Gallicanism - History

A French religious doctrine, emphasizing royal or episcopal authority over matters pertaining to the French church at the expense of papal sovereignty. It emerged during Philip the Fair's struggle with Boniface VIII (1297–1303), and remained a traditional, though controversial force in France, invoked to defend established liberties against Ultramontanism and papal interference.

Gallicanism is the belief that popular civil authority—often represented by the monarchs' authority or the State's authority—over the Catholic Church is comparable to that of the Roman Pope's. it is akin to Anglicanism but is nuanced, however, in that it downplays the authority of the Roman Pope without denying that there are some authoritative elements to the office associated with being primus inter pares (first among equals).

History

Gallicanism is a group of religious opinions that was for some time peculiar to the church in France. Ultramontanism affirmed the authority of the Roman Pope over the temporal kingdoms of the rest of Europe, particularly emphasizing a supreme episcopate for the Bishop of Rome holding universal immediate jurisdiction. This eventually led to the proclamation by the Roman Catholic Church of the dogma of Papal Infallibility at the First Vatican Council.

Gallicanism tended to restrain the Pope's authority in favor of that of bishops and the people's representatives in the State, or the monarch. But the most respected proponents of Gallican ideas did not contest the Pope's primacy in the Church, merely his supremacy and infallibility.

St. Peter and the popes, his successors, and the Church itself have dominion from God only over things spiritual and not over things temporal and civil. They cannot be deposed by the church and their subjects cannot be absolved by the church from their oaths of allegiance. The authority in things spiritual belongs to the Holy See and the successors of St. Peter, and does not affect the decrees of the Council of Constance contained in the fourth and fifth sessions of that council, which is observed by the Gallican Church. The exercise of this Apostolic authority (puissance) must be regulated in accordance with canons (rules) established by the Holy Spirit through the centuries of Church history. Although the pope have the chief part in questions of faith, and his decrees apply to all the Churches, and to each Church in particular, yet his judgment is not irreformable, at least pending the consent of the Church. Secondly, it was limited by the authority of the general councils and the bishops, and lastly by the canons and customs of particular churches, which the pope was bound to take into account when he exercised his authority.

Gallicanism was more than pure theory — the bishops and magistrates of France used it, the former to increase power in the government of dioceses, the latter to extend their jurisdiction so as to cover ecclesiastical affairs. The former lessened the doctrinal authority of the pope in favour of that of the bishops, to the degree marked by the Declaration of 1682, and the latter augmented the rights of the state.

There were eighty-three "Liberties of the Gallican Church", according to a collection drawn up by the jurisconsults Guy Coquille and Pierre Pithou. Besides the four articles cited above, which were incorporated, these Liberties included the following:

The Kings of France had the right to assemble councils in their dominions, and to make laws and regulations touching ecclesiastical matters. The pope's legates could not be sent into France, or exercise their power within that kingdom, except at the king's request or with his consent. Bishops, even when commanded by the pope, could not go out of the kingdom without the king's consent. The pope could not authorize the alienation of any landed estate of the Churches, or the diminishing of any foundations. Answering to the question of how there came to be formed in the Church of France a body of doctrines and practices which tended to isolate it, and to give it a character somewhat exceptional in the Catholic body, Gallicans have held that the reason of this phenomenon is to be found in the very origin and history of Gallicanism.

For the more moderate among them, Gallican ideas and liberties were simply privileges — concessions made by the popes, who had been quite willing to divest themselves of a part of their authority in favour of the bishops or kings or France. This idea made its appearance as early as the reign of Philip the Fair, in some of the protests of that monarch against the policy of Pope Boniface VIII. In the view of some partisans of the theory, the popes had always thought fit to show especial consideration for the ancient customs of the Gallican Church, which in every age had distinguished itself by its exactitude in the preservation of the Faith and the maintenance of ecclesiastical discipline. They said that the popes had found it impossible to recall to their allegiance and to due respect for ecclesiastical discipline the Frankish lords who had possessed themselves of episcopal sees; and that the popes had, therefore, granted to Carloman, Pepin, and Charlemagne a spiritual authority which they were to exercise only under papal control. and, as they regarded the matter, these Liberties could not be touched by any pope. Moreover, they added, the Kings of France have at times received from the popes certain clearly defined privileges; As a matter of fact, historians could have told them, the privileges accorded by popes to the King of France in the course of centuries are known from the texts, of which an authentic collection could be compiled, and there is nothing in them resembling the Liberties in question. Besides, the Ultramontanes pointed out there are some privileges which the pope himself could not grant. It is hardly conceivable that a pope should allow any group of bishops the privilege of calling his infallibility in question, putting his doctrinal decisions upon trial, to be accepted or rejected;

