CHAPTER II.

THE OTHER MEMBERS OF THE HIERARCHY-ADMINISTRATION OF

DIOCESES.

§ 228. The Clergy in their Relations to the State.

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The violent conflicts between Church and State produced their legitimate results. Without a conflict, there is no victory. Feudalism and its innumerable fetters were among the greatest obstacles to the progress and freedom of the Church. The feudal lords generally claimed that the royalties and right of spoil (jus regaliae, jus spolii seu exuviarum), so burdensome to the Church, were rights which justly belonged to them by reason of their position. In Germany alone did the popes succeed in abolishing these rights. By what was called the jus primarum precum, the feudal lords long retained an influence in nominations to ecclesiastical benefices. It required the full exercise of papal authority to shield and protect the clergy against the arbitrary and violent exactions of the temporal power. Among their ablest and boldest champions were Urban II., in the council of Clermont (can. 2), and Alexander III., in the third council of Lateran (can. 19) After the publication of the decree of Innocent III. in the

1 The right, jus spolii, by which sovereigns claimed succession to the property of deceased priests and bishops-to so much, at least, as they had derived from their ecclesiastical benefices. The ancient canons forbade ecclesiastics to dispose by will of any but their patrimonial goods. These canons were by degrees relaxed, on account of the many lawsuits which arose from the difficulty of distinguishing between ecclesiastical and patrimonial property. Later abuses called for a renewal of the ancient discipline. We learn from Matthew of Paris (ad an. 1246) that three archdeacons in England had amassed great wealth in money and sacred vessels of silver and gold, and that two of them dying intestate, their great possessions, which ought to have passed to the poor or to the service of the Church, were claimed and obtained by their lay relatives. The evil was not much remedied when sovereigns seized, for their own purposes, the property left at their deaths by bishops and priests. Döllinger, Ch. Hist., Vol. IV., p. 28, Eng. transl., note of the translator, Rev. Dr. Cox. (TR.).

fourth council of Lateran (A. D. 1215, can. 46), and of the bull "Clericis laicos" of Boniface VIII., the clergy were not allowed to make any but voluntary contributions, and these only in urgent cases, and subject always to the will of the Pope.

The clergy also made an effort to regain their ancient immunities, particularly those of the forum, in personal suits at law. But here the claims of feudal lords occasioned frequent collisions between ecclesiastical and secular jurisdiction. In spite of the menaces of popes and councils, ecclesiastics still continued to be dragged before secular tribunals; but this clashing of the spiritual jurisdiction with the secular had at least the effect of making the punishment of churchmen more commensurate with their offenses. The domain within which the higher clergy exercised a civil jurisdiction grew daily more extensive, and their exercise of it steadily more beneficial. To their equitable administration of justice is to be ascribed the enactment of laws-some enjoining the observance of the Peace of God, and others directed against piracy, arson, tournaments, usury, and arbitrary taxationby which the public peace and municipal order were far better preserved than in these days of police, with its many facilities for correcting lawlessness and repressing vice.

The energy displayed by the clergy in political affairs created a spirit of public enterprise, which manifested itself in the formation of guilds, the foundation of charitable institutions, such as orphan-asylums (orphanotrophia), foundling-houses (brephotrophia), hospitals for the sick (nosocomia), homes for the aged and infirm (gerontocomia), and free hospices for the entertainment of strangers (xenodochia). They also took the precaution to found pest-houses for lepers (leprosoria), which, at a time when the same attention was not given as at present to public sanitary measures, checked the spread of the terrible malady brought from the East into Europe by the crusaders.1

1Cf. Wührer, on the beneficent influence of the Church in the Middle Ages (Pletz, New Theolog. Journal, year IV., 1831, Vol. I., p. 227 sq.); Hurter, Vol. IV, p. 454 sq. The same, on the Christian Institutions of Charity at the end VOL. II-41

The clergy, in order to justify their steadily increasing influence, appealed to the right of the Church to interfere in civil affairs, when and in so far as these came within the domain of morals and might be an occasion of sin, or when the parties them-selves invoked her intervention as arbitrator.1 But, as every act of injustice, when considered from a Christian point of view, is sinful, it followed that in proportion as an age became Christian, the influence of the clergy widened.

The preference of the people to seek justice from ecclesiastical rather than secular tribunals was not unfrequently a source of warm and animated disputes between clerical and lay judges, in the course of which the latter showed a disposition to forget that they had been taught jurisprudence by the clergy. Thus, for example, by a decree of the fourth council of Lateran (ecumenical) it was enacted that, instead of the summary and arbitrary methods of procedure heretofore in use in lay courts of justice,3 a carefully written and detailed process should be substituted. In the course of time this was adopted in all secular tribunals. The Suabian code. says, expressly, "that all the principles of law and right in use in civil and ecclesiastical courts of justice have been taken from the Decretum Gratiani and the decretals of Gregory IX.”

The Church exercised a specially beneficent influence in favor of that class of mankind on whom feudalism bore most heavily. She never ceased to offer the most determined opposition to slavery, and to soften its hardships," by appealing

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of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries (Tübg. Quart. 1842, p. 226-250). Hefele, Influence of Christianity on public spirit (Supplem. to Ch. H., Vol. I., p. 175-211).

