A History of Christianity - S1.E2 ∙ Catholicism The Unpredictable Rise of Rome
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00:0080 years ago, my mother was a little girl in the Staffordshire Potteries.
00:07One day she was out walking with my grandfather, devout pillar of his local Anglican parish
00:12church, when they passed a church that she thought she'd like to look into because it
00:16was Roman Catholic and she had a girl's curiosity about it.
00:22Her father made it quite clear that he would be highly displeased if she even went inside
00:27a Roman Catholic church to look round.
00:30For him, Rome was an alien world liable to pollute the English way of life.
00:38That seems a world away now and my grandfather isn't around to stop me exploring.
00:47So my second journey into Christianity takes me into the history of the church which calls
00:52itself Catholic.
01:01Its headquarters is the Vatican in Rome, an independent sovereign state with influence
01:07all over the world.
01:10Over one billion Christians look to Rome.
01:13That's more than half of all Christians on the planet.
01:18But there's a huge paradox here.
01:22How did a small Jewish sect from first century Palestine, which preached humility and the
01:28virtue of poverty, become the established religion of Western Europe?
01:33Powerful, wealthy, and expecting unfailing obedience from the faithful.
01:39It's a story of what can be achieved when you have friends in high places.
02:04The centre of the Western Latin Church is the city of Rome and the spiritual head of
02:08that church is the Bishop of Rome, the Pope.
02:12And that's very odd when you think about it because Rome's the centre of the empire which
02:16killed Christ and the empire went on killing members of the church for another 300 years
02:21on and off.
02:27So what happened to give Rome a Christian destiny?
02:37The obvious focus for the newly emerging church was Jerusalem.
02:41It's where Jesus was crucified.
02:43But in 70 AD, the Romans destroyed the city.
02:48Christianity gradually spread south and east.
02:51But one missionary, the Apostle Paul, looked in a different direction, to Asia Minor, now
02:57modern Turkey and Greece.
03:01His letters in the New Testament trace his journey through the trading routes of the
03:05empire whose capital was Rome.
03:09And eventually, as a prisoner of the emperor, Paul came to Rome.
03:13It's said that he was met by his friends here on the Appian Way just outside the city, that
03:18he then spent years under house arrest before the Roman authorities killed him.
03:26With the perversity of history, Rome's brutality would put the city centre stage for Christianity.
03:33Without Jerusalem, Rome could now claim a piece of the Christian story.
03:41From very early on, Christians were drawn here, to the underground catacombs of San
03:46Sebastiano, where Paul's body was hidden from the authorities.
03:53But they were also drawn to another martyr's grave, Simon Peter, one of the twelve original
03:59disciples of Jesus.
04:05Peter and Paul are equally venerated in these graffiti from the third century.
04:11At that stage, there was no hint that one of them would become the sole spiritual leader
04:16of the church, nor that the Roman Empire would become Christian.
04:22Or Rome, the centre of a worldwide Christian church.
04:27So what on earth, or what in heaven, happened?
04:37This is the first glimpse that many early Christians had of Rome.
04:42It's the port of Ostia, about 12 miles south-west of the city.
04:48The first Christians in the west were Greek speakers, travelling merchants or slaves who
04:53sailed here from trading ports all round the Mediterranean.
04:59These Christians met together in secret, to share an idea which has seized millions across
05:042,000 years.
05:07Eternal salvation is open to anyone who believes in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.
05:13And at the heart of their new faith was a ritual symbolising selfless love, sharing
05:20a meal.
05:23Christian people went on breaking bread and drinking wine in thanksgiving for Jesus Christ,
05:28and they probably did so here, in this family home, and the clue to that is in the mosaic.
05:34It's got fish in it, and fish are a secret Christian symbol, because the first letters
05:40in Greek for fish are the same as the first letters in Greek for Jesus Christ.
05:49Christianity began creeping in from the fringes of Roman society.
05:55Church buildings started openly appearing.
05:59This is just one of at least two in the port of Ostia.
06:06By the year 251, the church in Rome had on its books 46 priests, 7 deacons, and 52 exorcists,
06:15readers and doorkeepers.
06:22If you were a traditional-minded Roman, you'd notice all this.
06:27You'd notice crosses appearing on floors and walls, and you wouldn't like it.
06:34The gods would be offended.
06:36The story spread that Christians actually drank blood during their ceremonies.
06:41Well, after all, that's what they said they did.
06:44But the rumours grew.
06:45Christian love feasts were said to be incestuous orgies.
06:49And although Christians were a non-violent sect, their refusal to sacrifice to the emperor
06:53looked like treason.
