Theology Essay: Church State Relations

Theology turn up church service State RelationsChurch-State Relations and SecularizationThroughout floor there has developed a variety of relationships betwixt Christian churches and g overnments, slightlytimes symphonic and sometimes conflictual. The major(ip) forms of relationships surrounded by Christian churches and governments ar in large esteem grounded in various attitudes in the Christian Bible. The Christian Bible is not a single book, solely a battle array of books written over more than a millennium and containing very various(a) perspectives on godliness and government.One perspective, represented by the sings, which were hymns sung in the Temple in Jerusalem, exalts the king to an al near divine position, sitting at the right hand of divinity (Ps 1101) and receiving the provinces of the existence for an inheritance (Ps 28). Coronation hymns celebrate the kings special relationship to idol. This perspective dominates the self-understanding of the kings of Judah, the southern part of old-fashioned Israel.In sharp crinkle, the prophet Samuel take a shits kings as crooks and oppressors who ar tot every(prenominal)yowed by graven image just now as a assignment to human sinfulness. Samuel warfarens the tribes of Israel that if they choose to shed a king, the king result gulp their young men into his army and put the young women to work in his service. In this trajectory, prophets, armed only with the conviction that they urinate been called by theology to pro aver the Word of god, repeatedly stand up to the kings of ancient Israel and denounce their sinfulness. thus Samuel condemns Saul, Nathan condemns David, and later onward prophets worry Isaiah and Jeremiah condemn the kings of their times.Meanwhile, in the Gospel of John, messiah tells the roman governor Pontius Pilate that his kingdom does not belong to this world (Jn 1836). This suggests a separation of responsibilities betwixt civil regime and sacred lea dership. repeatedly in the gospels, when people want to authorize delivery boy a king, he slips through and through their midst and escapes. His mission is to proclaim the reign of God, not to put a worldly kingdom.thither are to a fault various covenants that pitch forth the relationship of God and Gods people (Gen 98-17 1518-21 Ex 20 Deut 5) a covenant in the ancient Middle East was a solemn agreement that bound some(prenominal) parties to observe certain obligations. The covenant with Noah was made by God with all of creation. The covenant with Abraham initiated a relationship with Abraham and his desc completionants forever. The covenant made with Moses at Mt. Sinai became the commutation framework for the relationship of the people of Israel to God. The Book of Deuteronomy re stark nakeds and reflects upon this covenant a generation afterwards, as Moses is at the end of his life.These four options would turn, respectively, later on Grecian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, L utheran, and Calvinist views of the proper relation between church and state. The semi semi semipolitical theologies of the later Christian customs duty consist in large measure of a series of conflicting appropriations of these perspectives. One can read the major political options taken by later Christian communions as growing one or more of the biblical trajectories. The twisty Orthodox tradition and some aspects of the Roman Catholic tradition continue the tradition of set apart kingship. Later strands of the Roman Catholic tradition view profane rulers as prone to corruption and in exigency of repeated rebuke by spectral leaders, such as popes. The Lutheran tradition focuses on delivery boys statement to Pilate that his kingdom is not of this world and concludes that there are both(prenominal) kingdoms the kingdom of God, which is command by the gospel, and the kingdom of this world, which is ruled by civil governments. The Calvinist tradition focused on covenant i n a modality that none of the preceding traditions had done, placing covenant at the contract of relationships both with God and with former(a) human beings. In this lecture, I will not discuss the original biblical texts themselves, besides I would like to explore the path in biblical perspectives have guided later Christian political theologies.Divine KingshipThe ideology of the Judean monarchy, with its lofty view of the monarch as favored by God and called to mediate divine referee in the world would shape the Byzantine Orthodox traditions view of the Emperor as a sacred figure with certificate of indebtedness for the empire and the church together. Psalm 110 proclaims The ecclesiastic said to my Lord Sit at my right hand till I make your enemies your footstool (1101). That is, God says to the king be enthroned beside me. This strand of the Bible sees God as entrusting a special responsibility to the king, which included particular circumspection for the rights of wid ows and orphans, who were usually the most vulner adapted persons in the ancient world. In this perspective, kings are divinely chosen beings with both rights and responsibilities of proper rule.This perspective would influence later Eastern Christian views of church-state relations. For example, after Constantine had unified the Roman imperium in the primordial fourth century and made Christianity legal, the fourth-century bishop Eusebius of Caesarea in Palestine