W

hat does it mean for an institution to be mobile? Many of us across the disciplines will be familiar with Douglass North’s economic and sociological understanding of institutions as “humanly devised constraints” that structure interaction, and are therefore inherently kinetic (North 1991). The kinesis of institutions, thus framed, in fundamental to their ontology such that discussing their mobility seems almost tautological.

But what of institutions in a somewhat different sense: those grand organizational constructs through which humanity has come together to generate ideology and to regulate praxis? Organizations of administration, a staple across diverse societies, often project themselves as anchors of social experience, a fixed point around which public cultures and the displacements of individuals (in the sense of lives lived) are constructed.

No administrative organization has invested more resources in projecting itself as immobile than the Rome Catholic Church. Established, resolute, universal, eternal: in its own propaganda the Church is an immoveable rock around which the world turns. This makes the Catholic Church all the more interesting as a case study for examining the hidden mobilities that inevitably lie within such a large and composite body, especially one that has been influential in processes of globalization. Indeed, arguably, the multiple flows – of people, goods, ideas and information – continue to regulate the Church’s functions in crucial ways.

Once we step past the Catholic Church’s own self-fashioning we can see it as an amorphous and constantly adaptive entity whose forms and identities are generated by internal kinesis and shaped by how its members interact with the outside world.

Understanding how the Catholic Church works, institutionally and organically, is an important subject in contemporary contexts with implications for policy debates in areas as diverse as community organisation, sexual ethics, child protection, and women’s rights – in the global north as well as the Global South. My focus in this essay, however, is simply to illustrate observations about the Church’s “institutional” mobility historically (for my profession is as historian). I aim to show that what has often seemed to outside observers to be a fusty archaic relic from the Eurocentric past retains organic and dynamic qualities that have been evolving over centuries.

How one sees the Catholic Church as mobile depends on where one looks for mobility within it. And, as an historian, I can construct multiple intersecting histories of ecclesiastical mobility which collectively cohere to an heterogenous, even universalizing, whole.

Urbi Et Orbi

The Roman Catholic Church’s distinguishing feature is surely that it is Roman. Other Christian Churches claim Catholicism and even “apostolic succession” (the idea that the current leadership is part of an unbroken line of succession going back to Jesus’s first followers). But only the Roman Catholic Church retains its deep investment in the symbolic and spiritual significance of place. Specifically, in the location of the imperial capital from Jesus’ day.

In fact, Rome’s role in Roman Catholic identity has its own complex history. The earliest Christian bishops in the city argued for their pre-eminence based purely on its secular prestige. Only from the time of Pope Damasus (366–84) did their successors play the association with St Peter – the first of the Apostles – hard. The tradition had it that St Peter travelled to Rome and became the city’s first bishop: this was what elevated popes above all other bishops, Damasus and his successors claimed.

This idea that the pope is pre-eminent precisely because he is St Peter’s successor is what marks out Roman Catholicism from other Christian variants. So one might think that popes would prioritize their presence in Rome, a form of immobility, as a legitimating activity. Not so. Popes have pursued different strategies with respect to the mobility of their person and entourage at different times in History such that we can historicize that mobility via several distinct phases.

Early popes who left Rome did so only involuntarily. Clement I (88–99), for instance, was exiled to Chersonesos Taurica by the emperor Trajan and then martyred on the Black Sea. Pontian (230–35) likewise died in exile in Sardinia. John I (523–26), Agapet (535–36), Silverius (536–37), and Vigilius (537–55) all spent part of their pontificates in the new imperial capital Constantinople (albeit not entirely voluntarily). Leo III (795–816) ended up in Paderborn, Saxony after he fled Rome in 799, and had to strike a fateful bargain with the Frankish king Charlemagne to crown him Holy Roman Emperor in return for restoration.

Eleventh-, twelfth-, and thirteenth-century popes took to the road regularly. Urban II (1088–99) famously preached the First Crusade at Clermont in France – an event which also signaled that Jerusalem and not Rome might become Christendom’s first city once again. Fourteenth-century popes mostly resided at Avignon as guests – some said prisoners – of the French King. Only in 1420 did Pope Martin V (1417–31) re-establish a papal presence in Rome in a way that has proved to be definitive and decisive. And, even then, fears stalked the city that his fifteenth-century successors would not return every time one of them decided to journey from it.  

I raise these cases to draw a contrast with two images which have emerged from the modern papacy: 1) Pope Pius IX (1846–78), “the prisoner of the Vatican” – a man encircled by the Italian state’s burgeoning ambitions and whose resoluteness meant that he and his successors effectively committed to voluntary incarceration as an act of political resistance (Chadwick 1998, 215–72). And 2) John-Paul II (1978–2005), the “flying pope” whose jet-set lifestyle put heads of state half his age to shame but who made the papacy visible and tangible in the world again (Corkery 2010).

These two men are highly significant in the history of papal mobility but the polarity between them is just one phase in a longer story into which we must situate their actions if we are to achieve a holistic perspective on how the Roman Catholic Church reconciles its responsibilities to the twin pillars in the traditional papal urbi et orbi address: city and world.

A Global Church

The papacy is the heart of the Roman Catholic Church, but the Church is more than the papacy. A second way of conceiving of the Church’s institutional mobility is to look at the spread in its global footprint – a phenomenon which has its own chronology, quite distinct from that of papal mobility, and which intersects other stories of import: from the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, to relations between medieval Christians and Muslims, to European overseas expansion and colonialism after 1500.

