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.

Roman Anthology: Corpus Christi and My Last Few Days in Italy

After returning from the beach and our adventure in Pompeii, can you blame us for wanting to take it easy for a day? So we did, and the next two days after I wandered around Rome tying up some loose ends, visiting St. Paul's Outside the Walls and walking around that neighborhood and wandering again through the streets by the forum and the Colosseum on my way to visit Santa Maria in Cosmedin (named so because it was used by the Greek community after it had been turned into a church and was really well decorated back in the day (cosmetics, yeah?)). Back at the hostel we wouild change rooms and meet new people, striking up conversations with Australians and Canadians and Americans, always relieved when we found people who spoke English with very little confusion.

Thus the end of our time in Rome passed pretty peacibly. We were sticking around until Corpus Christi, which is a celebration of Eucharist because Christine had heard there was a big to-do, it being a holy day in the summer, etc. I'm just learning all sorts of holy days over here. Anyway, on Corpus Christi the pope holds mass at San Giovanni in Laterano and then leads a procession over to Santa Maria Maggiore and it's kinda a cool thing. So I figured, hey, these churches are both on my list. I'll head over to San Giovanni and get there a little early, get a seat near the back and then walk over. There can't be that many people, can there?

Oh, how naive I am.

I'm not entirely sure who you had to be to get tickets inside, but I showed up around 4:30 (and the mass started at 8) and waited behind those steel fence-looking barriers for hours and never got any closer than this. I watched the whole mass (in Latin, so none of us understood it) from a video screen.

This video screen, in fact.

 So I don't have pictures of the inside of the church devoted to both St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist, but I can send you here for a virtual tour that is so jokes (jokes=cool, too much Vlogbrothers). Here's another for Santa Maria Maggiore.OK, now we're all caught up. Back to the story.

But I sat outside for hours, listening to Italian, German, Spanish and then I stepped back and looked at the crowd that had gathered outside of the cathedral to just watch the mass on the screen.

This. This is why we have cathedrals.

Now I'm not saying that's the only reason why, but this is a holiday I didn't know existed until Christine brought it up for me. Can you imagine the number of people something more famous like Easter might draw to this city? Christianity is kinda a big thing and regardless of the purposes of the designs and the symbols, a church is foremost an assembly hall, potentially for a lot of people. To that end, the cathedral and churches of Rome do their job well.

 As the service drew to a close, the clergy inside began to process out of the church. We outside had already seen the pope platform on the back of a pickup truck but we all, nuns and priests and common folk alike, swarmed over in front of the church to watch the lines of cardinals and bishops I guess form around the path the pope would take out. And like everyone else there, even though I'm not Catholic by any stretch of the imagination, I stood on my toes to catch several blurry pictures of the pope as he drove by. Because, hey, how many times in your life have you seen the pope?

Times I've Seen the Pope IRL: 1

Then we all began walking over to Santa Maria Maggiore. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience to walk down the streets of Rome with literally hundreds of other people, singing along to the words printed in my mass book and humming the tunes projected over the speakers that lined the roads we were walking. We passed other churches with their doors open on the way, and you always had to be careful of a particularly pious person pausing the kneel momentarily in acknowledgment of the altar seen through the doorways. I moved between groups of nuns with habits of all colors, people who looked like me, dressed in clothes no finer than a regular day in Rome affords and Italian military men in their dress uniforms, walking in a circle around their chaplain. I've never been in a such a large, solemn crowd.

Then we arrived at the church and as many of us as could filled the square in front.

Sorry to distract- I just love laser beam light pictures. And you can see all of us filling the square.

 No one went inside- a large altar had been brought outside for the ceremony.

All that remained was the benediction and, that having completed the service, the crowd started the chant Vive la Papa! Vive! It was another moment to be caught up in and even though I didn't cheer along, it was good to hear the Italian's love for their pope. Even after the strong voices in the crowd let the cheer die out, a little boy's voice piped up, Vive la Papa! and a few of the kinder hearted souls around him shouted Vive!

On my walk back to the hostel I passed behind the great church dedicated to Mary, planned on this spot because the Virgin left footprints in the snow marking this spot, and found a large crowd on the corner between me and the street I wanted to take, just staring. I realized they were waiting again on the pope and this time I waved, from a much smaller crowd, as the pope was driven by us, his car following others from the ceremony. He smiled and waved at us and the same cheer was brought up again and I couldn't help but shout the response along with those beside me.

When in Rome, you know?