecclesiastical theme. The work of Vanvitelli, aimed at a clarifying simplification, leaves in the Annunziata and in the Santissima Trinità in Naples a new word, capable of opening other horizons to creative activity. Yet the cultural factor and the orientation toward antiquity, studied with archaeological spirit and intended as an unsurpassed model, susceptible however of imitation, when taken in an absolute and irreconcilable manner, produces churches that externally differ little from actual pagan temples. In Italy such extremes were rarely reached, since the force of tradition prevented them, together with a not inconsiderable capacity of the architects; the Gran Madre di Dio by Buonsignori in Turin, the S. Carlo by Amici in Milan, the

S. Francesco di Paola in Naples, partly reworking traditional themes, achieved a vision that was not lacking in nobility. Far less successful and significant, however, were, shortly afterward, certain wretched imitations of medieval churches that retained a pronounced northern character by adhering to that style more closely than our own 13th-century constructions had done. Eclecticism, in general, even with regard to ecclesiastical buildings, produced more works of taste than creations worthy of the name, when it did not produce works that do not even deserve to be mentioned.

Modern architecture has certainly revolutionized construction systems, causing the disappearance of much of the traditional repertoire. The church, on the other hand, has practical needs that require solutions not unlike those of many centuries ago; consequently, the theme has often been simplified, and in this way, even medieval schemes have been interpreted with a sense of modernity and with the use of different materials. Even in this case, works have been erected that attest to an orientation of taste rather than a high individual creative spirit. On this point, see also what has been said at cols. 1829–30 of Vol. I of this encyclopedia.

III. DECORATION

Indissolubly linked to the evolution of architectural forms is the decoration of churches. However, it is not possible here to mention everything that has been used over the centuries to adorn the house of the Lord: furniture, fabrics, furnishings, sacred images, etc., but only those plastic and pictorial works that, being strictly connected with architecture, constitute an essential complement to II. The mosaics and paintings that, in the apses and along the walls of the earliest churches, depicted the Redeemer and the saints and narrated the events of the New and Old Testaments, covering the structures of the buildings with their mantle of gleaming tesserae and vivid colors, contributed greatly, between the 4th and 7th centuries, to altering the very character of architecture. These decorations, in other words, replacing the exaltation of plastic values and the taste for the balanced contrasts of masses characteristic of ancient art, with a new chromatic joy and an ever-greater interest in luministic values, tended to nullify the very logic of architectural structures and to create within the church a world of splendor, almost a terrestrial reflection of the Empyrean. This new decorative conception was furthered by the Oriental taste (see BYZANTINE, ART), widely diffused in Italy after the 5th century.In the following centuries, while architectural forms, also for the reasons just mentioned, accentuate their process of simplification and become ever more essential, the internal decoration of churches becomes poorer. Only in a few cases are the apses covered with mosaic and inlaid marbles, while along the dimly lit walls paintings display ascetic images of saints or modestly recount the events of Holy Scripture.

Sculpture, which in the earliest churches had been widely used not only to depict sacred images but also to adorn the architectural members of the building—such as capitals, architraves, door and window frames, altars, ciboria, and screens of the schola cantorum—was reduced, between the 8th and 11th centuries, to the production of reliefs where marble is laboriously incised rather than worked in high relief, with braided friezes and strangely stylized figurations. From these figurations, alongside the human image, any illustrative or naturalistic intent seems banished, replaced by monstrous and fantastic beings, the sun, the moon, palm trees, evangelical symbols, doves, and peacocks according to a clearly defined repertoire and traditional symbolism.

