Download The People`s Religious Authority

The People’s Religious Authority
One of the problems that Protestant and Eastern Orthodox Christians have with Roman
Catholicism is its emphasis on stricter spiritual power and religious authority. This is something
Pope Francis touched on in his apostolic exhortation of November, 2013. He made the point
that his church should not be an institution governed by too many laws, even quoting Thomas
Aquinas and Augustine for support. But any student of religion can see that the Roman Catholic
church has more laws and rules than Protestant churches, as well as possessing more legalities
than the Eastern Orthodox Church, which includes the early Church. This is what the pope was
implying, since he was advocating some papal reform to reduce so many ecclesiastical rules.
The existence of so many legalities in Roman Catholicism is not a good sign, but a sign of fear
and control. It inspired the hatred of Jews and killing Eastern Christians, the Crusades, Medieval
cults of Humanism and Anti-Clericalism, even influencing Protestant spirits of intolerance
against sinners, as well as fundamentalist ideologies angrily forcing people to comply with what
is deemed to be socially righteous. But apart from these dubious fruits of Western Christianity,
Roman Catholic conceptions of power are by themselves an over-active spiritual activism.
What most people no longer understand is that ancient secular power and legalities were
rarely as extensive and centralized as they are today. It can be argued that the Roman Catholic
church eventually had compiled more rules to obey than most secular leaders had before the
19th century. And it can be argued the papacy had more power in religion than monarchs had
in politics. Kings and queens were not in the habit of regulating all features of daily life, like
birth certificates, marriage licenses and passports, due to the principle of families having social
power as a check and balance to political power, as well as the ancient principle of living by
fewer laws. Kings and queens were limited by other checks and balances, such as parliaments,
the nobility, the people, the church, even the fact of eternity. Hence, there was no such thing as
dictators and Totalitarianism until the 20th century. Though the papacy tolerated fewer checks
and balances to its power, it was not originally the case.
In the first thousand years of Christianity, the Church followed the Apostolic precedent of the
fewest rules, family rights, liberty and checks and balances to power. The Church and State
curtailed abuses between each other. When these failed, the people were expected to rebel,
which America’s Founding Fathers reflected in their own writings. But the early Church had
checks and balances. Bishops were expected to obey the Gospel without developing the Faith.
Bishops were not only checked by other bishops, at least three bishops in neighboring districts
were necessary to ordain a bishop. And the people had to consent to his ordination. The lack of
any one of these things prevented a candidate from being ordained.
Thus, ordaining a bishop was not necessarily a clerical matter. The first popes of Rome, for
example, were democratically elected for many generations. Clergymen had nothing to do with
ordaining a bishop except to join in voting for him and laying hands on him. The Roman Church
voted for a new bishop every two years, while other Churches during these first generations of
Christianity had similar or different customs, depending on the area. Ancient documents often
talk about how the people had much greater electoral power over the ordination of bishops
and priests, and the Church since Her first centuries has always insisted on the people having
some degree of spiritual authority, due to the Apostolic principle of checks and balances.
These customs were modified over the centuries, due to practical difficulties, such as finding a
new bishop every two years, in the case of Rome and others. Some candidates refused to be
bishop, which even made elections for permanent bishops difficult. So the people themselves
voted to have the clergy elect candidates, opting only to be the final arbiter. And this is the way
it was until Roman Catholicism in Medieval times eliminated completely the people’s authority.
While worshippers abdicated their Apostolic duty of being directly involved with ordinations,
they nevertheless have a duty to defend the faith. An erring bishop or priest must be reported
by the people and rejected after an investigation proves him false or sinful. When this fails, the
people must rebel against that bishop or archbishop, which has happened in Church history. It
is rare, but people have rebelled against religious authority, such as resisting heretical popes,
Iconoclasm, governmental intrusions in ecclesiastical matters and politically-led councils, as
when the East united with the West. Thus, Apostolic-based spiritual authority in the Church has
never been a single man having absolute power, nor even a council having absolute power. The
Bible specifically teaches that laymen are priests of God and that Christ’s Body is a communion
of many ministries united as one. This is how saints are made saints, by the people canonizing a
holy man or woman to sainthood, not by lightning coming down from Heaven. Though the Bible
does say that religious leaders have sacramental and doctrinal authority, spiritual power is a
relational quality, approximating the relational beauty of the Holy Trinity.