depict the Emperor who was formally only a candidate for reception into the church, as receiving, as it were, a transcript of divine sovereignty from God and tell the administration of the full world, including the church, in imitation of God (Life of Constantine). That is, Constantine had a divinely given over responsibility to govern not only the Roman Empire but likewise the Church. This view of a sacred emperor would shape the self-understanding of Byzantine Emperors until the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the self-understanding of the Russian Czars until 1917. All of the initiatory sevener ecumenical councilsmeetings of bishops from throughout the worldacknowledged by the Byzantine Orthodox and Catholics were called by Roman Emperors and were presided over by them or their legates. If the pope did not wish to have a council, pressure would be applied. In the sixth century CE, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian wanted to call a council, but pontiff Vigilius disagreed with him. Justinian had Vigilius kidnapped by the Byzantine police while he was saying Mass and held until he agreed to the council. Then the council was held in Constantinople, where Justinian wanted it, not in Sicily, where pope Vigilius wanted it. At the end of the council Vigilius did not like the idea of condemn men who had died two centuries earlier in communion with the church. Justinian applied only pressure to the Latin clergy, and Vigilius eventually accommodateed the Condemnation of various bishops from two hundred grades earlier.The assume of sacred kingship would likewise dominate early medieval Western views of kings and emperors from the eighth to the 11th centuries. During the first millennium of Christian history, lay rulers, inspired by the ideology of the Judean monarchy, regularly called bishops and popes to account for their misdeeds and had recognize authority to depose unworthy ecclesiastical leaders and appoint parvenue ones. In one year alone, 1046, Emperor Henry III, imbued with the divinely given mission of sacred kingship, deposed ternion popes (Sylvester III, Benedict IX, and Gregory VI) and appointed a youthful pope, Clement II. Before his death in 1056, Henry would appoint three more popes. There is certainly the danger of abuse of great cum here, but there was in like manner a genuine concern that the papacy not be dominated by corrupt Roman nobility. This tradition leaves a hereditary pattern that take exceptions Christian political leaders to accoun tability to God for the way they enforce justice in this world and counsellings them with responsibility for good governance of the Church. During the first millennium popes from Gelasius I onward would insist on a short letter between sacred and secular authority in wander to limit the role of Emperors in the church.Like Samuel and other prophets who challenged the pretensions of biblical monarchs, Augustine spurned Eusebiuss exaltation of a Christian Roman Emperor and the entire model of sacred kingship. Like Samuel, Augustine thought earthly rulers were largely thieves and dictum monarchy as a tragic necessity because of human sinfulness and not as directly willed by God. Augustine believed that no form of government could encounter true justice in this world, and he questioned Justice removed, what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers? What are bands of robbers but little kingdoms? Empires in principle are not Christian. This perspective would buttress the Gregorian Ref orm in the eleventh century, when a series of popes and reformers would reject the model of sacred kingship. pope Gregory VII, repeat Samuel and Augustine, insisted that kings are largely thugs and oppressors who need to be called to accountability by religious leaders and who can be deposed by grandiloquent authority. The inability of either popes or emperors completely to dominate Europe would lead to spic-and-span distinctions between secular and sacred in the twelfth century and in later medieval and early redbrick thought. From about the year 1100 on, emperors and pro-imperial apologists insist on a distinction between the sacred and the secular to limit the power of the papacy in politics. The suspicion of great empires as great robbers that need to be called to account by religious leaders would inform the battles of popes against emperors and kings for centuries and hovers in the background of Pope John Paul IIs challenge to the Soviet Empire on his trip to Poland in 19 79 and his eloquent acknowledgment of human rights against oppressive governments around the world.The claim of episcopal authority over kings and nations could manifest itself in dangerous ways as well. In Psalm 2, God promises the king I will give you the nations for an inheritance and the ends of the earth for your possession. You shall rule them with an iron rod you shall shatter them like an earthen dish. regular(a) though never fulfilled in ancient times, that promise, buttressed by the conquest narratives of the Hebrew Bible, lived on in Christian memory, and fifteenth-century popes saw themselves as the trustees of this inheritance. In 1452, as the Portuguese were inaugurating their journeys of discovery and conquest, Pope Nicholas V allow to the king of Portugal the right to conquer and enslave the entire non-Christian world In the name of our apostolic authority, we grant to you the