The Babylonian captivity of the church
The papacy moves to Avignon
Pope Clement V is a Frenchman, elected in 1305 under heavy pressure from the French king Philip IV. He never goes to Rome. In 1309 he establishes the papal court at Avignon, a city on the Rhône River in Provence — technically papal territory, practically under French influence.
He stays. His successors stay. For sixty-seven years — 1309 to 1377 — the papacy operates from Avignon.
The Italian poet Petrarch coins the phrase that sticks: the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, a reference to the exile of Israel in Babylon. The parallel is not exact but the feeling is real: the universal church is being administered from a provincial city under the thumb of a single monarch.
The Avignon papacy is not uniformly corrupt. Several of the Avignon popes are administratively capable and personally pious. They build a magnificent palace. They improve the church's financial administration. They conduct diplomacy.
But the perception — that the papacy has become a tool of French interests, that the bishop of Rome has abandoned Rome, that the church's universal claims are undermined by its provincial captivity — damages the papacy's credibility in ways that decades of careful administration cannot repair.
Catherine of Siena, a laywoman from Tuscany who somehow acquires enough moral authority to correspond with popes as an equal, writes to Gregory XI with a directness that is almost rude: Come back to Rome. You are the Vicar of Christ. Act like it.
He comes back in 1377. Within a year he is dead, and the chaos of the election that follows produces the Great Western Schism.
“Come! Come! Do not resist the call of the Holy Spirit any longer! Come, and do not fear anything that may happen. The cross and true virtue will be your refuge.”
— Catherine of Siena, Letter to Gregory XI, c. 1376 AD
“Remember therefore from where you have fallen, and repent and do the first works; or else I am coming to you, and will move your lampstand out of its place, unless you repent.”
Catherine of Siena wrote to the pope and told him he was failing his calling. She was a laywoman, a tertiary Dominican, with no institutional authority whatsoever.
He listened.
The prophetic voice in the church has never required institutional position. It requires only the conviction that what needs to be said is true, and the courage to say it to whoever needs to hear it.
Catherine's letters to Gregory XI are among the most extraordinary documents in the medieval church — a woman of no formal standing holding the most powerful man in Western Christendom accountable to his own stated beliefs.
She did not shout. She did not flatter. She simply said: this is what you said you were. This is what you are doing instead. Come back to who you are.
Who in your life needs that letter? And are you the one to write it?