07:01Churches became scapegoats for a whole heap of new threats to the Roman Empire.
07:08Economic crisis, social breakdown, civil war.
07:18It culminated in a savage attack on Christians right across the empire.
07:26In the great persecution at the end of the 3rd century, church buildings were destroyed.
07:32And all Christians were required to sacrifice to the pagan gods.
07:43Some of those who refused are said to have been slaughtered here in the theatre at Ostia.
07:52It had never been this bad.
08:00The Roman Empire was now gleefully killing Christians, just as it had killed Christ two
08:06and a half centuries before.
08:11You'd have been mad to think that Rome could be the centre of worldwide Christianity.
08:20But Christian fortunes were about to change dramatically.
08:29One emperor did a reverse turn, which took Christianity from a religion of the poor and
08:35dispossessed into a religion of the rich and powerful.
08:50In the early 4th century, the Roman Empire was torn apart by rival claims to the imperial throne.
08:56During the struggle for power, one general and ruthless politician made a decision which
09:01changed the course of Christian history.
09:06Because of that, Christians have called him Constantine the Great.
09:15He made the decision to become a Christian.
09:18For reasons which lied buried forever in his mind, he became convinced that the Christian
09:21god had helped him hack his way to power.
09:24This was the god whose followers were still being persecuted by his rivals, and that might
09:28have had something to do with it.
09:36When Constantine had secured supreme power in all Roman territories in the East and West,
09:42he set about making the Empire Christian.
09:47To secure the Eastern half, he moved his capital to a small Greek city overlooking
09:52the Bosphorus, which he named after himself, Constantinople.
10:00But he had plans for Rome too, rooting out Rome's pagan past and remodelling Christianity
10:08into a state religion.
10:15Constantine was a generous benefactor of this church, St Martin-on-the-Mount.
10:22It's rather off the tourist map, but in here there's something very special.
10:27A glimpse of the true scale of Constantine's vision for a Christian Rome, a new Jerusalem
10:34with churches to outshine the ancient imperial buildings of the Roman past.
10:41And here it is, a church which became one of the most famous in Christian history, the
10:45Basilica of St Peter.
10:48And it's one of the few decent views of what old St Peter's looked like inside.
10:52In a word, huge.
11:02All this architectural fuss about St Peter raises an historical mystery about Catholic
11:07Rome which has never been fully resolved.
11:13Why has Paul not been given equal reverence?
11:23One answer lies within St Peter's Basilica itself.
11:31Not over the shrine and probably the final resting place of Jesus' right-hand man, Simon
11:38Peter.
11:40It was Jesus who gave him the nickname which in Greek means rock, Petros.
11:46In three of the Gospels, Jesus says that on this rock he will build his church.
11:52And so Constantine may well have focused on a church to St Peter because of that key line,
11:59the power of Christian Rome founded on a Greek pun.
12:10Constantine had given promotion to the cult of Peter.
12:14While curiously and surely significantly, he seems to have made no effort to provide
12:20St Paul with anything nearly so grand.
12:35Paul's body lies in the church of St Paul's outside the walls.
12:40The name says it all.
12:45Here we are in what was once a malaria-infested plain two miles beyond the city walls of Rome.
12:53Your average tourist might be forgiven for not noticing that Paul the Apostle to the
12:56Gentiles had anything to do with the city.
13:02It was Paul who pursued the radical idea of taking Christianity to non-Jews, something
13:08the conservative Peter had been very sceptical about.
13:14Apparently the Catholic Church owes its existence more to Paul.
13:19And there's no better person to reflect on this mystery than the abbot of St Paul's himself.
13:25Well how about a what-if?
13:26If the situation had been reversed, what would the church look like now?
13:30If Paul had been the centre, well even that image, Paul the centre, doesn't make sense.
13:36Paul by nature represented this movement on the fringe and it's clear to me how Peter
13:43took the dominant position, because Peter represented the stability of the core, the
13:49basic, the rock.
13:52So I mean I think it would have been a much less centralised church probably.
13:58Risky question, good thing or bad thing?
14:00So you're asking a solid Roman Catholic whether it's good to have a strong centre or not.
14:06Well of course it's important to have a strong centre.
14:08But what's going on around it is equally important.
14:12It's a pity in a way.
14:13I'd like to see the Pope declaring his Pauline ministry as well, which would then kind of
14:21bring the two a bit more into equality.
14:35I was grateful to the abbot for his gentle frankness.
14:39Because one thing that the modern papacy really pushes at the faithful, Rome knows
14:44best, the centre is what matters.
14:49But it took the church a long time to make this the big theme in Catholicism and there
14:55is no guarantee that it will always be like that.