full and entire faculty of invading, conquering, emanation and reigning over all the k ingdoms, the duchies . . . of the Saracens, of pagans and of all infidels, wherever they may be found of reducing their inhabitants to perpetual slavery, of appropriating to yourself those kingdoms and all their possessions, for your own use and that of your successors (Nicholas V, Dum Diversas, 1452 quoted in Peter Schineller, A Handbook of Inculturation, 34). In 1493 and again in 1494, abruptly after the discovery of the revolutionary World, Pope Alexander VI pull a line on the map of the Americas, marking a district between the areas that Spain and Portugal could dominate. The dream of empire, inspired by biblical promises, would shape centuries of new colonial history.ReformationDuring the Reformation, the two major Protestant traditions jilted both the Byzantine Orthodox and the Roman Catholic models, but they drew sharply contrasting visions of politics from the Bible. Citing the Gospel of John, where Jesus denies that his kingdom belongs to this world, Martin Luther use d the distinction between two kingdoms as a central principle structuring his theology. Luther insisted that God rules Gods own people by the Gospel and God rules those outside the church by the Law (Secular Authority To What close It Should be Obeyed, in Dillenberger, 368). However, Christians remain sinners throughout their lives, and so God also rules Christians by the Law insofar as they are sinners and part of a sinful society. Luther shared Augustines and Samuels skepticism about earthly rulers, but he interpreted Pauls Letter to the Romans (chapter 13) as calling the Christian to obey even rulers whose policies offend a Christian conscience. He insisted on granting immunity to preach the Word of God, but he generally trusted governmental authorities to rule the temporal role realm. In the later history of Lutheranism, contrary to Luthers intention, the Lutheran church was generally subservient to the state, and the state often supervised ecclesiastical governance.In contr ast to all the earlier models, John Calvin placed the covenant at the center of his political theology, with implications that would echo through much of European and American history. For Calvinists, covenants governed relations not only between God and Christians but also between earthly rulers and their subjects. In various countries the Calvinist tradition developed a forceful critique of monarchy based on the mutual obligations of each party. For Calvin, God alone is truly king, and all humans are radically fall and subject to constant temptations to idolatry. No figure, whether pope or emperor or king or even a Protestant preacher, can claim infallible, final authority. Since rulers are forever tempted to rebel against God, all earthly power must be limited. Calvin distrusted nation because a majority can be just as tyrannical as an one-on-one, and he thought democracy could easily lead to sedition. He judged that in a fallen world, no single figure can be trusted, and thus all political powers must be checked by the self-interest of others. He advocated a mixture of aristocracy and democracy, a model that would be very influential on political developments in North America.Calvinists often suffered brush ups and persecutions. After the St. Bartholemews Day Massacre in France, when Roman Catholics murdered thousands of Protestants, Theodore Beza, Calvins most faithful disciple, proclaimed the sovereignty of the people, the right of revolution, and the binding reputation of a constitution. Presbyterians in Scotland insisted on mutual responsibilities of the covenant as a way of limiting the powers of the Stuart monarchs. When Mary Stuart accused John Knox of grasping for power, he denied the charge and insisted My one aim is that Prince and people alike shall obey God. (Ernst Troeltsch, The Social command of the Christian Churches, vol. 2, p. 634). The rebellion against King Charles I began in Scotland with the proclamation of the study Covenant. Pr ecisely because covenants spelled out mutual obligations for both ruler and the ruled, they could become the can for rebellion and revolution when the terms were judged to have been violated. Through reflection on covenants in the Hebrew Bible and on vivid law, Calvinists influenced early innovational theories of government based upon a social contract and thus relying upon the coincide of the governed.Calvin saw the Gospel as a transformative social power, and there is a militant utopianism in Calvins vision of Christianity that would change the world. Geneva was to be the New Jerusalem. Puritans frustrated by the Stuart monarchs in England brought this energy and vision to New England, determined to build the city on the hill to inspire the world. Puritans understood themselves as the new Israelites fleeing slavery and coming to the Promised Land. As in earlier papal and imperial models, there was a negative side to the appropriation of biblical promises. Remembering that the ancient Israelites were instructed to destroy other tribes lest they tempt them to venerate other gods, Puritan settlers viewed Native Americans as temptations to sin and sought to remove them or, at least, contain them in separate areas, reservations that were called praying towns (Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through emphasis The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-1860, 