The Conclave: A Sometimes Secret and Occasionally Bloody History of Papal Elections (2 page)

Catholics claim that there has been an unbroken succession of popes for the last two thousand years, beginning with St. Peter, who was appointed as head of the apostles by Jesus himself, came

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to Rome around AD 60, and was martyred there. There is no irrefutable proof that Peter was ever in Rome, but there are few nowadays who would deny it. Nor would many people deny that the basilica of St. Peter’s on Rome’s Vatican Hill is built over his tomb.

But it is more problematic to call him “Bishop of Rome.” The first person to write about the o
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ce of bishop as the position of someone who presided in authority over the local church in his area was Ignatius of Antioch. Ignatius – who was also the first person to talk about the “catholic” (meaning worldwide) church – wrote about the year AD 100. He, too, was martyred in Rome, sometime around AD 107.

So if Ignatius was one of the very first bishops, then Peter, who died some forty years earlier, could not possibly have been a bishop. In fact scholars, especially since the detailed study of early Christian Rome by Peter Lampe (see bibliography), now think there was not one “bishop” in Rome until about the middle of the second century. Instead, there were a number of di
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erent Christian communities, representing diverse immigrant groups, who would have been governed more by a council than by a single individual; the members of the councils were called “presbyters” or “bishops.” Each of these councils would have looked after a house church which served the di
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erent communities. There is no account of how these councils were chosen, but the title of “presbyters” or elders suggests that they were simply the senior members.

It is not clear when Rome developed the “monarchical” episcop- ate. Though there are succession lists of Bishops of Rome, they are somewhat confused and the bishops follow one another at sus- piciously regular intervals. However, at the time of Anicetus, who according to the traditional dates was bishop from 155 to 166, Rome received a visit from Polycarp, the distinguished Bishop of Smyrna, who came to discuss with Anicetus the date of the cele- bration of Easter. A problem had arisen because some of the immi- grant Christian communities in the city wanted to keep the feast

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day on the date that had been traditional in the churches from which they had come, the day of the Jewish Passover. The fact that Polycarp came to speak to Anicetus, who had forbidden them to celebrate according to the custom back in Asia Minor, saying that every Sunday was a celebration of Easter, suggests that by this time one man had emerged in Rome as a bishop in the now traditional sense.

Which probably means that he was elected. We know the Bishops of Rome were elected, just as they still are, even if the process has changed greatly down the centuries. The trouble is that we do not have any detailed account of the process. At least, not in Rome. On the other hand there is no reason to suppose that the process in Rome was any di
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erent from elsewhere, and there are other accounts of episcopal elections, though none from the very earliest period of Christianity. And those narratives which do exist tend to come from disputed elections and therefore do not give a fair picture of the process.

That ordinary people, the laity, were involved is clear, even though there were attempts to exclude them (as at the Council of Laodicea in 341). Such an attitude to the laity seems to have been fairly common, even early on in the history of the Church. Pope Leo I, for example, in the middle of the fifth century, had to write to the bishops of Southern Gaul (France) to tell them that they should have involved the lay people and insisted that no one ought to be promoted to the episcopal o
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ce against the will of the laity. That suggests that even by then the clergy were playing a dominant role. Bishops from neighboring dioceses, or “sees,” were common- ly called in, certainly to consecrate the man chosen but also some- times to oversee the election itself. When Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa in Cappadocia, turned up in 380 to help count the votes in the epis- copal election in Sebasteia, he found himself selected as bishop of a second city, something that the law of the Church forbade. Apart from the fact that there were expected to be at least three bishops at

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the consecration of a new bishop, there seem to have been few hard and fast rules regulating the elections.

