November 2005

Parish History Episode 55
The Re-union of the churches

While in England the Lollards were being persecuted, throughout the first half of the Fifteenth Century, and were becoming increasingly hostile towards traditional Catholicism, a very different trend seemed to be apparent in the rest of Europe, where great reforms were being considered by Councils of the Church, and efforts were being made to heal rifts and schisms that had, in some cases, endured for centuries. Men of good-will hoped that the Church could be both reformed and re-united by these deliberations, which involved extended sittings by six great Councils, those of Pisa (1409), Constance (1414-7), Basle (1431-9), Ferrara (1439), Florence (1439-43) and Rome (1443-5). In retrospect, it can be said that while these Councils did not achieve sufficient reform to stave off the movement called the Reformation which would erupt in the following century, they certainly achieved much for church unity.

We have already mentioned the Councils of Pisa and Constance, both of them attended by Cardinal Langley, the Bishop of Durham. Between them these Councils succeeded in ending the seventy-year-old schism between Rome and Avignon. The Council of Constance managed to depose the existing popes (by then three in number), and appointed a new pope, Martin V, in their stead. During the following few years, several contrary trends could be discerned. The bishops, or many of them, kept in touch with each other by correspondence, and tried to ensure that the Church continued to be controlled by conciliar government. Pope Martin, however, was determined to make sure that he would be the last pope to be appointed by a Council. The kings of the various European kingdoms, however, had played an essential rôle in isolating and then bringing down the rival popes, but they had also negotiated concordats with those popes, by which they sought to control the Church within their own borders, by direct negotiations with the bishops within their respective kingdoms. This
tended to mean that there was less central direction of affairs, and therefore, whether popes or councils ultimately prevailed at the centre, the
Church was in practice tending to be run on slightly different lines in the different kingdoms.

Also, while the Council of Constance had succeeded in ending the long-running schism between Rome and Avignon, it had, by its action in burning Jan Hus, the Czech reformer, opened up a new schism, initially only between the Bohemian Church and the rest of Western Christendom, but one which would ultimately run between the South, that is “Catholic” “Papal” Europe, and the North, that is “Protestant” “Reformed” Europe. Much of the energies of Pope Martin V, during his reign from 1417 to 1431, was devoted to attempts to crush the Bohemian heretics, and three successive crusades were proclaimed against them. Militarily, these
crusades were all alike unsuccessful, and, at the end of Martin’s life, the Czechs had gone over to the offensive, and their armies had overrun parts
of Bavaria, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Saxony, Brandenburg and Pomerania, even reaching the shores of the Baltic Sea.

On Martin’s death, the cardinals elected Eugene IV, 1431 to 1447, a man who desired peace and reconciliation. He realised that it was essential to make peace with the Czechs, who were strong, but he also desired to heal the rift with the East, by that time nearly four centuries old. The Greeks were certainly anything but strong, and the last remnants of the Byzantine
Empire seemed about to be overwhelmed by the advancing Turks.

Pope Eugene was also willing to try again to bring conciliar government to the Western Church, feeling that the Czechs and the Greeks were more likely to accept the leadership of a Council comprising all the bishops than to accept the primacy of the Bishop of Rome alone. Accordingly, the bishops were summoned to a General Council of the Church, but they were obviously suspicious of the Pope’s intentions, and they preferred to meet at Basle, on the Rhine, well away from Rome. This Council sat continuously for fourteen years, though it moved its location three times, successively to Ferrara, Florence and Rome. Various reforms were voted into effect, but more spectacularly it negotiated, in 1436, the Compactata with the Czechs, and, in 1439, the Formula of Union with the Greeks.

By the terms of the Compactata the Roman Church conceded various privileges to the Bohemian Church, which was now referred to as the Utraquist Church (from the Latin word uterque, meaning both). Principally, the Utraquist laity were conceded the privilege of taking Communion in both Kinds, Bread and Wine, Body and Blood. The Utraquists also claimed, and sometimes took, more, including the use of their Slavonic language in the Liturgy, the marriage of priests, and the administration of Communion to infants (all practices in use among those other Slavs who acknowledged the Primacy of Constantinople). Also, while Utraquist practices were not to be permitted outside the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, “Catholic” or “Romanist” churches were to be tolerated in Bohemia, for the benefit of those who were dissatisfied with the new Rite. This inevitably tended to make the Churches look unequal in status. The Utraquists, it seemed, were tolerated in one Kingdom alone. The Catholic Church was still… well, catholic, almost universal.

But nevertheless it was a beginning. For the first time people, at any rate in Bohemia, were permitted to choose for themselves between rival Churches. If this precedent had been followed when, during the following century, Reformation erupted, first in Germany, and then in England and elsewhere, Europe would have been spared a century or more of religious wars.

Having settled, so it seemed, the problem of relations with the Bohemian Church, Pope Eugene and the Council of Basle then turned to
negotiations with the Greeks. The Ottoman Empire of the Turks by now ruled most of the Anatolian and Balkan peninsula·s, and John VIII, the Byzantine Emperor, ruled over only Constantinople and a few other scattered cities. He travelled to Italy, where he met the Western bishops, who had moved the Council from Basle, first to Ferrara, and then to the city of Florence. Here, in 1439, the Emperor John, along with Joseph II, Patriarch of Constantinople, and other Greek bishops, negotiated with Pope Eugene and the members of the Council, and the Formula of Union was drawn up, whereby the Greeks accepted practically all the liturgical practices and doctrinal beliefs of the Roman Church in return for the Pope’s promise to preach a crusade against the Turks. John returned home with this promise, but found at best a sullen acceptance of the terms
of union amongst his subjects. If a crusade had quickly materialised, and driven back the Turks, they might have acquiesced in the Union, but
though the Pope preached, few crusaders appeared.