40-42). When the Puritan Revolution in England failed in 1660, Puritans in America gave up hope for Europe and saw themselves as the millennian people, with a divine mission to convert the world after the failures in Europe.Secularization and Religious Freedom in North AmericaThus far we have seen the major models of church-state relations through the 17th century. all pre- new(a) government with which I am familiar looked to religion for a source of legitimation. Emperors, kings, sultans, aristocrats all claimed to rule by the will of God. In China emperors ruled through the Confucian image of the Mand ate of Heaven. Buddhist kings cultivated harmonious relationships with Buddhist monasteries to demonstrate their devotion and piety. All this came under suspicion in early modern Europe.During the 16th and 17th centuries, European Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, fought a series of blistering and bloody wars of religion. Each side claimed to be fighting on behalf of God each side assumed that an empire, a nation, or a smaller polity should be unified in its religious belief and practice. Only a small minority of Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries believed in religious dislodgedom for each individual fit to the persons own conscience. Because religious convictions were so strong, and because religion was embedded in manifold political, social, and economic relations, the conflicts were relentless and merciless. The Thirty years War in Germany, which raged from 1618 to 1648, began as a religious conflict among Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists. By the end the w ar was more political than religious, with Catholic France intervening on the side of the Protestants to weaken the Holy Roman Emperor but the misuse had been done. There were atrocities against civilian worlds on all sides. This was the bloodiest war on the true of Europe prior to World War I. Meanwhile, about the same time, England went through an extremely vicious, bloody civil war, which killed a higher percentage of the population of England than did World War I.In the wake of these wars of religion, thinking people increasingly began to question whether religion could or should be trusted with the task of legitimating any form of government. Enlightenment thinkers began to reflect on the virtue of religious tolerance, of respecting the self-reliance of conscience of others in matters religious. They also began to reflect on the possibility of separating church from state. rough this same time, in the British colonies in North America, some began to question the wisdom of g overnment regulation of religion. In New England Roger Williams surveyed the bitter history of religious conflicts in Europe since the time of Constantine and concluded that statuesque religious loyalties was a violation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Williams interpreted Jesuss parable of the wheat and the weeds as forbidding Christians to attack those with whom they disagreed. Williams daringly judged the Emperor Constantine, who legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire, to have been more of a danger than Nero, who had persecuted Christians. Under Nero, Christians had heroically suffered and died with Constantine, Christians took power, became corrupted, and began to impose Christianity by governmental authority. Williams also argued that it was unjust for the King of England to pretend to have the right to give outside lands where Native Americans had lived for centuries. For Williams, the fact that Native Americans had different religious practices did not deprive them of th eir right to their homeland.In 1635 Williams was banished from mum as a dissenter. The following year he moved south, where he purchased land from Native American Indians and establish a new community, Rhode Island, as a haven for the cause of conscience, founded on the principle of religious self-sufficiency for all. His ideal of religious freedom or, in his phrase, soul liberty was fiercely opposed by the Puritans in Massachusetts but would stand as a model for later generations.About the same time, Lord Baltimore founded Maryland as a refuge for Catholics fleeing persecution in England. Purchasing land from Native American Indians, he intended the liquidation to be a home for followers of all Christian paths, and the learn founding the colony offered equal rights in religious freedom to all. In 1649 the Maryland Assembly passed a Toleration Act offering freedom of conscience to all Christians. The example of guaranteeing religious freedom spread to other colonies as well, wi th similar charters of religious liberty in New jersey in 1664, in Carolina in 1665, and in Pennsylvania in 1682. There was increasing momentum in the colonies to end government prophylactic in religious practice and to accept a variety of forms of faith.The Americans who fought the Revolutionary war were struggling for religious liberty as well as for political liberty. The quest for religious freedom came from both the tradition of dissenting Protestantism and also Enlightenment ideals of religious toleration. Many of the founders of the united States of America were strongly influenced by the European Enlightenment, with its suspicion of Christianity, its critique of the wars of religion, its unbeliever faith, and its doubts about any