15:05The crucial steps towards centralised power were taken 30 years after Constantine's death.
15:13The decision to promote Peter over Paul was exploited to the full.
15:24That laid foundations for the later papacy.
15:32It was during the time of Pope Damasus I that the Bishop of Rome was established as
15:37bishop in unbroken succession from St Peter.
15:41Well, I'll stick my neck out and say that I don't believe that Peter was bishop in Rome.
15:49You'd be hard put to find anyone before the time of Pope Damasus who made that claim.
15:57The list of the bishops of Rome, up to about 180, is just that, a list, linking Damasus
16:04back to the disciple who knew Jesus, Peter.
16:08You might say that Paul was now surplus to requirements.
16:17As successor of Peter, the Bishop of Rome became the Holy Father, Pope, of all Christians
16:23in the West.
16:25Now Damasus set out to give Christianity the glory which an imperial religion demanded.
16:33He brought the good news not to the poor and the downtrodden to whom Jesus had preached,
16:40but to the Roman nobility.
16:43There's a monumental room just above the catacombs of San Sebastiano which shows precisely how.
16:53Well, this chamber may not be much to look at now, but it's something very precious because
16:57it's a building actually commissioned by Bishop Damasus himself, and what it is is a luxury
17:03mausoleum for the aristocratic members of his congregation in Rome.
17:15Pope Damasus also personally composed Latin inscriptions glorifying the suffering of the
17:21Christian martyrs.
17:24There's rather more elegance than evidence in what he wrote.
17:28This is actually one of Damasus' inscriptions.
17:32It's about a very obscure saint called Eutychius.
17:34Eutychius, the martyr, showed that he could conquer the evil commands of the tyrant and
17:44the ways of the world.
17:46But what's nice about it as well is the lettering.
17:49It's the best, most expensive imperial lettering you could get, like on an imperial Roman inscription.
17:55It's a symbol that the Church is no longer the Church of a few Greek-speaking traders.
18:00It's the Church of all Roman society at all levels.
18:09The Catholic Church was no longer an upstart.
18:13It had friends in high places.
18:16Now, a religion fit for gentlemen.
18:23But I don't want to leave the impression that the Catholic story is just about power politics.
18:32If you're in any sense a Western Christian, you live with one legacy in particular from
18:37this period, even if you fight against it.
18:41The idea that Adam and Eve have left us totally corrupted by sin.
18:48That was the conclusion of Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in North Africa.
18:54The father of Western theology.
19:00As a young man, Augustine lived the life of a playboy.
19:06He was also a scholar with a brilliant career ahead of him.
19:11But it all turned sour.
19:13Then, in a garden in Milan, came a moment when he began to see a purpose in his life.
19:20He heard a child chanting, Take up and read.
19:30Augustine opened Paul's epistle to the Romans at random.
19:36Paul confronted him with his own sin and told him that the only way to salvation was through
19:41purity of life.
19:44Augustine became obsessed with the source of sin in Adam and Eve's disobedience to God.
19:51And his answer bequeathed the Western Latin Church an idea which not every Christian has
19:57found in the Bible, original sin.
20:02Augustine came to believe that all humans inherit sin from the sin of Adam and Eve,
20:06and that sexual desire is an appetite at the base of physical body rather than the
20:10soul, and that the sexual act is the way that sin is transmitted from one generation to
20:15the next.
20:18It means that you and I are so corrupted by sin there's nothing we can do to save ourselves
20:23from hell.
20:24Only God can do that by his grace.
20:26And there is no reason why he shouldn't make completely random decisions as to who to send
20:30to heaven and who to leave in hell.
20:32We have no say in the matter because we are nothing but corruption.
20:39That idea of predestination still hangs around Western Christianity, Catholic and Protestant,
20:49as does Augustine's dark view of sex.
20:55And maybe the modern West is so obsessed with good sex as the symbol of a fulfilled life,
21:01precisely because the Western Latin Church has been so long obsessed with bad sex as
21:06the root of human sin.
21:14The Christian Church's humble beginnings were now a distant memory.
21:21A golden age seemed to beckon, but this turned out to be a mirage.
21:30In the 5th century, barbarian invaders overran the Western half of the empire.
21:37And in 410, they took Rome itself.
21:42At that moment, the Latin Church could easily have crumbled and become a footnote in European
21:49history.
21:58But see what happened.
21:59I've come to North Italy and the city of Ravenna.
22:06The centuries while the Church stood alone after the fall of Rome are often called the
22:10Dark Ages, as if civilised life collapsed.
22:15Actually that's not true.
22:16The Church was not about to die with the empire, but it was at a crossroads.