But the West has always had problems with a relational sense of authority, due to Augustine’s
followers. For example, Augustine’s private sex problems and the West’s pagan family customs
created an ideal that the husband was the supreme power in any family, with the wife and
children being like serfs or slaves. But Eastern Christianity was more affected by the ideal that
husbands and wives are priests of their children, with the husband having a slight deference of
authority. Western believers thought of the family as a kind of secular institution, while the East
thought of the family as “the Little Church”, as St. John Chrysostom defined it. Hence, Roman
Catholic and Protestant marriage services portray the priest, minister or government institution
of secular power uniting the couple, while Eastern Christian marriage services portray God
uniting the couple. The same thing occurs with Confession, where Roman Catholic priests
provide absolution, while Eastern Orthodox priests convey God’s absolution.
Thus, Western sacred power is a dictator-like, man-based Singularity. This is from Augustine’s
idea of the Trinity, where the Three Persons are treated as secondary features of the One
Essence, which Scholasticism in the 1200’s enhanced. This impersonal, abstract spirit makes
God more distant and relational authority less important. A centralizing, secularizing ideal has
taken over the West, in spite of theoretically stating otherwise. And Western scholars cite this,
including a mini-ecumenical council in the 1980’s, convened by the British Council of Churches.
The first time Eastern Christians had to deal with Western dogmas occurred in the 800’s. As
Eastern Christians began to preach in the same areas of central Europe as Western Christians,
the Western religious leaders persecuted Eastern preachers, including actual saints. A few died
or were silenced because of this. Thus began the typical pattern of Church history, where the
West committed most of the violence, hatred and atrocities against the East, due to developing
new beliefs of a papal centrality. A spirit of fear and control dominated the West.
But some of the believers of central Europe in the 800’s rebelled against Western spirituality
because of its intolerance. Liturgy and Bible studies were only in Latin, which prevented anyone
from learning the Gospel. Only non-Germanic men were allowed to be ordained. And there
were other obstacles for Germanic Christians to seek spiritual perfection, due to the extension
of more laws and regulations. But the persecutions of Eastern Christians, even enslaving them,
led to Western victories, to Polish, Hungarian and Czech lands becoming Roman Catholic.
Western spirituality after the 800’s continued to develop and proliferate new laws and
regulations. Along with strong-arm tactics to peacefully or forcefully subjugate all non-Roman
bishops in the West, the new papal spirit slowly eradicated all direct and indirect spiritual
authority that the people once had. The Church was divided between clergy and laity in evermore strict delineations. One of the last major acts was to eliminate the practice of married
clergy in the 1000’s. Though certain reasons for this action can be rationalized as benign, such
as the fact that the majority of Western priests were already celibate, there were certain
malign reasons. For example, married priests were in charge of local parishes, including their
families and children, owning the property and often helping to preserve the life and growth of
the parish by teaching and ordaining villagers, so each local parish could be passed on to the
next generations. The papacy wanted that property and that control.
After the Great Schism, papal spirituality made the separation between clergy and people so
strict, that worshippers lost Apostolic understandings and applied Pagan rituals during Liturgy,
with the priests having no meaningful contact with the laity. Hence, the new papal traditions
taught that the Body of Christ is divided between a teaching Church and a learning Church, a
heavenly Church and an earthly Church, even stating that the Church is a secular institution and
a religious institution, which is a concept that survives to this day, as Pope Francis asserted last
November. Eastern Christianity follows the Bible in saying that Christ and His own Body cannot
be divided into sections, especially not for centralizing spiritual power and religious authority.
Roman Catholicism divided clergy and people as strictly as the division between nobility and
subjects, creating a religious-secular elite having little to do with worshippers. (The Papacy even
ruled an actual kingdom, the Papal States.) This extended to the clergy as well, where a division
between popes and bishops emerged. The last vestige of clerical power was the Conciliar Era,
or Conciliarism, which reached its height in the 1400’s, when Western Christianity had three
popes at the same time. Some Western Christians were clinging to the original Apostolic
doctrine that an Ecumenical council has more authority than the pope, even having the power
to annul papal decisions. They convened Ecumenical councils, the Council of Constance and the
Council of Basel, where it was proclaimed that an Ecumenical council had more authority than
the pope, and it was determined which of the three popes was to be pope, thus ending a major
series of schisms. But the popes could not tolerate this last Apostolic vestige of checks and
balances, and within a century the papacy finally destroyed Conciliarism with an Ecumenical
council called the Fifth Lateran Council in 1512-1517, which also ensured that the people could
never annul a papally-defined ecumenical council. The popes amassed absolute power,
culminating in papal infallibility in 1870, which many Roman Catholic clerics also detested. Thus,
the popes annulled a previous Ecumenical council by their own self-fulfilling Ecumenical council.