By this time most of the lands acknowledging the leadership of Constantinople were under Turkish rule. The Turks had already conquered
Serbia and Bulgaria, and most of the Asiatic Greeks were also subjects of the Turks. None of them even wanted a new crusade from the West, and they blamed the Crusaders of the past, who had sacked Constantinople in 1204, for having undermined and fatally weakened the Byzantine Empire. The Patriarchs of Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria, who had been represented at Florence by legates, were also unenthusiastic. So also were the Russians, and they were by now becoming the most important of the Orthodox Churches.

But, nominally at least, re-union had been achieved between Rome and Constantinople. And Pope Eugene had sent out invitations to the
Christian Churches of the Further East. The Maronites of Lebanon were naturally invited, and they had been in Communion with the Latin Church since the time of the Crusades. But the patriarchs of the Coptic Church (of Egypt) and the Armenian Church also came to Florence, and they subscribed to Formulae of Union similar to that agreed to by the Patriarch Joseph of Constantinople, and without needing to be bribed by the promise of any crusades.

Some delegates came from the Jacobite Church of Syria, and some from the (Assyrian) Church of the East (a body to which our parish church still regularly sends support), but no actual formulae were achieved in these cases. Most surprising of all, a bishop even came to Florence from the Abyssinian Church, having sailed down the Nile, through Moslem lands, then taking passage on a Venetian ship to Italy. The Council of Florence was truly an Ecumenical Council, as none other, before or since, has been.

Pope Eugene did preach his crusade, and it did set out in 1444, assembling in Hungary, and crossing the Danube, to invade Bulgaria, then
recently conquered by the Turks. But it was decisively defeated by an army commanded in person by the Sultan Murad II, and no aid reached
Constantinople. But the Emperor and Patriarch still clung to the Formula of Union, hoping for further assistance.

When Eugene IV died in 1447, he probably thought that the re-union of Christen-dom was well-nigh complete. His successor, Nicholas V (until 1455) was the first of a series of intellectual and artistic popes who would be patrons of great artists, and would lead Rome into the world of the
Renaissance. He was to preside over the Papal Jubilee of 1450. The first such Jubilee had been held in 1300, and it had been meant then to be a
once-in-a-century event. However, a second one, a penitential jubilee, so to speak, had been held in 1350, to give thanks for the beginning of Europe’s recovery from the Black Death. Thereafter, they were held every twenty-five years, so that men and women in each generation could take
advantage of travel to Rome to purchase an indulgence: though by that time professional pardoners were travelling all over Europe selling Papal indulgences, so that there was not really a need to travel to Rome in person.

But the Jubilee proclaimed for the year 1450 was to be a Jubilee of Union. Invitations were sent out to Bohemia, Russia, Constantinople, Armenia,
Egypt, everywhere. Probably almost all the pilgrims who actually came were from the traditional heartlands of Catholic Europe, but clerics in exotic Eastern robes mingled with them.

But already, three years after Pope Eugene’s death, the structure was crumbling. Civil war had erupted in Bohemia, fought between the moderate Utraquists, the majority, who were content with the liturgical concessions that had been won and who wanted no doctrinal innovations, and an extremist minority, who desired a more radical, root-and-branch
reformation.

A worse disaster followed in the East. John VIII had died in 1448, and had been succeeded by his brother, who became Constantine XI, the last in the line of Byzantine Emperors, a line stretching back for over a thousand years. He continued to uphold the agreements arrived at by the Formula of Union, but his energies were largely taken up by the conflict with the Turks.
Murad’s successor, the Sultan Mohammed II, constructed, in 1452, a group of fortresses which dominated all the approaches to Constantinople,
by land or sea, thus permitting him to isolate the city. In the following year he began a bombardment of Constantinople’s walls, and cannon at last forced a series of breaches within the fortifications of the city. Constantine XI died in one of the breaches, fighting to the last as the Turks swarmed in. He had received the Sacrament that morning, from the hands of a priest still loyal to the Formula of Concord. Thus he died in defence of his city, and out of Communion with the vast majority of his nation.

Nothing now remained of the Formula. All the Greeks now repudiated it. The Slavs had always been lukewarm towards it: especially the Russians, and they were now the most powerful of the Eastern Churches, and very hostile to the West. The Armenian and Coptic patriarchs now saw no point in it, and dropped away; though in each of those two nations, a minority faction continued to exist in union with the West.

Unlike previous articles in this series, nothing in this article has any direct relevance to Houghtonle- Spring. But it has been included because it forms the immediate background to the situation next century when Christendom really fell apart, and most kingdoms would be devastated by ferocious civil wars fought over points of religion. The men and women of Houghton will also be caught up in these events.

But, before the Wars of Religion began, there was a moment of hope, in the middle of the Fifteenth Century - a window of opportunity that opened for a few brief years. Perhaps the Devil was alarmed. At any rate, whether through his agency or otherwise, that window was soon slammed shut again.

Dick Toy

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