22:23A choice of routes lay ahead.
22:28This is the Church of San Vitale.
22:32It marks one possible future, to look east to Byzantium, the surviving half of the Roman
22:39Empire and one half of the imperial church.
22:46San Vitale was built by an emperor of the east, Justinian, whose ambition was to win
22:51back the whole territory of the old Roman Empire.
22:57Ravenna was one of his conquests.
23:00The Church of San Vitale, one of his legacies.
23:04Eventually, his branch of imperial Christianity would become orthodoxy and flourish in the
23:11Balkans and Russia.
23:15But there was another option for the Western Church, even more radical.
23:22It could choose to do some sort of deal with the new barbarian rulers, with the invading
23:29Franks in Gaul, Visigoths in Spain, Vandals in the African provinces, Ostrogoths in North
23:38Italy.
23:40Contrary to the image of barbarians, these people were not savages.
23:45Most of them were already Christians, just not Catholic Christians.
23:50I've come to the Church of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, also in Ravenna.
23:55It was built for Theoderic, king of the Ostrogoths.
23:59The trouble was, in the eyes of the Catholic Church, everything about his Christianity
24:02was heretical.
24:04He was a follower of Arius, who believed that Jesus Christ was not fully eternal and divine
24:11in the way that God the Father was.
24:14You know what's so precious about this place is that it's not just an Arian church building.
24:18We've got Arian pictures, mosaics.
24:20We've got the life of Christ, miracles.
24:22We've got the miraculous draught of fishes, for instance.
24:25But on this wall, what's so great is that he's a young Christ, he's got no beard.
24:30When we go round to this side, later scenes of the life of Christ, like his betrayal in
24:35the Garden of Gethsemane, he's got a beard.
24:38So the Arian Christ, like us, he grows older.
24:44He's human.
24:47Faced with the choice of an alliance with the East, with the Arians, what would the
24:51Latin Church do?
24:55Its decision forever shaped Western Christendom.
25:00It decided to go it alone, and look to the Pope to guide it.
25:06And in the end, it was the Latin Church which survived intact, and it was Arian Christianity
25:12which was wiped from the record.
25:16Well, we've got an intriguing case of Catholic censoring mosaics here, because this is a
25:22picture of a palace.
25:23It's helpfully labelled Palatium, and it's the palace of the Arian king, Theodoric.
25:30But he's missing.
25:31He would be where that great area of gold mosaic is, but he's gone.
25:36And either side of him would be his courtiers.
25:39Instead of the courtiers, you've got these rather boring curtains.
25:42But they haven't done it very well, because, you see, they've left hands on the columns.
25:48Hand, hand, fingers.
25:51There they've gone.
25:52They just don't exist anymore.
25:58So how did the Latin Church survive on its own?
26:02Well, the decisions made by that wily politician Pope Damasus began to pay off.
26:09The Church still had influential friends.
26:16The Latin Church survived because of a great choice made by people clinging to shreds of
26:20imperial power, the Roman aristocracy.
26:24Once they'd ruled the empire, now they decided to rule the Church.
26:29The Roman noblemen became bishops to preserve the world they loved.
26:35When the empire collapsed, the Church stepped into the power vacuum.
26:47The Western Church had survived.
26:51It had adapted.
26:54200 years earlier, Christianity was against the establishment.
26:59Now it was the establishment.
27:05Not surprisingly, the bishops of Rome were in an expansive mood.
27:13Rome would play a new role as the capital of a Western Christian empire of the mind,
27:19greater than any empire created by the Roman army.
27:24The Aryan peoples had brought their own Christianity westwards as far as Spain.
27:32Now Rome would outflank them.
27:36The Pope sent a mission reaching beyond the Aryans to the former Roman colony of Britannia.
27:51In 597, a party of 40 Roman monks and priests landed in Kent.
27:58They'd been sent by Pope Gregory I, himself a monk and one of those Roman aristocrats
28:04who'd taken over the Church.
28:07It's said that his mother, Sylvia, sent his monastery daily meals on a silver dish.
28:13Gregory couldn't have been less like an upper-class twit playing at being a monk.
28:17He was the first Pope to take an initiative in mission to the boundaries of the lost empire.
28:25It was led by a monk from his own monastery in Rome, a priest called Augustine.
28:30Britain's often been celebrated as the man who brought Christianity to England.
28:35Actually, it wasn't quite like that.
28:41Britannia already had some Christians from its days as a Roman province.
28:46But for two centuries, it had been in the power of non-Christians, Anglo-Saxon warriors
28:51from mainland Europe.