Most of its partisans regarded Gallicanism as a revival of the most ancient traditions of Christianity, a persistence of the common law, which law, according to some (Pithou, Quesnel), was made up of the conciliar decrees of the earliest centuries or, according to others (Marca, Bossuet), of Canon laws of the general and local councils, and the decretals, ancient and modern, which were received in France or conformable to their usage. "Of all Christian countries", says Fleury, "France has been the most careful to conserve the liberty of her Church and oppose the novelties introduced by Ultramontane canonists". The Liberties were so called, because the innovations constituted conditions of servitude with which the popes had burdened the Church, and their legality resulted from the fact that the extension given by the popes to their own primacy was founded not upon Divine institution, but upon the false Decretals. If we are to credit these authors, what the Gallicans maintained in 1682 was not a collection of novelties, but a body of beliefs as old as the Church, the discipline of the first centuries. The Church of France had upheld and practised them at all times; the Council of Constance had taught them with the pope's approbation.

The early middle ages

To the similarity of the historical vicissitudes through which they passed, their common political allegiance, and the early appearance of a national sentiment, the Churches of France owed it that they very soon formed an individual, compact, and homogeneous body. From the end of the fourth century the popes themselves recognized this solidarity. It was to the "Gallican" bishops that Pope Damasus addressed the most ancient decretal which has been preserved to our times (Babut 1904). Two centuries later St. Gregory the Great pointed out the Gallican Church to his envoy Augustine, the Apostle of England, as one of those whose customs he might accept as of equal stability with those of the Roman Church or of any other whatsoever. Besides, it is not at all plain how a council of the Province of Milan is to be taken as representing the ideas of the Gallican Church.

In truth, that Church, during the Merovingian period, testifies the same deference to the Holy See as do all the others. Ordinary questions of discipline are in the ordinary course settled in councils, often held with the assent of the kings, but on great occasions – the Councils of Epaone (517), Vaison (529), Valence (529), Orleans (538), Tours (567) – the bishops declare that they are acting under the impulse of the Holy See, or defer to its admonitions; they take pride in the approbation of the pope; Bishops condemned in councils (like Salonius of Embrun, Sagitarius of Gap, Contumeliosus of Riez) have no difficulty in appealing to the pope, who, after examination, either confirms or rectifies the sentence pronounced against them.

From Pepin to the Reformation

The accession of the Carlovingian dynasty is marked by a splendid act of homage paid in France to the power of the papacy: before assuming the title of king, Pepin made the point of securing the assent of Pope Zachary. Without exaggerating the significance of this act, the bearing of which the Gallicans have done every thing to minimize, one may still see it as evidence that, even before Gregory VII, public opinion in France was not hostile to the intervention of the pope in political affairs. It is true that with him there already appears the idea that the pope must limit his activity to ecclesiastical matters, and not intrude in those pertaining to the State, which concern kings only; The proof of this is in the fact that Hincmar himself, when his claims to the metropolitan dignity are not in question, condemns very sharply, though at the risk of self-contradiction, the opinion of those who think that the king is subject only to God, and he makes it his boast to "follow the Roman Church whose teachings", he says quoting the famous words of Pope Innocent I, "are imposed upon all men". the Council of Troyes (867) proclaims that no bishop can be deposed without reference to the Holy See, and the Council of Douzy (871), although held under the influence of Hincmar, condemns the Bishop of Laon only under reserve of the rights of the pope.

With the first Capets the secular relations between the pope and the Gallican Church appeared to be momentarily strained. 993), in the discourses of Arnoul, Bishop of Orleans, in the letters of Gerbert, afterwards Pope Sylvester II, sentiments of violent hostility to the Holy See are manifested, and an evident determination to elude the authority in matters of discipline which had until then been recognized as belonging to it. When it regained its independence, its old authority in France came back to it, the work of the Councils of Saint-Basle and of Chelles was undone; It has been said that during the early Capetian period the pope was more powerful in France than he had ever been. Under Gregory VII the pope's legates traversed France from north to south, they convoked and presided over numerous councils, and, in spite of sporadic and incoherent acts of resistance, they deposed bishops and excommunicated princes just as in Germany and Spain. he haughtily proclaims that, in virtue of the concession made by the pope, with the assent of a general council to Charlemagne and his successors, he has the right to dispose of vacant ecclesiastical benefices. With the consent of the nobility, the Third Estate, and a great part of the clergy, he appeals in the matter from Boniface VIII to a future general council — the implication being that the council is superior to the pope. The same ideas and others still more hostile to the Holy See reappear in the struggle of Fratricelles and Louis of Bavaria against Pope John XXII; Following the pope, the University of Paris condemned these views; Upon that idea was soon grafted the conciliary theory, which sets the council above the pope, making it the sole representative of the Church, the sole organ of infallibility. It was in the assembly which voted on this measure (1398) that for the first time there was any question of bringing back the Church of France to its ancient liberties and customs — of giving its prelates once more the right of conferring and disposing of benefices.

