Folia Canonica 5. (2002)

STUDIES - Kenneth Pennington: Bishops and their Dioceses

BISHOPS AND THEIR DIOCESES

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gion. Leonessa was not part of the Reatine diocese but was 3 5 mountainous kilometers distant. Whether this qualifies Biaggio as a “native son” is difficult to say. It is not until the sixteenth century that we can find sustained criticism of translations. Emanuele Gonzalez Tellez, a Spanish canonist, Saint Robert Bellarmine and a few others lamented the widespread practice of moving bishops from diocese to diocese. Their criticisms, however, did not influence papal policy.15

After the papacy had established the right to approve all episcopal translations, stripping local cathedral chapters of their right to elect a local bishop followed inevitably. The process through which local chapters lost their rights of election stretched out over centuries. It is possible to gain some insight into the attitudes and presuppositions of canonists and, more generally, of local clergy by looking at the canonists’ views of the relationship of the cathedral chapter and the bishop and their views on how a canonical election of a bishop should proceed.

If the story of a bishop’s relationship to the territory over which he exercised jurisdiction is the featured event of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, the development of the bishopric into a corporate unit that was governed by a bishop and his chapter of canons was the main story of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In the early Middle Ages bishops exercised their authority and jurisdiction unfettered by any formal constitutional structures. By the thirteenth century, a bishop’s power and the exercise of his office was limited by a new conception of the bishop’s juridical personality that embraced the joint authority of the bishop and the cathedral chapter.16

In the period between ca. 1180 and 1300, the canonists generally concurred that the bishop and chapter together constituted the basic administrative unit of the diocese. The canons of the cathedral chapter usurped the rights of the lower clergy and spoke for the people and the clergy of the entire diocese. To describe this new juridical entity, the canonists worked out corporate theories that they applied to a wide range of institutions.17 In canonistic thought, the relationship of the bishop and the cathedral chapter divides into three categories: What the bishop can do in the name of the church; what the chapter may do without the

15 On Tellez and Bellarmine’s thought on translations, see my forthcoming article Sovereignty and Rights in Medieval and Early Modern Jurisprudence: Law and Norms without a State, in Rethinking the State: Catholic Thought and Contemporary Political Theory, ed. H. G. Justenhoven (University of Notre Dame Press).

I6Gaudemet, Le gouvernement (nt. 1), 55-102; J. Gaudemet, Les elections dans l'Église latine des origines au XVT siècles, Paris 1979.

17 K. PENNINGTON, La loi: Loi, autorité législative et théories du gouvernement, 1150-1300, Histoire de la pensée politique médiévale, J. H. Burns (ed.), Paris 1993, 419—427 (revised version of an essay published in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c.350-1450, Cambridge 1988).