29:00In the mere eight years of life left to him, Augustine laid a solid foundation for an Anglo-Saxon
29:06church which was quite exceptional in Europe in its devotion to Rome.
29:12His seat of power, Canterbury Cathedral, was given the dedication Christ Church, because
29:17it was then the dedication of the Pope's cathedral in Rome.
29:22It was the Pope who appointed Augustine the first Archbishop of Canterbury.
29:26And in fact, Pope Gregory gave Augustine a special liturgical garment, the pallium.
29:32And this was a symbol that the power of the Archbishops of Canterbury came from Rome.
29:39It's easy to forget that the English church was under Roman obedience for 900 years, far
29:45longer than it's been Protestant.
29:48Eventually, the Church of England turned its back on the Church of Rome in the 16th century
29:53Reformation.
29:55But it forgot one little thing.
29:58Bizarrely, the coat of arms of the Archbishop of Canterbury still incorporates the Y shape
30:04of the pallium.
30:06It's a little piece of heraldry which the Protestant Reformation in England either failed
30:10to notice or decided to ignore.
30:17When Augustine died, there were around a dozen monasteries in England.
30:22A century later, there were at least 200.
30:29But these distant isles made their own special contribution.
30:34They gave shape to one of the distinctive practices of the Catholic Church, confession.
30:52I've come as far west in Europe as you can get to where monks lived a life as intense
30:57and austere as anything in church history.
31:00I'm heading for Skellig Michael off the Kerry coast in Ireland.
31:10These monks were not Anglo-Saxon, but Celtic Christians.
31:15They came to settle out here in the Atlantic Ocean as far back as the 6th century.
31:21It's easy to see them as isolated from the church in Rome.
31:27But for them, the sea was not a barrier, but a series of pathways to their neighbours and
31:32beyond.
31:35They shared books with other monks right across the Mediterranean, and Latin was the language
31:40of their liturgy and their literature.
31:44Here's a man-made step, 600 of them, designed by the monks to take me up to the monastery.
32:02Well I have to confess that I started up these stairs cheerfully enough, but vertigo has
32:06taken over and I simply can't go on, so I will never see the monastery on Skellig Michael.
32:12I cannot understand why the monks lived here.
32:15It feels like the edge of the world.
32:21It seems absurd to me that living here, Irish monks could have an upbeat view of human nature.
32:29But they did.
32:32Such a contrast with the pessimism of Augustine of Hippo.
32:37And out of this optimism came a new practice, designed to cope with that sense of guilt
32:43and falling short that Christians call sin.
32:48They came up with tariff books, guide books to dealing with sin.
32:53The principle is you can find out or decide what sort of penalty, penance, deals with
32:59what sort of sin, and you can list them, and there they are for priests to deal with.
33:04Who wouldn't jump at the chance of having a forgiveness of sin tariff?
33:08And this is the beginning of individual confession to a priest.
33:14It's a very powerful thing to do, to offer someone forgiveness.
33:21Confessions remain very precious for Catholics, but it's also been an enormous source of conflict
33:25and anger in the Western Church.
33:28That's because forgiveness is very personal.
33:31Is a priest getting in the way, or is he helping you reach out to God?
33:38That idea doesn't sit very well with Augustine of Hippo's views about total human corruption.
33:44And aren't you rather manipulating God by setting up measurements for forgiveness?
33:52The clash between those two thoughts went on lurking in the life of Latin Christians.
33:58In the 16th century Reformation, it was the central issue to split the Western Church.
34:12It's an impressive witness to the energy of Celtic Christians that this remote corner
34:17of Europe had such a profound influence on the whole Church.
34:24Western Latin Catholicism had not faded during the so-called Dark Ages.
34:30It had survived, and more than that, it had spread its Christian message to a world beyond
34:36Rome.
34:44But it was still vulnerable.
34:48With the emperor gone, it was at the mercy of kings and noblemen who were often little
34:52better than bandits.
34:58And a new religious rival had risen in the East, Islam.
35:08At the end of the 8th century, with Islam relentlessly pressing westward, Pope Leo III
35:13turned the clock back 400 years and made Western Christianity an imperial power once more.
35:23Just like Constantine I, the new emperor, Charles, would be nicknamed the Great Charlemagne.
35:47The ancient spa town of Aachen in southwest Germany was once home to Charlemagne, the
35:52most powerful man in 8th century Western Europe, but also a man with a fetish for history.
36:02Charlemagne loved to wallow in the hot pools of Aachen, pretending to be a Roman at the
36:06baths. But he was actually descended from barbarians, the Franks. They were one of the
36:11peoples who'd swept into Western Europe and smashed the central structures of the Roman
36:15Empire. But the Franks were different from the other barbarians. They'd taken up Catholic
36:20rather than Aryan Christianity.
