Gallicanism

Within Catholicism, the doctrine of Gallicanism states that civil authority (the authority of the state) over the church is equivalent to that of the pope. The church itself has never upheld this view. Rather, the doctrine was adopted in France ("Gallia," in Latin) in the seventeenth century as a rejection of ultramontanism, the doctrine (especially supported by the Jesuits) that ascribed great political power to the pope, including by implication power over states.

The Catholic Church in France during the period that it upheld the doctrine of Gallicanism is referred to as the Gallican Church. In the eighteenth century, Gallicanism spread from France to the Low Countries. In the end, ultramontanism never emerged victorious, as the Age of Enlightenment led to revolutions and the adoption of democratic forms of government that would not permit religious leaders to exert political power over state leaders.

Background

The intellectual and theological ancestor of Gallicanism is conciliarism, a reform movement in the Catholic Church from the fourteenth century through the sixteenth century. Conciliarists argued that the ultimate authority in the church should belong not to a single monarch—the pope—but to an ecumenical council. The principal opposition to this idea rested on the notion that the pope, as the bishop of Rome, was the successor of Saint Peter and inherited a unique authority granted to Peter directly by Jesus. This was the view that eventually won out after centuries of exhausting debate. Conciliarism was officially condemned at the Fifth Lateran Council in 1517, and as an added touch, the First Vatican Council adopted the doctrine of papal infallibility in 1870.

However, conciliarism had particular resonance in France because of the special role France played in the debate. The inciting incident sparking the conciliarism debate was the Avignon papacy. In 1305, a troubled papal conclave elected a French cardinal to the papacy, who became Clement V. However, Clement V refused to relocate to Rome and instead relocated the papal court to Avignon in France in 1309. Seven successive popes ruled the Catholic Church from Avignon, all French, all closely allied with the French government, to the consternation of non-French church leaders. The Western Schism, lasting from 1378 to 1417, resulted when Pope Gregory XI left Avignon for Rome in 1377 and died the following year, quickly leading to a circumstance in which two (and eventually three) different men claimed to be the legitimate pope.

The Avignon papacy impacted Gallicanism and French conciliarism in two ways. First, it demonstrated the chaos that can result when too much power is vested in one office—the Western Schism would not have resulted from a dispute over a council member's seat because no single council member would be significant enough. Second, the French (and the French state) had grown accustomed to a power structure in which the state and the pope shared power over the church. While other European countries viewed this as corruption, under the doctrine of Gallicanism it would be the natural order of things.

Overview

Formally, Gallicanism began in 1681 with the Declaration of the Clergy of France, but the groundwork had been laid in the past. Even the Fifth Lateran Council, while officially condemning conciliarism, had also affirmed the 1516 Concordat of Bologna, which carefully divided church-related powers in France between the king and the pope. The king, for example, was granted the power to appoint church officers such as bishops, archbishops, abbots, and priors. However, because the pope's blessing was still part of the ceremony that actually installed them in their offices, the pope retained a de facto veto. Still, this meant that the pope had to publicly oppose the king's choice in such cases, and doing so certainly didn't guarantee that the king would nominate the pope's preferred choice instead. The veto, therefore, was not often used, but it had great symbolic power in reassuring the Vatican of the pope's supremacy.

Between the Fifth Lateran Council and 1681, the Protestant Reformation spread across Europe, with numerous countries severing ties with the Catholic Church. France was not among them. Protestants, known as Huguenots, existed in France, and religious wars between French Catholics and the Huguenots had been fought throughout the late sixteenth century and again in the 1620s. The attrition of other countries to Protestantism and the threat of Huguenots within France, combined with the symbolic importance of France to Catholic history, gave the country considerable leverage with the Vatican.

In 1663, the prestigious French theological school the Sorbonne declared that the pope had no authority over the king in non-religious matters nor over general ecumenical councils in religious ones. The Declaration of the Clergy of France essentially confirmed this view in four articles drafted on behalf of the French Catholic priesthood. It spelled out the limits of clerical authority, declaring that the authority of the pope and the church itself is limited to spiritual matters and salvation, not temporal and civil matters and that the pope does not have the authority to overrule decrees of councils.

In essence, this declaration does not go much further than conciliarism, except insofar as it also draws a line between spiritual and temporal authority. Over the next hundred years, though, others within the church argued for a stronger form of Gallicanism, and it was the stronger form that spread from France to the Low Countries. The stronger form ascribes powers to the state—in this case, the French king—over certain aspects of the church that had previously been reserved for the pope or general councils. Among these powers: the right to refuse a papal legate's entry into France; the right to assemble a church council in France; the right to regulate ecclesiastical matters within France; and maybe most controversially, the right to veto the effect (within France) of any papal bull or letter.

Ironically, the French Revolution ended Gallicanism in France by attempting to subordinate the church entirely to the state, as of the 1790 Civil Constitution of the Clergy.

Bibliography

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