The spread of dioceses, the jurisdictional areas of an individual bishop, which constitute Catholic Christianity’s fundamental administrative units, are instructive in this respect (and were well studied by Church historians as far back as the nineteenth century for that reason). They tell a tale of ebb and flow: of retrenchment as areas fell to barbarian hordes in the West or, later, to Islamic armies in the East. They also tell a tale of aspiration: of the scale of the Church’s ambition to be seen as an “universal” Church with jurisdiction and representation across all known lands. Why else did popes continue appointing Latin Patriarchs of Jerusalem for centuries after that city was lost to Saladin in 1187? Why else did they acquiesce in 1533 in conferring a jurisdiction on the Archbishops of Goa in India which ran from the Cape of Good Hope to the northern tip of Japan?  

Yet, bishops and the dioceses are but one data set at our disposal for tracking the Church’s geographical mobility in this way. Parishes, those smaller subdivisions within dioceses where individual Christian communities meet and worship, are just as instructive. Parish structures only emerged in Europe around the year 1000 – before that an older form of ecclesiastical organisation, the principal church (pieve) and its satellites (capellae) persisted in many places. But by the end of the Middle Ages there were 32,000 parishes in France alone, 20,000 in Iberia, 9,500 in England, etc. The distribution of these parishes was not even: in 1477 Antwerp, a city of 40,000 souls, formed just a single parish but Ghent, roughly the same size, had seven and London, probably around twice the size of the other two, had a hundred (Spicer 2015).

Finally, as significant as these local structures, are the transnational ones: the religious orders which spread out across the globe from the Middle Ages onwards and the nexus of papal legates and nuncios who have come to form the Church’s diplomatic corps. They have their own distinct historical geographies and patterns of development, which reflect all manner of social, political, and even economic exigencies.

A history of the Church’s institutional mobility must grapple with each of these component parts and reconcile their entangled but potentially conflicting historical trajectories. It is not easy, which is why such a work of comparative synthesis is yet to be written in the modern era, but the resources are out there for a scholar who would deign to try.

A Church of All Believers

A history of the Church’s institutional mobility must also grapple with one further thing: the role in this of the mobility of its wider membership. Historians think of the Church as comprised first-and-foremost of its clergy, whose movements formed the basis of the geographies described above. And yet, the Church was always more than this. It was, in the words of the famous German Church Historian Hubert Jedin (1900–80) “a society of human beings, the ‘people of God’ under the leadership of men” (Jedin 1981, 1–2). It was the apostolic college, the episcopate, and the papacy – but it was also something fundamentally more than them, which to include not only all clergy and members of religious orders, but also lay people, women as well as men.

How then might this larger body of the lay faithful impact understandings of the Church’s institutional mobility? In one obvious way, their mobility shaped its mobility because they negotiated its boundaries with the secular world beyond it. But how far ecclesiastics pulled non-ecclesiastics into the Church’s orbit and geography is also a key measure of its capacity to mobilize and inspire.

Various categories of persons are important in any assessment of this mobilization: the aspirants who made their way to Rome in the hope of becoming clerics and making their fortunes there, those who petitioned the pope in his courts, medieval pilgrims, Enlightenment grand tourists, modern sightseers, etc. No doubt there are further categories, and those are just those who were motivated to move towards Rome.

The Church created other sites for lay mobility over the centuries – Santiago de Compostela, Lourdes, Knock, Walsingham, and, of course, Jerusalem, the holiest of all sites – such that an overall history of lay mobility within it will be a complex composite of different stories and trajectories.

Even in the case of Rome, the story of lay mobility has been a very different one to that of clerical mobility, as represented (for example) by the pope’s personal patterns of movement. A crucial development in lay mobility in fact took place in 1300, just as the popes themselves were preparing to decamp to Avignon, when Boniface VIII (1294–1303) declare the first “Jubilee Year”. That announcement presaged the first of thirty-two or thirty-three further Jubilees to date (depending on how one counts). They have mostly been great occasions that have brought unprecedented flows of people into the city and sometimes required popes to restructure its economy and topography to accommodate them.

Such Jubilees matter because they bear witness to changing patterns in how people interact with the Church as an institution – in particular, which people and how many of them. They add to the rich complexity of a subject whose historicization must involve careful comparative study. Nevertheless, the reward from that study is both tangible and decisive: it lets us write the Roman Catholic Church into increasingly nuanced and sophisticated narratives of human achievement, showing its relation not only to progress but also to transgression and resistance in the formation of a global world.

References

Chadwick O (1998). A history of the popes, 1830–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Corkery J (2010). John Paul II: universal pastor in a global age. In: Corkery J and Worcester T (eds) The papacy since 1500: from Italian prince to universal pastor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 223–42.

Jedin H (1981). Introduction. In: Dolan JP and Jedin H (eds) History of the Church. 10 vols. New York: Crossroad, Vol 1, pp. 1–10.

North DC (1991) Institutions. The Journal of Economic Perspectives 5.1: 97–112.

Spicer A (2015). Introduction. In: Spicer A (ed.) Parish Churches in the Early Modern World. London: Routledge, pp. 1–30.

Miles Pattenden is Director of Core Programmes at The Europaeum, Oxford and an Associate Member of the Faculty of History. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society for the Arts and writes on the history of the Catholic Church in academic and public settings.