36:31Charlemagne's empire extended from beyond the Pyrenees into the heart of modern Germany.
36:36But his ambition was to reunite the old Roman Empire west and east, a Christian Roman Empire.
36:44His first priority was to become the protector and defender of the Catholic Church.
36:54In return, Pope Leo III crowned him as Emperor of the West on Christmas Day 800 in St Peter's
37:00Basilica in Rome.
37:04Charlemagne's successors called themselves Holy Roman Emperors, and many of them were
37:12crowned on this throne in Charlemagne's Cathedral in Aachen.
37:19No Pope before had crowned monarchs. Did this now mean that the Church was mightier than
37:24the Empire? For the next few centuries, Popes and Emperors quarrelled about who best represented
37:29Christian Rome, and which side had supreme authority over the other.
37:36There never was a clear answer. But at least Emperor and Pope shared a vision, an imperial
37:44Western Latin Church. And that gave Latin Christianity a new self-assurance.
37:53Two hundred years later, in 1054, the West would finally split from the Church in Constantinople,
37:59separating distinct Catholic and Orthodox Churches.
38:07Far from damaging the Western Latin Church, the split became the platform for an ambitious
38:12new Pope, Gregory VII, to revolutionise the Church.
38:22So much has happened to the Roman Catholic Church in the centuries since then, but it's
38:26still indebted to Gregory's reforms a thousand years ago.
38:34The big theme of Catholicism has come to be the centre. Central control is now what matters,
38:41and what marks it out from other denominations. The Church expects obedience from the faithful.
38:49But in the Middle Ages, it couldn't always take that for granted.
38:57In converting Europe, monks and missionaries had chiefly targeted the nobility, reasoning
39:03that the rest would follow. But the Church now had a greater ambition.
39:10What Gregory now wanted to do was to micromanage the fate of every soul in Europe.
39:17And to drive through this change, the papacy first targeted the clergy.
39:25Gregory made a change which was to redefine the popular image of the Catholic cleric.
39:30Before that, most clergy who were not monks would expect to marry, but Gregory started
39:34a campaign to make all clergy automatically celibate. That's because he wanted the best,
39:40the most disciplined, and the most loyal clergy possible.
39:45He deeply distrusted married clergy. They might found dynasties that might make Church
39:51lands their own hereditary family property. With its foot soldiers in place, the Church
39:57now had a presence in every village and town, every parish, doing its best to control every
40:05aspect of people's lives.
40:08What emerged was a single Western Latin Catholic society, unified by the Latin language and
40:13underpinned by a complex religious bureaucracy. It reflected the lost Roman Empire. It outshone
40:20the Roman Empire. And what was it all for? Nothing less than making all society holy.
40:32But far and away the most centralizing step was taken by the Pope himself when he told
40:37the world what he thought he was, or what he'd like to be. A universal monarch reigning
40:44over all the rulers of the earth. A set of so-called dictates spelled it out. Twenty-seven
40:52very blunt statements of power. No Pope before had said it quite like this.
41:02It didn't actually use the word infallibility. That wouldn't happen until the 19th century.
41:07But it did say that every Pope is undoubtedly made a saint by the merits of St. Peter. Well,
41:13excuse me!
41:17Frankly I don't see every Pope as a living saint, and neither have countless Catholics
41:22over the centuries. And in fact, the Popes after Gregory have been pretty wary about
41:28his statement. But neither have they said that he was wrong.
41:34This absolutism would give later Protestants yet another reason to break away from the
41:39Western Latin Church. But this was not just a greedy church grabbing power. It was also
41:49intended to offer something to the faithful. Not just any old something. Salvation.
42:01For a thousand years the Christian picture of the afterlife had been stark. After death
42:07you either went to heaven or hell. But now the Latin Church picked up an old idea from
42:14early centuries. Purgatory. A place for purging. Where the souls of the dead burned in fire.
42:29The difference from hell was that purgatory wasn't forever. And purgatory had only one
42:35exit. Up to heaven.
42:38It was tailor-made for those who in this life feel ordinary. Not very good, not very
42:45bad, but certainly not good enough to go straight to heaven. It was a very comforting doctrine.
42:51Crucially, it gave people a sense that while still on this earth they could do something
42:56about their salvation.
43:00They could pray or they could do good works to shorten their time in purgatory.
43:09The whole system became an industry in the Western Church. A purgatory industry. A vast
43:14factory of prayer and ceremonial observance. It was one of the most successful ideas in
43:19the whole of Christian history. It satisfied millions of people for centuries on end.
