6-8. The Development of Parochial Independence
This new emphasis on the "sacerdotium" of Christian presbyters is perhaps to be connected with the new position which in the fourth and following centuries they were beginning to occupy as parish priests. It was the necessity of the regular administration of the Eucharist which dictated the commencements of the parochial system. While the custom of daily Eucharists was neither universal nor perhaps earlier than the third century — it arose partly out of Christian devotion, partly out of the allegorical interpretation of the "daily bread" — the weekly Eucharist was both primitive and universal, and the needs in this respect of the Christian people could ultimately be met only by a wide extension of the independent action of the presbyterate. Though in the larger cities it can never have been possible, even at the first, for the Christian people to meet together at a single Eucharist, the bishop, as Ignatius tells us, kept under his own control all arrangements for separate services, and the presbyters, like the head-quarters staff of a general, were sent hither and thither as occasion demanded. It may have been as definite localities came to be permanently set apart for Christian worship, that the custom grew up of attaching particular presbyters to particular churches.
Probably it was during the long peace 211-249 that ground was first acquired for churches within the walls at Rome: cemeteries were constructed by the ecclesiastical authorities as soon as the beginning of the third century, but the earliest mention of church property in the City is when the Emperor Alexander Severus (222-235), as we learn from Lampridius, decided a question of disputed ownership of land between the "christiani" and the "popinarii" in favour of the former, because of the religious use which they were going to make of it. Certainly by the time of Diocletian Christian churches throughout the Empire were of sufficient number and prominence to become, with the sacred vessels and the sacred books, a special mark for the edict of persecution in 303.
And just as the restoration of peace produced an outburst of calligraphic skill devoted to the Bible, of which the Vatican and Sinaitic codices are the enduring monuments, so, too, the ruined buildings were replaced by others more numerous and more magnificent. Constantine erected churches over the graves of the Apostles on the Vatican hill and the Ostian Way, while inside the walls the Lateran basilica of the Saviour and the Sessorian basilica of the Holy Cross testified further to the policy of the emperor and the piety of his mother. When Optatus wrote, fifty years later, there were over forty Roman basilicas, all of them open to the African Catholics and closed to the Donatists: "inter quadraginta et quod excurrit basilicas locum ubi colligerent non habebant." But this number perhaps includes the cemetery churches, for the parish churches or "tituli" of the City appear to have been exactly twenty-five under Pope Hilary (461-468), in its life of whom the Liber Pontificalis enumerates a service of altar vessels for use within the City, one golden bowl for the station and twenty-five silver bowls (with twenty-five "amae" or cruets, and fifty chalices) for the parish churches, "scyphus stationarius," "scyphipertitulos " The "station thus opposed to the "parishes" is the reunion, on certain days of the year, of the whole body of the Roman clergy and faithful under the pope at some particular church: it was a corrective to the growth of parochial separatism, like the custom of sending round every Sunday, from the pope's mass to the mass of every church within the walls, the "fermentum" or portion of the consecrated bread.
So Innocent writes, in 416, in his decretal letter to Decentius of Gubbio: "presbyteri quia die ipso propter plebem sibi creditam nobiscum. convenire non possunt, idcirco fermentum a nobis confection per acolythos accipiunt, ut se a nostra communione maxima ilia die non iudicent separates; quod per parochias " [= in other dioceses] "fieri debere non puto, quia non longe portanda sunt sacrament a, nee nos per coemeteria di versa constitutis presbyteris destinanms."
It was part of the same careful guard against the over-development of parochial independence, that, though there were parish clergy at Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries, there was as yet no parish priest. When Ambrosiaster wrote, it was the custom to allot two priests to each church (in 1 Tim. iii. 12, 13) "septem diaconos esse oportet, et aliquantos presbyteros ut bini sint per ecclesias, et unus in civitate episcopus." At a council under Pope Symmachus in 499, sixty-seven priests of the City subscribe, each with his title. "Gordianus presbyter tituli Pammachii" and so on: but the "tituli" are not more than thirty, some of them having as many as four or five priests attached to them. Indeed, thirty is perhaps too high a figure, for some "tituli" may appear under more than one name — an original name from the donor or the reigning pope, and a supplementary name in honour of a saint.
Of the fourth century popes Damasus had named a church after St Lawrence, and Siricius after St Clement: the basilica built under Pope Liberius became St Mary Major under Xystus III (432-440), and the two basilicas founded under Pope Julius (337-352) became in time the Holy Apostles and St Mary across Tiber.
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