Later, during the Romanesque period, between the 11th and 13th centuries, in that characteristic revival of the arts typical of the age, with the new magnificence of architecture, the decoration of churches also took on aspects of greater splendor. While in the apses mosaics reappeared more frequently, truly reflecting the elements of taste and pictorial culture, the decoration of the walls—sometimes itself executed in mosaic, as seen in the churches of Sicily and at St. Mark’s in Venice—acquired, in the orderly arrangement of frames and the logical succession of scenes, an organic disposition linked to the new capacity and need to narrate with clarity and evidence not only the events of the Old and New Testaments and the lives of the saints, but also the actions of men. At this time, sculptural decoration also grew richer in vigor, especially in those structures where the articulation of architectural members gained new, compelling prominence. This predominant character persisted and increased in the 13th and 14th centuries with the spread of Gothic taste; then, as the facades of buildings assumed new importance, enriched with spires and piers, portals with enormous frames and deeply recessed jambs, galleries, and vast traceried windows that occupy the fronts, and the towering spires that flank them, a throng of statues of saints, patriarchs, prophets, kings, queens, heroes, bishops, and the greatest men of lineage or city populated the exterior and interior of the church—pinnacles, niches, and baldachins. It was a multitude of images that, inserted into the rigorous logic of architectural members, expressed the sentiments of the people gathered beneath the lofty naves of the church.and in those images consecrates his own sentiments and aspirations, perhaps recognizing himself there sub specie aeternitatis.

The new values of surface, space, and mass exalted by Renaissance architecture, the taste for smooth walls divided into harmonious frames by pilasters and columns, while on the one hand it seems to limit the tasks of decoration, on the other it renders it more precious by placing in greater evidence its intrinsic worth as a work of art, until, toward the close of the 15th century and more so at the beginning of the following one, painting and plastic decoration prevail anew both outside and inside architectural structures, exalting with perspectival illusions a new sense of space that would overturn every apparent structural logic in Correggio’s cupolas opening onto the boundless sky of Parma.

On the other hand, painting, sculpture, and architecture, through the work of Michelangelo himself in the Sistine Chapel and the Medici Chapel, created perfectly unified organisms. Indeed, the architecture painted by Michelangelo on the vault of the Sistine Chapel is more forceful and solid—not to mention the architecture imagined by Botticelli in the delicate partitions concerning the underlying biblical scenes—but also more so than that of Pontelli, the builder of the smooth walls of the spacious hall.

Thus did Michelangelo and Correggio lay the foundations for the further development of the concept of pictorial decoration. The former, within a solid architectural frame that continues and completes the real one, imagines scenes and figures acting within the limits imposed by that logic; the latter, annulling architectural reason, allows his images to range freely in the open sky. This latter fact is truly significant for art because it already realizes those methods which, later reduced to rules and precepts of foreshortening and aerial perspective, would mark the most evident and among the most seductive features of church decoration in the Baroque age.

Then once again the entire environment would assume a unified character. Painted and sculpted images would contribute

They will run together with the lines of architecture to create an illusory space and effects of fantastic scenographic perspective, so that after the wonders of a Pietro da Cortona or a Gauli, Brother Pozzo will not hesitate to mark on the floors of the churches he decorates the point from which his vertiginous aerial perspectives must be viewed for the illusion to be perfect.

But when Brother Pozzo was painting, while the Italian taste for perspective decoration had already spread throughout Europe—often imported by the Italians themselves—a group of theorists and artists had long been advocating a return to sobriety and simplicity. Formal sobriety and decorative simplicity in opposition to Baroque excess, consciously or unconsciously in harmony with the new rationalistic spirit, a product of Enlightenment thought, which was then spreading everywhere.

With the new neoclassical fashion and the taste for an architecture whose elements are studied in ancient monuments with an archaeological spirit, it seems that in churches decoration can only be that proper to architectural members. Nor did church decoration assume particular characteristics during the 19th century, except for a frequent deliberate intention to highlight, through the richness of the materials used—especially marbles—the merits of perfect craftsmanship. These latter characteristics are in some way connected with what is sought today in the best cases. Although it must be borne in mind that precisely in modern sacred architecture the need is felt anew and insistently for a unified conception, whereby architecture, sculpture, and painting, coordinated among themselves and under the same guiding principle, contribute to the creation of the work of art. — See Plates XC–XCII.