Papal infallibility is a new dogma, since the early Christians never practiced it. The idea of a
bishop sitting on a throne was foreign to them. Bishops were given special chairs on altars as a
sign of respect, but what they said on the chair and off the chair was not divided between
official and unofficial, secular and religious, divinely authoritative and just an opinion. Divinely
guided proclamations were not determined by the type of preaching but by sainthood. Indeed,
what a bishop announced at any time was taken doctrinally. Since secular Medieval kings and
queens did make the most authoritative declarations on their thrones, this became the custom
that Roman Catholics followed with this idea of infallibility from a papal throne, ex cathedra.
The Roman Catholic spirit of eliminating the people’s contributions to the Church comes from
Augustine’s and Scholasticism’s Trinitarian flaws. Since the Three Persons of the Trinity are of
secondary value to the One Essence, Diversity does not matter as much as Singularity. This is
why Pope Francis has declared that a Singularity, the Common Good, has more value than the
Multiplicity of families and persons, reflecting Pagan principles of a singularity’s supremacy.
Because persons have secondary value in the Roman Catholic version of the Body of Christ,
this has increasingly led to a feeling of alienation over the centuries. Some Western Christians
have either joined Protestantism or stopped going to church altogether, hinting of St. Paul’s
prediction of the Great Apostasy. The Anti-Clericalism of the so-called Enlightenment Era was a
reaction to the hyper-strictness and over-regulation of Western Religion, and it fomented or
exacerbated the trends of People Power in politics and Atheism in religion, which ironically led
to even more hyper-strictness and over-regulation in politics. Though Pope Francis wants to
reverse this problem by getting the people more involved with social issues on the street level,
which he assumes will somehow convert rabid Secularists to the Faith, his understanding is in
the realm of using people to help the poor in order to justify the failures of Socialism (though
he thinks all blame goes to Capitalism, due to being oblivious to the Socialist-Capitalist fusion),
as though the intentions and fruits of big-government politicians are angelic. Other than this,
the only way for worshippers to be more involved is to donate more money.
So the spiritual authority of the laity in Roman Catholicism has developed from the Bible’s
concept of the Royal Priesthood to the concept of secular-based activism, volunteering for pot
luck dinners and making financial donations. But St. Peter in 2 Peter 2 spoke about the Royal
Priesthood of believers, not a social club. Our baptisms sanctify each Christian, clergy and laity,
to be a priest of God to the world, since we were sacrificed in the water of baptism, offering our
lives to Christ. And this is why each Christian’s hair is cut at baptism, as a sign of being a priest.
Also, all Christians share in the Eucharist, which is the spiritual offering of the Church. This gave
laity authority in the early Church, not in sacraments and doctrines, but as a check and balance
to religious power. Though abuses did occur among the clergy and laity, the general principle is
Biblical and remains valid, that all Christians are priests with some degree of spiritual authority.
Though believers in the early Church abdicated direct authority over the clergy, there was a
degree of indirect spiritual power the people could and did exercise, and still do in Eastern
Orthodoxy. But the West kept eroding the laymen’s input, not by letting worshippers decide,
but by a pope imposing his will. It is possible that Vatican II is a beginning for reversing this, but
the West must erode its Augustinian, Scholastic perceptions of the Trinity’s relational power as
a secondary feature to God’s one existence, which is treated as foundational and singularizing,
subjecting Personhood to an abstract Singularity. This is not only cited by Eastern theologians,
but it is also reported by important Western religious scholars, as well as being the conclusion
of the British mini-ecumenical council in the 1980’s, whose book is “The Forgotten Trinity”.
It is too impractical to restore worshippers having more direct spiritual authority. But they
should at least be clerically involved in some way. The West needs to learn this, and it begins
with the Holy Trinity, not simply with secular outreach and religious volunteering. If this occurs,
Christian unity and growth will be fulfilled on Apostolic terms, not on Humanist terms.