claims for unearthly revelation. Thomas Jefferson thought that the alliance of clergy and political officials inevitably led to tyranny, and he believed that clergymen should not be allowed to any hold political office. On function he excoriat ed them as the real Anti-Christ. In return, some New England preachers attacked Jefferson himself as the Anti-Christ and warned that if he were elected president, he would commandeer all Bibles and establish houses of whoredom in the churches. Jefferson and George chapiter, like many of their contemporaries, were deists, for whom the natural religion of humankind provided the net answer to the conflicts among particular religions. For both, religious freedom was indispensable for human progress. As military commander, Washington forbade the celebration of the English anti-Catholic feast, Popes Day, on November 5, 1775, at a time when he was seeking support from communicative Catholics in Canada. Ben Franklin was deeply influenced by Deism and is often considered a deist but he shaped his own idiosyncratic view of natural religion, with a plurality of deities under the direction of one supreme deity. Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington would quietly attend Christian church service s without believing handed-down theology more radical deists such as Thomas Paine, Ethan Allen, and Elihu Palmer, rejected Christianity more thoroughly, criticizing the Bible for its multiple contradictions and substituting a religion of nature for Christian practice.While many of the founding fathers were deists of one form or another, American Protestants also contributed strongly to the revolution and interpreted the establishment of the new nation in religious terms. Indeed, the evangelical revival movement cognize as the First Great Awakening in the early eighteenth century did much to foster communication among the colonies, to establish awareness of a new shared American identity in contrast to the British, and also to arouse evangelical Protestant hostility to Anglican and Catholic forms of worship, thereby paving the way for revolt against the British king. The Puritan practice of interpret the settlement in North America as a fulfilment of promises in the Book of Revela tion was influential on supporters of the Revolution.In Virginia the Church of the England was the established Church, and all other forms of worship were forbidden. The young James capital of Wisconsin was deeply shocked by the imprisonment of traveling Baptist preachers who openly verbalised their religious beliefs in Virginia he would later become one of the leaders in the quest for full religious liberty. capital of Wisconsin asserted, Torrents of blood have been spilt in the old world, by vain attempts of the secular arm to eat up religious discord. . . . Time has at length revealed the true remedy. The remedy for Madison and his colleagues was full religious liberty and the separation of church and state.The founders of the new nation resolved that the bitter religious wars of Europe should not be replicated on American soil. George Mason was the chief author of Virginia Declaration of Rights, which declared all men should enjoy the fullest Toleration in the Exercise of Reli gion according to the Dictates of Conscience. The Bill of Rights for the Commonwealth of Virginia, approved on June 12, 1776, was a landmark achievement, the first such list of rights in history.On July 4, 1788, a parade in Philadelphia celebrated the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Clergy from various Christian denominations marched together and with them, arm, in arm, a Jewish rabbi. One observer, Dr. Benjamin Rush, commented, There could not have been a more happy emblem contrived, of the section of the new constitution, which opens all its powers and offices alike, not only to every(prenominal) sect of Christians, but to worthy men of every religion. Two years later George Washington visited the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, which lock stands as the oldest synagogue in the United States. The Jewish community thanked him and the new government for generously affording to all liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship Washington, in reply, confirm tha t the U.S. government gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, and he went on to bring up the religious toleration granted by the British and other European governments (often on condition that Jews improve) from the American recognition of religious liberty as an inherent natural right. In principle, followers of all religious traditions were to be fully equal citizens in the United States of America.Secularization in the United States was not hostile to religion but allowed a free range of religious debate. One can read the history of the United States in terms of four Great Awakenings, each of which was linked to a movement of social or political reform. Alexis de Tocqueville would note the paradox that in Europe churches were established but languishing. In the United States, by contrast, no church was established, and all were flourishing. The free competition among Protestant churches called forth creative thinking and vitality.France and the grandiloquent ReactionA few years after the American Revolution, another revolution began in France, which became far bloodier both in assail established religion and also in devouring its