The Dark Ages

Gregory I and the Medieval Papacy

Between about 600 and 1500 the Roman church shaped nearly every part of life in western Europe. It baptized every infant, married and buried every family, owned vast lands, ran the schools, and judged heresy in its own courts. Its bishop at Rome claimed to stand in Peter's place over all Christians and, in time, over the kings of the earth. Baptists have long called these centuries the Dark Ages. The name does not mean that nothing good was built or learned. It means that the light of God's Word was kept from ordinary people while a system of priests, sacraments, and merit stood where the Gospel should have been.

The medieval papacy took shape under Gregory I, bishop of Rome from 590 to 604. A former prefect of the city who had given his estates to found monasteries, he became bishop of a shrunken Rome, struck by plague, threatened by the Lombards, and largely left to itself by the emperor in Constantinople. Gregory managed the Roman church's great estates, fed the city's poor, negotiated with Lombard kings, and organized the city's defense. In practice the bishop of Rome had become a ruler.

In 596 he sent monks under a prior named Augustine to the English kingdom of Kent, binding the church that grew there to Rome. His Pastoral Rule became the handbook of bishops for centuries, and his Dialogues taught that some lesser sins may be cleansed by fire after death and that masses offered for the dead can release them. Here lie the seeds of the doctrine of purgatory that later councils would define.

After Gregory the papacy's worldly power grew. In the 750s the Frankish king Pepin granted the pope the lands in central Italy that became the Papal States, ruled by popes until 1870, and on Christmas Day 800 Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor. Forgeries lent support: the Donation of Constantine, which claimed that the first Christian emperor had handed rule of the West to the bishop of Rome, and the ninth-century False Decretals, which put exalted papal claims into the mouths of early bishops. Lorenzo Valla proved the Donation a forgery in 1440, long after it had done its work.