Folia Canonica 5. (2002)
STUDIES - Kenneth Pennington: Bishops and their Dioceses
10 KENNETH PENNINGTON the bishop’s authority was dominant. They established a ring of churches and other ecclesiastical institutions around the cathedral church. Bishops became princes of small territorial states in every sense of the word, “territorial state.” These developments are reflected in the public liturgy of bishops ascension to power and in their deaths. At their election, bishops entered their sees accompanied by great processions and were installed into their offices with liturgical ceremonies that proclaimed their ascension to power. When they died their bodies again entered the city with ceremony and pomp that imitated their arrival.6 As Timothy Reuter has observed: The bishops possessed “the symbols of state. Bishoprics were small states with everything that corresponds to our conception of the state.”7 From the pontificate of Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) on, these small states were buffeted by the authority and power of the Mater omnium ecclesiarum in two different ways: through papal control of episcopal appointments and through translations. From the very beginning of his pontificate Innocent claimed the prerogative to approve all forms of episcopal translations: Translations of bishops, translations of bishoprics, and translations of a bishopric to a bishop. In the early days of his pontificate (March 17, 1198) Innocent III sent a letter to Petrus of Antioch in which he asserted for the first time in the history of the Church the pope’s clear and unambiguous right to “translate and depose bishops and to transfer bishoprics from one place to another.”8 A short time later (August 21, 1198) the pope sent another decretal to bishops in Germany that was remarkable for its language and for its content, Quanto personam.9 In the previous letter Innocent had claimed his prerogative was based on the Petrine Privilege. In this letter, his claims bypass St. Peter and establish a new rhetoric for papal power: God, not man, separates a bishop from his Church because the Roman pontiff dissolves the bond between them by divine rather than by human authority, carefully considering the need and the usefulness of each translation. The pope has this authority because he does not exercise the office of man, but of the true God on earth [non puri hominis sed veri Dei], 6 Reuter, Ein Europa (nt. 4), 1-2, 17. For the late Middle Ages see J. J. Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City: The “Episcopus exclusus" in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, 72), Leiden-Boston-Cologne 1999. 7 REUTER, Ein Europa (nt. 4), 5. 8 Cum ex illo, Po. 52, 3 Comp. 1.5.1 (X 1.7.1). On episcopal translations see K. Pennington, Pope and Bishops: The Papal Monarchy in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (The Middle Ages), Philadelphia 1983, 75-114. S. SCHOLZ, Transmigration und Translation: Studien zum Bistumwechsel der Bischöfe von der Spätantike bis zum Hohen Mittelalter (Kölner Historische Abhandlungen, 37), Köln-Weimar-Wien 1992. 9 Quanto personam, Po. 352, 3 Comp. 1.5.3 (X 1.7.3). See the discussion of Quanto personam, in PENNINGTON, Pope and Bishops (nt. 8), 15-42.
