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CNN Sunday Morning
A Look at History of Papacy
Aired August 18, 2002 - 08:44 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CATHERINE CALLAWAY, CNN ANCHOR: Pope John Paul II has made his mark in a number of ways. He is the first non-Italian pope since 1523. He helped inspire the anti-communist movement in his native Poland even. CNN's senior analyst Jeff Greenfield puts the papacy in historic perspective in our "Faces of the Week."
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JEFF GREENFIELD, CNN SENIOR ANALYST (voice-over): He is now in the sunset of his reign, bent and frail. But he carries with him the power of an office unlike any other, an office that stretches back to 264 men and 2,000 years of history, to an apostle to whom Jesus said, "thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church."
(on camera): For Peter and for two dozen more that followed, the price of the papacy was violent death at the hands of their Christian persecutors. But that history changed forever on October 28, 312 A.D., when the Emperor Constantine saw the sign of a cross in the sky and words that promised him conquest under that sign.
After a great military victory, Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.
From that day to this, popes have grappled with the competing poles of the spiritual and temporal worlds. And while the church proclaims the pope the Vicar of Christ, history demonstrates that their reigns have encompassed the best and the worst of the human condition.
(voice-over): Through most of the papacy, the pontiff held enormous political and military power. When Leo III crowned Charlemagne on Christmas Day 800 with the golden diadem of the emperor of Rome, it marked the beginning of the 1,000-year reign of the Holy Roman Empire. Popes Innocent III and John XXII launched crusades in Spain and France, as well as in the Arab lands.
But other popes have had only their spiritual power to confront temporal rulers. In 452, as Attila the Hun was sweeping through Italy, Pope Leo I met him face-to-face, alone and unarmed. Whatever words he spoke, Attila turned back.
And in the first year of his reign, John Paul II returned to his native Poland to confront the Soviet-dominated regime with a mass -- and with a mass of followers.
Other struggles were less successful. In 1309, political struggles led the papacy out of Rome to Avignon, France, where it remained for some 70 years. In the 16th century, Henry VIII, outraged over the pope's refusal to let him marry, established the Church of England. And in 1870s, after Italy was unified, the new rulers responded to the pope's hostility by seizing the papal states, shrinking the pope's temporal rule to the few square miles that is now Vatican City.
In protest, several popes thereafter never left that small trough of land during their entire reigns.
(on camera): And the papacy has hardly been free of human imperfection. For every Gregory I who championed the poor and shunned all trappings of wealth, there were centuries of popes who accumulated great wealth, who sold official posts, even sold indulgences, assuring swift passage out of purgatory for a price. And today's sexual abuse scandals are mere echoes of papal reigns so libertine that some popes placed their illegitimate sons into high church positions.
In modern times, popes have displayed neither great personal immorality nor great temporal power. Instead, their power and their reputations have derived from their words and from their ability and their willingness to persuade.
(voice-over): For example, Leo XIII was the first pope to explicitly champion conciliation between the church and the idea of freedom, and his 1891 cyclical, "merram novarrum (ph)," put the church for the first time squarely on the side of social and economic justice.
Historians still debate whether Pius XII helped save many Jews from the Nazi terror, or muted his voice to preserve the Vatican's position.
John XXIII, who reigned for only five years until his death in 1963 is honored by many non-Catholics as the pope who reached out beyond the church to those of other faiths.
And John Paul II's legacy is yet to be written by history. Is he another pope that brought the church into the modern world, or a pope who committed himself to defending its traditions, on women in the priesthood, on celibacy, on contraception and abortion?
(on camera): When the time comes to choose the next pope, much will be said and written about the crises he will face. Will the laity follow the church on controversial matters of faith and morals? Will the church recover from the scars of recent scandals?
What history demonstrates is that however grave these crises may be, the church and the papacy have faced far worse.
Jeff Greenfield, CNN, New York.
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