Together with the restoration of the "Ancient Liberties" the assembly of the clergy in 1406 intended to maintain the superiority of the council to the pope, and the fallibility of the latter. However widely they may have been accepted at the time, these were only individual opinions or opinions of a school, when the Council of Constance came to give them the sanction of its high authority. In its fourth and fifth sessions it declared that the council represented the Church and that every person, no matter of what dignity, even the pope, was bound to obey it in what concerned the extirpation of the schism and the reform of the Church; that even the pope, if he resisted obstinately, might be constrained by process of law to obey it in the above-mentioned points. In that instrument the clergy of France inserted the articles of Constance repeated at Basle, and upon that warrant assumed authority to regulate the collation of benefices and the temporal administration of the Churches on the sole basis of the common law, under the king's patronage, and independently of the pope's action. From Eugene IV to Leo X the popes did not cease to protest against the Pragmatic Sanction, until it was replaced by the Concordat of Bologna in 1516. Those principles even appeared at the Council of Trent, where the ambassadors, theologians, and bishops of France repeatedly championed them, notably when the council discussed whether episcopal jurisdiction comes immediately from God or through the pope, whether or not the council ought to ask confirmation of its decrees from the sovereign pontiff, etc. Then again, it was in the name of the Liberties of the Gallican Church that a part of the clergy and the Parlementaires opposed the publication of the Council of Trent;

After the Reformation

Nevertheless, towards the end of the sixteenth century, the reaction against the Protestant denial of all authority to the pope and, above all, the triumph of the League had enfeebled Gallican convictions in the minds of the clergy, if not of the parliament.

In 1663 the Sorbonne solemnly declared that it admitted no authority of the pope over the king's temporal dominion, nor his superiority to a general council, nor infallibility apart from the Church's consent. In 1682 matters were much worse for the Pope. Louis XIV having decided to extend to all the Churches of his kingdom the regale, or right of receiving the revenue of vacant sees, and of conferring the sees themselves at his pleasure, Pope Innocent XI strongly opposed the king's designs. Irritated by this resistance, the king assembled the clergy of France and, on 19 March 1682, the thirty-six prelates and thirty-four deputies of the second order who constituted that assembly adopted the four articles summarized above and transmitted them to all the other bishops and archbishops of France.

Pope Innocent XI testified his displeasure by the Rescript of 11 April, 1682, in which he voided and annulled all that the assembly had done in regard to the regale, as well as all the consequences of that action; The bishops designate to whom Bulls had been refused received them at length, in 1693, only after addressing to Pope Innocent XII a letter in which they disavowed everything that had been decreed in that assembly in regard to the ecclesiastical power and the pontifical authority. The king himself wrote to the pope (14 September, 1693) to announce that a royal order had been issued against the execution of the edict of 23 March, 1682.

In spite of these disavowals, the Declaration of 1682 remained thenceforward the living symbol of Gallicanism, professed by the great majority of the French clergy, obligatorily defended in the faculties of theology, schools, and seminaries, guarded from the lukewarmness of French theologians and the attacks of foreigners by the inquisitorial vigilance of the French parliaments, which never failed to condemn to suppression every work that seemed hostile to the principles of the Declaration. After the Concordat of 1801 — itself the most dazzling manifestation of the pope's supreme power — French Governments made some pretence of reviving, in the Organic Articles, the "Ancient Gallican Liberties" and the obligation of teaching the articles of 1682, but ecclesiastical Gallicanism was never again resuscitated except in the form of a vague mistrust of Rome.

When the first Vatican Council opened, in 1869, it had in France only timid defenders. When that council declared that the pope has in the Church the plenitude of jurisdiction in matters of faith, morals discipline, and administration that his decisions ex cathedra are of themselves, and without the assent of he Church, infallible and irreformable, it dealt Gallicanism a mortal blow. but an important indication of the Catholic doctrine was given in the condemnation fulminated by Pope Pius IX against the 24th proposition of the Syllabus of Errors, in which it was asserted that the Church cannot have recourse to force and is without any temporal authority, direct or indirect. Pope Leo XIII shed more direct light upon the question in his Encyclical Immortale Dei (12 November 1885), where we read: "God has apportioned the government of the human race between two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the former set over things divine, the latter over things human.

After the first Vatican Council, Gallicanism was no longer a permissible opinion within the Roman Catholic Church.