It’s your church’s feast: the Feast of the Chair of Saint Pater at Antioch. You will have to explain it. Interesting that your church dropped the “at Antioch” part later, I suppose it was a matter of convenience.
The other Apostles had chairs all over the East as well. All of the Apostles, Peter among them, were all over the east, there are many Apostolic Sees. These were culturally advanced and prosperous cities with classically educated clergy. Even under the Caliphs they produced great theologions like Saint John Damascene.
Of course, in the west, there was only one Apostolic See. So for westerners, Rome seemed to be the only Apostolic See. After the church at Rome converted to a Latin liturgy, Greek fell out as a training necessity for the priesthood, and a whole body of theological literature was then generally unavailable to them.
Soon, after plagues, invasions and economic collapse, the population declined, public works fell into ruin, schools closed.
The west was in such a bad state for a while, the economy was in the toilet and literacy plummeted to single digits, that the Merovingian and Carolingian monarchs were appointing to the episcopate very illiterate and sycophantic men from families connected to the crown. Many if not most of these Frankish bishops had no real theological training at all, and their Latin was horrible.
Concubinage was still common among the elites, and bishops and priests kept them. Abbies were “owned” by powerful families and Abbots usually were absent, often at their hunting lodges spending the income provided by the monasteries.
So secular were clerics, that many bishops even rode off to battle on warhorses to smash heads for their princes and benefactors, they were a pretty dissolute bunch.
I stated earlier that the bishops of the Carolingian empire were so disreputable and ill educated that they were not invited to the Seventh Ecumenical Council.
Rome itself plunged to a population of some 40,000 or less by the time of Charlemagne (from a high of over one million in late antiquity). The city was a real cultural backwater dominated by petty princes and distant monarchs. Even Popes were appointed by emperors and kings, the College of Cardinal electors did not exist until centuries later.
Bishops in Spain and Gaul routinely ignored the Popes opinion.
It was a time when ‘Trial by Ordeal’ (introduced by the Franks)was considered serious jurisprudence in western Europe, sanctioned by the bishops. The people allowed superstition, visionaries and mythmakers to dominate their thinking.
Someone claiming to be Isadore of Seville compiled a large list of fabrications about the church, even Popes were taken in by the fraud and promoted the forgeries.
The Papacy was born.
Michael