At the same time that Gregory was elected Bishop of Nyssa, Martin, a former soldier turned monk, was chosen as bishop of Tours by general acclamation of clergy and laity. He did not want the o
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ce and had to be persuaded out of his monastery and escorted under guard into the city. Once there, however, a number of people, includ- ing, according to the account of his life by Sulpicius Severus, some of the bishops who had gathered to take part, protested that he was unworthy of the role of bishop because he was ugly, poorly dressed, and had unkempt hair – criteria, one would have thought, that might have ruled out a good many otherwise worthy candidates if they had been rigorously applied down the centuries. Meanwhile Martin became bishop, won great renown, and is now venerated as a saint.

A similar story of a reluctant candidate is told about another saint, Saint Ambrose, who became Bishop of Milan in 374. His case was unusual – though not unique – because when he was chosen he was not only still a layman, but not yet a Christian. On the other hand, he came from a devout Christian family which had risen high in the administration of the Roman Empire. Only a couple of years before his election as bishop Ambrose had been appointed governor of Milan. It was in his capacity as governor that he attended the gather- ing in the great cathedral of Milan (it is thought to have held upward of 3,000 people) to choose a successor to Bishop Auxentius.

Auxentius had been a somewhat problematic bishop. For one thing, he was from Cappadocia – in modern Turkey – and not from Milan, or even from Italy. His way of doing things was not exactly common among his neighboring bishops. But more chal- lenging still was his stance on the relationship between God the Father and God the Son. He believed, and taught, that the Son was subordinate to the Father. This was a matter of high theology, but it had flared up into open conflict, especially in the Eastern part of the Empire. Theoretically the dispute had been settled by a council

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of the Church, the Council of Nicaea, in 325, but in practice the Council had failed to put an end to discussion. The person who had first put forward the views condemned at Nicaea was a priest of the see of Alexandria called Arius, and those who adhered to his teaching in one way or another were called Arians. Auxentius was an Arian, and there were a number of influential bishops around who wanted to drive him from his see.

His predecessor had been driven out by the Emperor of the day because he was too anti-Arius. Auxentius went to the other extreme, and when he died he left a church deeply divided between the two factions, for and against Arius’s doctrine. So bitter was the conflict that it seemed at the time that it might break out into open warfare – violence in episcopal elections was far from unknown and had occurred in Rome less than a decade before (cf. below, pp. 17–18). Which is why Ambrose, as governor of Milan, took himself o
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to the cathedral, which was very close to the center of the city. He made a speech, calling upon the Christians to remain calm and proceed with the election in an orderly manner. While he was speaking somebody shouted out “Ambrose for bishop,” and the cry was taken up by the rest of the vast crowd.

Ambrose may have been unbaptized, but he was still a good candidate as far as the Christians of Milan were concerned. Because he was not yet a Christian they may have thought him neutral between the pro- and anti-Arian factions: in fact he was to prove himself a vigorous anti-Arian, but no one was yet to know that. He would obviously have influence with the Emperor – a very important consideration when the population was still split between pagans and Christians. He was also unmarried, and his celibate lifestyle might have seemed (rightly, as it turned out, though Ambrose was later to imply that his life before the election was not wholly moral) evidence of an ascetic disposition appropri- ate for a bishop. What is more, he resisted the appointment, which was always a good sign because it was taken as proof of the reluc- tant candidate’s humility – again, a desirable virtue in a bishop.

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Ambrose himself says he was unwilling to take up the o
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ce of bishop; later accounts narrate some of the things he did to try to avoid it. Inviting prostitutes to his house is most probably a later rhetorical flourish; certainly the man who wrote about it was not there at the time to witness the fact, though he eventually became Ambrose’s secretary and may have heard something about his e
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orts to avoid consecration from Ambrose himself. It is quite possible that he twice tried to flee the city but was brought back. But whatever the details, the voice of the people finally won out, and the unbaptized (and, a fortiori, unordained) former governor of the city became Bishop of Milan, which was at that time the Western Empire’s capital city, rather than Rome.

Candidates were not always as unwilling as Ambrose. Just under a century later the aristocratic letter-writer and poet Sidonius Apollinaris, who eventually became Bishop of what is now Clermont-Ferrand, wrote to a friend about the election to the bishopric of Bourges. Two whole rows of seats were needed, he said, for all the candidates, and such was the excitement among the people that they had to give up any say and leave it to the judgment of the bishops present.