1 Denunciatio evangelica, according to St. Matt. xviii. 17.

2 Cf. Decretal. Greg. IX., Lib. II., Tit. I., c. 13; the chapter is summed up thus: "Judex ecclesiast. potest per viam denunciationis evangelicae seu judicibilis procedere contra quemlibet peccatoram etiam laicum, maxime ratione perjurii vel pacis fractae."

3 Concil. Lateran. IV., can. 38. Cf. Hefele, Hist. of Counc., Vol. V., p. 797. 4 The Conc. Londin. ann. 1102, under St. Anselm of Canterbury, most emphatically forbids it: "Ne quis nefarium illud negotium, quo hactenus solebant in Anglia homines sicut bruta animalia venumdari, deinceps ullatenus facere praesumat."

5 Greg. IX. severely reprimanded some Polish nobles who set their serfs to watch falcons' nests and cruelly punished them if the young were permitted to

to man's better instincts, and by showing how that all men are brothers by being created in the image of God and redeemed by the blood of His Son. She commanded bishops to protect the serfs of their dioceses against the violence of the lords, and procured the freedom of countless numbers of them, particularly when their masters were on the point of death, by representing their manumission (manumissio per testamentum) as a most acceptable work of Christian charity (in remedium animae, pro amore Dei), and by conducting the ceremony before the altar, thus surrounding it with the sacred solemnity of a religious rite. Finally, the Church gave the most noble examples of generous disinterestedness by renouncing many worldly advantages which she might have retained; by securing to the serfs engaged in domestic service such rights as changed their condition to that of free servants, and to those occupied in tilling the fields the privilege of becoming hereditary tenants or perpetual leaseholders, with the obligation of paying trifling but fixed sums annually, called jura dominicalia. But these classes, being regarded as in a certain sense born to their condition, could not dissolve at will their relations with their feudal lords.

The Church furthermore removed from her legislation the irregularity arising from defect of freedom. Bishops freely received into their seminaries the sons of serfs who gave evidence of talent and capacity, where they were educated for the ecclesiastical state, and prepared to occupy, as not unfrequently happened, the highest offices of the Church.1

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Including within the compass of her sublime unity men of every rank and condition of life, she, and she alone, was able

escape. He says: "Animas fidelium, quas Christus redemit sanguine, avium intuitu et ferarum Satanae praedam effici detestabile decernimus et iniquum.” Regesta Greg. in Raumer's Hist. of the Hohenstaufens, Vol. V., p. 16.

1 When Béla, king of Hungary (A. D. 1266), rejected a bishop because he was born a serf, Clement IV. wrote to him: "Pro nihilo reputanda esse haec discrimina, quae inter homines commenta est humana imprudentia imparesque esse voluit, quos Deus coaequaverat-hominum voluntate praescribi non potuisse contra naturum, quae hominum genus omni libertate donavit." However, the Church always sustained the principle enounced—e. g., in decretis Hungarorum, in Mansi., T. XXIII., p. 1184: "Nullum servum in clericum ordinetis, nisi dominus ejus eum manumittat, ut de caetero ex toto nihil in eo juris habeat."

to break down the barriers and to bridge over the great distances separating one class of society from another, and thus to bring together in the same state and for the same service the sons of serfs and the scions of kings.

§ 229. The Cardinals (cf. supra, § 194).

The cardinals, occupying a position immediately about the Pope's person, and being intimate with his affairs, acquired daily more and more the character of confidential advisers." But they were not the only persons of whom he took counsel. Quite the contrary. When matters of grave importance were under consideration, he took the opinions of all the archbishops and bishops who chanced to be present in Rome at the time, and not unfrequently called in men distinguished by ability and prudence from every country of Christendom.2 But the office of cardinal became one of prime importance afrer Nicholas II., Alexander III., and Gregory X. had committed to them the right of electing the Pope in the name of the whole clergy and the universal Church, and for this reason the Sacred College has among its members representatives from the three highest orders of the clergy-viz., bishops, priests, and deacons.

They were ordinarily selected from men still in the prime of life and the full vigor of manhood, who had already given evidence of their capacity and trustworthiness in the management of important affairs, either in the city of Rome itself, in legations, or, as, sometimes happened, in administering the provinces belonging to the patrimony of St. Peter.

1In Otto Frising., I. 17, they say of themselves: "Per cardinales universalis ecclesiae volvitur axis." Cf. above, p. 344, n. 1. Later on, also Sixtus V., in the Constitut." Postquam," dated 1585, says of them: "Cum ipsi veri cardinales sint in templo Dei bases."

2 Celestine III. writes to the English bishops: "Unde sacrosancto Rom. ecclesia, cui Dominus super caeteras contulit magistratum, pium ad alias materna provisione respectum providit ab initio, et laudabili hactenus consuetudine custodivit, ut de diversis mundi partibus ad earum ministerium implendum virɔs prudentes assumeret, quorum auctoritas et doctrina sub Romani pontificis moderamine constituta, quod ipse non poterat, procul distantibus ecclesiis ministraret." Mansi, T. XXII., p. 602.