43:26By the end of the 11th century, the Catholic Church was European society's single most
43:31important institution. The best organized monarchy in Europe. It promised a structure
43:40to people's life on earth and salvation in death. That's more than the old Roman emperors
43:46could ever have offered.
43:52But the reality was that half of the world's professing Christians were now subject to
43:56a different religion. Islam controlled the whole of North Africa, Spain, Sicily and much
44:05of Western Asia. It even occupied the original holy city, Jerusalem.
44:13And so, in 1095, in a great blaze of publicity, the Catholic Church mounted an ambitious military
44:25campaign. The First Crusade. There'd been a time when Christian leaders had tried to
44:32stop Christians from becoming soldiers. Now, atrocities were committed in the name of the
44:39God of Love. For the first time, the notion of holy war entered Christianity. The Crusades
44:44are an embarrassment for Christianity. In seeking to recapture the Holy Land, they got
44:49to the point where the Crusaders were forced to leave the Holy Land. They were forced to
44:56leave. The Crusades are an embarrassment for Christianity. In seeking to recapture
45:01the Holy Land, they caused misery and destruction. It was idealism, but it was also Christian
45:09love turned to violence and arrogance. But I'm here in London, at the Temple Church,
45:16to show that the Crusades left a more complex legacy. Some say this is modeled on the Church
45:23of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. But I think that's to hide an awkward truth. It's
45:31a copy of one of the most famous Muslim buildings in the world. It was built by the Knights
45:39Templar, an order of soldier monks founded during the Crusades to protect pilgrims to
45:44the Holy Land. They'd seized the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and made it their headquarters,
45:49hence the name Templars. All over Europe, they built these circular churches to look
45:54like what they thought was the Jerusalem Temple. It's a good thing they didn't realize it was
45:59actually a Muslim building. The dome of the rock on the Temple Mount. This was the Templars
46:06English HQ. Burial here in the round church was almost as good as being buried in Jerusalem.
46:26These knights are portrayed in their early 30s, the age at which Christ died and the
46:31age at which the dead will rise on his return. Men like these flocked to join the enterprise.
46:40The Crusades became yet another means of purging sin, like purgatory, but this time through
46:46action in this life. And that led to a further new Western Catholic idea. The Crusades were
46:54sold to noblemen and humble folk alike as another way of winning salvation. Whatever
47:00sins someone committed on Crusade were more than cancelled out simply by being on Crusade.
47:07And this was the first specimen of something which became big business in Western Europe
47:12alongside purgatory, the indulgence. An indulgence granted you time off from purgatory.
47:24Later, they became as routine as the modern lottery ticket for a good cause. In the end,
47:33you simply bought them. Even now, the idea of Crusade has its defenders, but I have to
47:41say that I find the Crusading era one of the darkest chapters in the history of Catholicism.
47:49There was at least one positive and hugely important outcome of the Crusades, a legacy
47:59that's still with us now. I wouldn't be a professor without it, so it must be good.
48:07Thanks to the Crusades, Islam gave us universities. And my employer, Oxford University, was one
48:19of the first. Academic robes, professorial chairs, lectures, the qualification of a degree
48:28itself are not Western ideas. They're all copied in remote places. They're copied in
48:36remarkable detail from medieval Islamic schools of higher education. And all to cope with
48:43the flow of new information pouring in from the Middle East. And it was only really the
48:48death of Edward VI which stopped Melanchthon coming. He seems quietly to have pocketed
48:53the travel expenses and not sent them back. But he was very wise because...
49:01In many ways, the Crusades mark a watershed in the history of the Latin Church. In a thousand
49:14years, the small persecuted Jewish sect had risen to a peak of unprecedented and, frankly,
49:21unexpected power. Certainly, no one could have expected the Roman papacy. But what was
49:29much more predictable was rebellion against the concept of papal monarchy. Dissent would
49:35now cast a long shadow over the Church. It led to more innovations, some of which are
49:43difficult for modern Christians to comprehend or even to forgive.
49:59At a great council of the Church in 1215, Pope Innocent III tried to secure the loyalty
50:06of the faithful by spelling out what it meant to be a Catholic. Confession and communion
50:18at least once a year. The council also told people what to believe and what not to believe.
50:29They told people what to believe about the Mass. Bread and wine miraculously become the
50:36body and blood of Christ. And they helpfully recommended a way in which philosophers could
50:43explain this miracle, transubstantiation. That's a big word for ideas taken not from
50:50the Bible but from Aristotle who lived long before Jesus Christ.