Sidonius could be an acerbic observer of episcopal elections. In the 460s he told a friend about what had happened when he accompanied his friend Patiens, the Bishop of Lyons (Sidonius had been born in Lyons), to Châlon-sur-Saône, where Patiens was to preside over the choice of a new bishop for that town. A group of bishops gathered, but their views were at odds, apparently, with those of the townspeople. The problem was that there were three candidates, but Sidonius did not think very highly of any of them. The first, he said, was “morally bankrupt” but kept going on about his ancient lineage; the second had provided rather good food for his supporters; and the third had secretly agreed that, were he elected, he would divide out church property among those who voted for him. Faced with these unsuitable candidates the bishops chose the senior (or arch) deacon John out of the noisy and angry

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crowd – much to his astonishment, Sidonius remarks – and made him the bishop. Deacons were clergy – though not of the rank of priests – who were in charge of the welfare of the local Christian community, and were often popular figures. The archdeacon was, therefore, well known to the community as well as to the visiting bishops and also had a reputation for holiness. The townsfolk accepted the bishops’ decision.

These stories give a flavor of what an episcopal election, conducted in front of the Christians of the city, was like in the early centuries of the Church. Of the very earliest elections to the bishopric of Rome we know next to nothing. It has already been remarked that, in the traditional list of the first dozen popes, they follow one another with suspicious regularity. Their names, and what little else we know of them, suggest that they were either Roman or Greek, though Anicetus, mentioned above, was from Syria and Victor I (traditionally 189–199) was from Africa. There is no evidence whatsoever about how they came to be popes. Zephyrinus (199–217) is the first to emerge from the obscurity of the papal succession lists as a distinct personality – and a weak one at that – but only because he is discussed by the Roman theologian Hippolytus, who did not like him.

The reason for the dislike was Callistus. Callistus, at least according to Hippolytus, was a Christian slave who looked after his master’s finances. He was, however, found guilty of embezzling money, fled to the Roman port of Ostia, and was arrested there while trying to get on board a ship. He was sentenced to the tread- mill, then pardoned, and then sent to the lead mines of Sardinia for causing a disturbance in a synagogue. There were numerous Christians in the mines, victims of the spasmodic persecutions which the Emperors unleashed upon the Church (Peter is thought to have died in the persecution of Nero in the year 64). Some time around 190 Pope Victor managed to get the Christians released. As a common criminal Callistus was not included, but succeeded in getting himself added to the Pope’s list. Apparently Victor was not

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pleased and sent him away from Rome. Zephyrinus brought him back, made him a deacon, and put him in charge of a Christian cemetery, still known as the catacomb of St. Callistus. When Zephyrinus died in 217 Callistus became pope.

The choice of a man with such a shady career seems odd. Certainly Hippolytus thought so. But there was more to it than that. As far as we can tell, Callistus was chosen as pope because he was a good administrator and, having been put in charge of the lower clergy by Zephyrinus, was well known in the church. He may also have been elected because he was ready to adapt Christian discipline to the changing position of the Church as it grew in numbers and became more established in society – not least as a property owner. Hippolytus accused him of being too lenient, but it may have been this trait which commended him to the electors. Callistus seems to have been killed in 222, thrown out of a window in the Roman district of Trastevere (where, indeed, he had been born) not in a formal persecution but in the course of an anti- Christian riot.

It used to be thought that Hippolytus was elected as an antipope, that is to say, someone chosen by a faction in the Church in oppo- sition to the legitimately chosen Bishop of Rome. There were to be many antipopes in the future, occasionally more than one at the same time. There were to be times when it became di
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cult to decide who was pope and who was an antipope, but it is now generally thought that Hippolytus was not after all the first of a long line, though he was clearly the leader of a faction among the Christians of Rome who did not approve of the policies of Callistus.