372 THE GLORY OF CHRISTENDOM

position Pope John XXII had taken earlier on the same subject in his bull of canonization of the Franciscan
Archbishop of Toulouse, Louis of Anjou, in 1317 and his correspondence with the Armenian Church in 1321
and with the Patriarch of Jerusalem in 1326. In 1332, early in the increasingly impassioned discussion that
followed his initial sermon on the Beatific Vision, John XXII explained that his sermons were not intended to
define doctrine but simply to begin discussion on a difficult theological issue. He was acting as no more than a
private theologian.
s

But a Pope can never really be only a "private theologian." While he may speak on theological issues
without intending to bind the faithful, his unique post and duties and responsibilities make it inevitable that
any pronouncement by him on such issues will have enormous impact. He cannot avoid seeming to teach
whenever he speaks on theology. For a Pope to propose a doctrine, actually or apparently contrary to that held
by most of the Church, when he is not sure of its truth, is imprudent in the highest degree. No Pope has ever
gone so far in such imprudence as John XXII in the Beatific Vision controversy.
On January 3, 1333 the opposition to John XXII's teaching on the Beatific Vision, up to this point mostly
private or anonymous, came into clear public view in the Pope's own city when it was denounced from the
pulpit of the Dominican church of Avignon by the English Dominican Thomas Waleys. He was promptly
imprisoned by the Inquisition on the Pope's request. Although John XXII claimed in a letter to Philip VI of
France the next month that he had not orderd Waleys' imprisonment because of the sermon, he did include that
sermon in a list of documents he wished a special commission of theologians to investigate, along with
statements on the Beatific Vision by Cardinal Jacques Fournier and Durandus de St. Pourgain, Bishop of
Meaux, which the Pope had requested but was dissatisfied with because they did not endorse his position.
When this commission (or at least several members of it) also did not agree with the Pope's view of thie issue,
he called for formal university disputations on it, notably by the theologians of the University of Paris, heirs of
St. Thomas Aquinas. 56
Clearly the Pope was not imposing his erroneous view, nor teaching it ex cathedra. But by continuing to
press the issue he was putting himself and the Church in a most peculiar position-indeed, almost inviting the
Church to repudiate him on a subject where he had supreme and infallible authority but was refusing to
exercise it, evidently because he had genuine doubts about the truth of his propositions. But if he doubted
them, why in the world did he keep proposing them?
55 Guy Mollat, The Popes at Avignon (New York, 1963), p. 22; Katherine Walsh, A Fourteenth-Century Scholar
and Primate; Richard FiuRalph in Oxford, Avignon and Armagh (Oxford, 1981), pp. 89-90, 101.
s6
Walsh, FitzRalph, pp. 91,94.
ADPESAWAYFROMROME
373
 History gives us no answer to that question; but a Catholic historian can well remind us that this would
not have been the first time Satan had tempted a Pope, right up to the brink of a disaster which God will not
allow to happen.
Were Popes Liberius, Vigilius, and Honorius praying for John XXII in this his hour of testing?
When the Franciscan general, Guiral Ot, gave qualified support to the Pope's view of the Beatific
Vision, theologians at the University of Paris vehemently protested, and an assembly of bishops and professors
of theology
meeting at the castle of Vincennes December 19, 1333 roundly declared that all the blessed dead enjoy the
Beatific Vision 5' A year later, on his deathbed at ninety, facing the Judgment, Pope John XXII retracted his
error:
We confess and believe that souls separated from their bodies and fully purged from guilt are above, in the
kingdom of heaven, in paradise and with Jesus Christ, in the company of the angels, and that according to the
universal law, they see God and the divine essence face to face and clearly, so far as the state and condition of
a separated soul permits.58
The conclave assembled promptly at the papal palace at Avignon and on December 20, 1334 unanimously
elected Cardinal Jacques Fournier, who had early indicated his disapproval of John XXII's teaching on the
Beatific Vision,
Pope Benedict XIL59 He began his pontificate with glowing praise for the Dominicans, whose theologians had
taken the lead in rejecting the erroneous view of the Beatific Vision, and sharp criticism of the Franciscans for
"heretical tendencies, revolutionary spirit, contempt for the official Church and relaxation of discipline." 6° In
January 1335, in the doctrinal constitution Benedictus Deus, he laid the matter to rest: the souls of the blessed
dead do now "see the divine essence by intuitive vision and even face to face. -6'
Papal infallibility had once again been preserved-and once again, as with Popes Liberius, Vigilius, and
Honorius, by a very narrow margin.
In the east, the resurgence of the apparently moribund Byzantine Empire under the vigorous and
brilliant leadership of Michael Palaeologus soon proved a spent force after his death. By the end of the
thirteenth century its days of
greatness before the Fourth Crusade had slipped below the horizon of living memory. Michael Palaeologus had
regained and held Constantinople and a substantial portion of the old empire, but during the forty long years of
the uninspired reign of his son Andronicus II its essential continuing weaknesses
s9
Mollat, Popes atAvignon,
6°
pp.
61
22-23. sslbid, p. 23.
lbid, pp. 26-28. Ibid, p. 31. lbid, p. 28.