50:58Failure to accept that the Mass was a miracle could land you into trouble. And there were
51:05plenty of other forms of religious energy which unnerved the Pope, like the Cathars
51:11who rejected the Mass altogether. Of course, churchmen didn't mind religious fervour in
51:17itself. It's when it got out of their control that they got worried and then they were quick
51:21to label it heresy and punish it.
51:27Pope Innocent III created structures to deal with heresy. Inquisitions. The English didn't
51:38actually use them. But this medieval courtroom in the University Church of St Mary in Oxford
51:45gives you a sense of what it must have felt like to be in front of the Inquisition.
51:52It's still the official courtroom of the Anglican Diocese of Oxford.
52:01It's difficult for modern Westerners to understand the mind of an Inquisitor. But we need to
52:06remember that they were clergy and they saw what they were doing as an aspect of the pastoral
52:11role of a priest to make society better. But there's a fine line in any system between
52:18idealism and sadism.
52:26Inquisitions were no worse than most medieval courts. Torture might be used to extract confessions.
52:33Those on trial had no right to defence counsel. Penalties ranged from wearing a cross of penitence
52:42to pilgrimage, to imprisonment, to death by burning at the stake.
52:49That's one way of dealing with heresy. Smash heretics and punish them. The other way is to reinvent the Church.
52:56To rediscover core ideas like poverty, humility, compassion. The sort of things which Jesus Christ preached.
53:12During the 12th century, new religious movements and maverick holy men attacked the wealth and power of the Church.
53:19Instead of handing all of them over to the Inquisitions, Pope Innocent took a huge risk.
53:25He brought them into the fold. His hope was to regain something which the Western Church had forgotten.
53:33The most famous of these holy men was called Francis.
53:42It's difficult not to have heard of Francis, and it's easy to be sentimental about him.
53:48The lovable saint, immortalised in stories retold to generations of children. He talked to the animals.
53:58Actually, you might think he was mad. He chucked away his wealth. He proclaimed the Christian message to birds in the graveyard.
54:05And he threw the Church into turmoil by saying that Christ was a down-and-out with no possessions.
54:13He might have been burned as a heretic, as many others were.
54:17But luckily for him, alongside his almost pathological non-conformity, Francis was deeply loyal to the Church.
54:27It was in a church, this church, where Francis heard his first call to action.
54:33He wanted people to see the ordinariness, the humanity of Christ, so that they could love and worship him better as God.
54:40And that made the Catholic Church more human and approachable, too.
54:49It was Francis who invented the idea of a Christmas crib in church.
54:55The first time, he brought along a real ox and a real ass.
55:01He wanted to remind us of the humble origins of the Christian faith.
55:07God becoming human, not in a palace, but in a stable.
55:13This was a new, more personal, emotional view of Christ.
55:19With a mother, Mary, who suffered like any mother when her son died horribly and before his time.
55:28So, the Catholic Church accepted Francis.
55:31It welcomed the new movements of friars who lived his message.
55:36But it actually did nothing to shed its own wealth and power.
55:41It's just as well Francis never saw this grand and expensive church built over the humble chapel where his mission had begun.
56:11By the end of the 13th century, the Western Latin Church had created nearly all the structures which shaped it up to the Reformation era.
56:20Monks, nuns and friars sent up their prayers to heaven in an ever-spreading array of religious houses.
56:29Thousands of parish churches made up a giant honeycomb of dioceses and archdioceses across Europe.
56:39And millions of Catholics owed their unfailing allegiance to the Pope in Rome.
56:47There would be setbacks for sure, but by the 15th century, the papacy emerged largely unscathed, powerful, wealthy and confident.
56:58So much so, it invested its energies in rebuilding Constantine's St. Peter's to make it the grandest building in Christendom.
57:09But in the 120 years it took for a succession of popes and architects to complete, the world had changed.
57:24By the time the new basilica was dedicated in 1626, Christianity had been convulsed by a new movement of revolt which had almost swept the papacy away.
57:39In every age of Christian history, even when the church has been vigorous and self-confident, there have been restless individuals liable to claim that it could do better.
57:49It was that sort of questioning and re-examination of Christian origins which led to the 16th century Reformation.
58:01The Reformation has proved the greatest fault line yet in Western Latin Christianity.
58:08But first, we need to visit that earlier and greater fault line, when the Latin and Greek halves of the Roman Empire went their separate ways.
58:18So next time, I'm travelling east to meet the Orthodox churches.
58:27Why not take part in the Open University's online survey, What Does It Mean to be a Christian Today?
58:34At bbc.co.uk slash historyofchristianity and follow the links.
58:47And the history of Christianity continues to unfold next Thursday night at 11 on BBC HD.
58:53Tonight, what news from this week's culture show?