The Genesis of Papacy's Frontiers / EXTRA ECCLESIAM 1rst Seminar

This work seeks to explore, through a sketch of the events of the 10th and 11th centuries, the development of the spheres of influence between Church and State. It also seeks to touch on the role of the Church in the political world. This paper was accepted as my thesis for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in the Humanties at the Pontifical College Josephinum , Columbus, OH, receiving the honor summa cum laude.

The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2011

2010

The Heythrop Journal, 2011

The system of papal provision – through which medieval clergy were appointed to ecclesiastical benefices across Christendom – has remained controversial ever since its inception in the 12th century. Xenophobic contemporary commentators, such as the 13th-century English chronicler Matthew Paris, lambasted the appointment of large numbers of foreign clergy to church livings through papal intervention – criticism that has endured in the modern historiography on papal provisions. The predominant historiographical interpretation remains that popes proactively developed an autocratic and nepotistic system of provision, expanding their own powers to reserve benefices through encyclicals such as Licet ecclesiarum, so as to increase their authority over the western Church, and to finance the curia by rewarding cardinals and kinsmen with valuable benefices in local churches throughout the West. An unresolved tension in the historiography has been created, however, by a newer approach that emphasises the importance of petitioners, rather than the popes, in fuelling the development of curial institutions. This article maps the state of the historiography, synthesises the differing scholarly traditions and suggests avenues for future research.

IEM Instituto de Estudos Medievais (NOVA FCSH), 2022

We are currently facing an extraordinary situation: two Popes coexist, one of whom is emeritus, after having abdicated in 2013 (more than seven hundred years after the most famous of medieval abdications, that of Celestine V in 1294), and the other still holds office. We have also recently experienced the canonization of three Popes and the promulgation of two jubilees (2000 and 2015). This rare situation has stimulated the artistic community that focuses on the figure of the Pope, who is undoubtedly the most important political personality and religious authority that the Middle Ages have handed down to contemporary times. In this regard, worthy of mention is the television series The Young Pope, written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino (2016), which highlights the attenuation of the papal identity. The pope is presented there as having difficulty in appearing in public and having his image reproduced, “because his image does not exist”. The Italian director was inspired by a long-standing problem: the representation of the Pope, especially since Innocent III (1198-1216), has constituted a particular iconographic question owing to a semantic complexity determined by ecclesiological implications. From the images on the apses of Roman basilicas to modern portraits, taking in the medieval bust of Boniface VIII, the effigies of the French popes of Avignon and schismatic popes, we focus on the medieval tradition that hides behind the papal politics through images of real and imaginary Popes from both modern and contemporary times. At the same time, we discuss the representation of the Church as a personification or symbol before considering the representation of the Church as a Pope. Finally, we conclude with the birth and figurative affirmation, starting from 1417, of a third iconographic subject: the Council that determined the end of the apical Pope/Church dualism.

Transylvanian Review, vol. XXVIII, No. 2, 2019