own children. Because the Catholic Church was intimately intertwined with the ancien regime, the old way of life in France, the cut Revolution targeted Catholic bishops, priests, nuns, churches and monasteries. Many Catholic leaders were killed, churches were turned into museumsas is the case with the Pantheon in Paris to the present daymonastery farmlands were confiscated by the French Republic and put up for sale to support the Revolution and its armies. The model of secularization in France was very, very different from that in the United States. Because the Catholic Church had been so powerfully established for centuries, the program of secularization aimed to cancel out the influence of the Catholic Church from the political sphere for the sake of laicit. This heritage lives on to the present day, cont inuing to shape relations between the French government and religions.Catholic leaders in Europe saw the French Revolution as a direct attack upon the Catholic Church, and this prompted a profound suspicion of modernity and its newly proclaimed democratic ideals. Napoleon, after all, had humiliated Pope Pius VII, taking him as a virtual captive into France in 1808. Napoleon, in the presence of the pope, crowned himself emperor, thereby signaling that the pope had no role whatsoever to play. Many thought that this would be the end of the papacy. After the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, the prideful European powers collected at the Congress of Vienna to plan the future of Europe. The pope sided with the forces of response. It was commented that the victorious European leaders had forgotten nothing and learned nothing. In this context, the papacy returned to a position of prominence and renewed vigor, albeit on the side of the forces of reaction in Europe.In this atmosphere, a Fre nch Catholic priest, Felicit Robert de Lamennais, sought to accept the ideals of democracy, separation of church and state, and freedom of speech, of the press and of religion into Catholicism. He argued against the interference of governments in religious matters and supported revolutions to transform society. Pope Gregory XVI modishly condemned him and the ideals of modernity. Pope Gregory condemned democracy, freedom of religion, separation of church and state, and freedom of the press. In a wordplay on the French term for railroads, chemins de fer (roads of iron), he even condemned railroads as chemins de lenferthe roads of hell. His successor, Pope Pius IX, was originally more positively inclined toward the reform movements in Europe, but after the Revolution of 1848 killed his Priume Minister and oblige him to flee Rome in disguise, Pope Pius turned vehemently against the ideals of the modern world. In 1864 Pope Pius IX issued the Syllabus of Errors, which repeated earlier papal condemnations of modern ideals, and concluding by a famous condemnation of the notion that the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and comes to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.During this time the Italian movement known as the Risorgimento was fighting to unify Italy into a modern nation. The pope had ruled the central portion of Italy, known as the Papal States, for centuries. By the time of the pontificate of Pius IX, this territory was reduced to the city of Rome, which was in effect defended by French troops. When in 1870 Prussia invaded France, the French troops were called home and the Italian General Garibaldi was able to capture Rome for the new Italian nation.In protest, the pope declared himself a prisoner of the Vatican and refused to leave its precincts for the rest of his life. This reason was followed for decades. The loss of temporal power profoundly transformed the papacy. For centuries popes had been not only spiritual leaders but also the temporal governors of Rome and central Italy. As such, they were involved in constant political squabbles and frequently papal armies fought in battles for land and power. Popes intervened on the side of their own families and were perceived as partisan political leaders. The papal states were long thought to be necessity to preserve the independence of the pope from domination by a temporal ruler.In 1870 the worst nightmare of the popes came to pass. Pope Pius IX lost all the temporal possessions except for the Vatican itself. Pius refused any negotiations with the new Italian natgion. Finally, in 1929 Pope Pius XI would sign a Concordat with Benito Mussolini, officially establishing the relationship between the Holy See and the nation of Italy.Paradoxically, however, the loss of the Papal States was one of the greatest possible blessings for the papacy. Once freed from the responsibilities of ruling the central portion of Italy, popes were eventually able to become respected moral and spiritual leaders on an remarkable global level. This came to fruition in the middle and late 20th c. Pope John XXIII, who served as pope from 1958 to 1963, was beloved by many, many people beyond the borders of the Catholic Church. He was, in a sense, the grandfather to the world, a kindly, spiritual man who spoke vigorously for peace and the welfare of the poor. During the Cuban missile crisis in the fall of 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union came the closest they ever did to nuclear war, Pope John XXIII served as an intermediary, fugacious messages between them. Pope J