Popes 'n Avignon

I have to admit defeat in this instance. It turns out that I know nothing about the pope, despite having seen him live and in person. I planned this to be a short little post about the Avignon popes but as I delve into this, I realize that there is so much about the history of the church that I had no clue about. I sat in Starbucks for hours wading through wikipedia articles on the history of the church (and the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire and various saints) before I gave up trying to understand the bigger picture on my own. As a high point in my research, I stumbled across this amusing summary of the history of the western world- warning: coarse language. It was a pretty pleasant couple of hours, though, because I got a chance to listen to Bec Sandridge. She's quite good and you should all go give her a listen- she's on iTunes as well- as she was one of my roommates at the hostel in Glasgow and she's a bit phenomenal.

But, despite my procrastination (I am so good at that- I should have minored in that, maybe even majored in it), I did manage to ascertain some facts that I shall now present to you. Things to know about the popes (mostly taken from the well-annotated wiki article):

1) Pope is the title of the Bishop of Rome, who's now seen as the spiritual head of the Roman Catholic Church.
2) Peter is generally considered to be the first pope, though he didn't use the title. In fact, the title of pope wasn't given exclusively to the bishop of Rome until centuries after the apostles lived and died.
3) After the fall of the Roman empire, popes took over care of the city of Rome and began to negotiate treaties with rulers of the other powers around them.
4) In 800 AD, Leo II crowned Charlemagne and officially set up the policy that emperors had to be anoited by the pope. Now you've got all sorts of political power invested in the pope and the papacy isn't exactly the thing we think of today, though it got cleaned up starting around 1049 by Leo IX.
5) In 1054, the church split into East and West halves. Kinda a big deal.
6) During the Middle Ages, you've got Western popes vying for power with the monarchs of Europe. (If you think of the Pardoner's Tale, you're probably on the right track. Also the scene with the pope in Doctor Faustus.)
6a) The pope actually moved his court to Avignon from 1309-1377. The popes in this time were French and allied with the French king. They had quite the set up in Avignon, as can be seen by the papal palace there. You've got luxury to the max, and, according to the wiki, it Avignon Papacy was known for greed and corruption.

And a palace.

7) For a while there, you've got Popes and Anti-popes and the papacy changed back to Rome, though there might still be a rival pope set up in Avignon.
8) All this begins to end as a response to the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. The church responds to the reformers' criticisms and in the end of it all, you end up with the dynamics we see today- a church already split East-West and now split Protestant-Catholic, not to mention all the other various branches that have come off of the main church as a part of the growing of a religion.
9) The First Vatican Council, coming around in 1870, declared that when the pope speaks ex cathedra (from the chair [of Peter]) he's saying something infallible.

From this chair, in fact.

This has only been used once since it was set out, in 1950, to declare the Assumption of Mary as dogma.
10) In 1962 you've got the Second Vatican Council, which started some of the reforms and changes we can see in Catholic churches today.

Of course, this is a minor sprinkling of events throughout a long and complex history of the church (but now you know why no one ever tries to teach you church history in Sunday school- it's a bit too involved for the hour between services) and I've definitely left out all of the thought behind the actions of all of the parties in the church. All this is to say that the Avignon Papacy is just one stage in a long, long history of the popes and the leaders of the church in Rome. I almost feel bad, looking at all of this as an outsider, because I sometimes think that I should feel like this church is my church. I can't pretend there isn't centuries of history between the apostles, the church fathers and then the Protestant Reformation, and in those centuries, the church was the Church. It's the traditions out of which we all grew.

And of course, it's easy to denounce the popes in Avignon (and in Rome- have you seen the Vatican?) as having been extravagant but, then again, it's not like many Christian leaders today are jumping into vows of poverty. Well, I should probably clarify that I'm talking about mainstream Christian leaders in America. Because if there's one thing that I can learn from being in Avignon, beyond the fact that the French like big golden statues

 and dancing on bridges that can't handle it,

it's that I don't know much even about Western church traditions, much less the state of Christians worldwide today. It's a big and varied place, our Church. Bit of a ponderous thing to see, really.