Boniface VIII Issues Unam Sanctam

In 1296 Boniface VIII forbade clergy, in the bull Clericis laicos, to pay any tax to lay rulers without the pope’s leave, and excommunicated rulers who levied one. The bull names no ruler (Boniface VIII, Clericis laicos). The Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani, a contemporary, tells how strife arose between the pope and Philip IV of France: the king arrested a bishop, took the revenues of vacant sees, and forbade the French prelates to answer the pope’s summons; the pope’s letters were thrown on the fire at the king’s court (Giovanni Villani, Chronicle 8.62).

On 18 November 1302, at the Lateran in Rome, Boniface issued a short doctrinal bull (Boniface VIII, Unam sanctam Latin text, dating clause). It names no king. There is, it says, one holy catholic and apostolic church, outside which there is neither salvation nor remission of sins. This one body has one head, Christ and his vicar, Peter and Peter’s successor; Greeks or others who say they were not committed to Peter are not of Christ’s sheep. Two swords are in the power of the church. The spiritual is wielded by the church, the temporal for the church, “by the hand of kings and knights, but at the will and sufferance of the priest”. The spiritual power establishes the earthly and judges it, and the highest spiritual power is judged by God alone. The bull ends:

Indeed we declare, announce and define, that it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff. (Boniface VIII, Unam sanctam pp. 435–437)

Villani tells also of an assembly at Paris at which the king had the pope charged with heresy and other crimes (Giovanni Villani, Chronicle 8.62), and reports that in September 1303 the king’s agent William of Nogaret and Sciarra Colonna seized Boniface at Anagni. The townspeople freed him after three days; he died in Rome on 12 October (Giovanni Villani, Chronicle 8.63).

The meaning and reach of the bull have been argued over since. In 1306 Clement V declared that it brought no prejudice to the king and kingdom of France, who were no more subject to the church than before (Clement V, Meruit). The Fifth Lateran Council renewed it in 1516, speaking of subjection to the pope as necessary for “all Christ’s faithful” and saving Clement’s declaration (Fifth Lateran Council, session 11 On the abrogation of the Pragmatic Sanction). The Lutheran confessors of 1537 called the constitution of Boniface false and godless for making the pope ruler of kingdoms by divine right (Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope 33). Among Catholics, Archbishop Manning argued in 1875 that the bull claims only a spiritual power that touches rulers indirectly, against the reading, which he ascribes to Bossuet, that it claimed temporal supremacy and had been withdrawn (Manning, The Vatican Decrees pp. 57–70). The Catechism of 1992 explains that the saying “outside the Church there is no salvation” is not directed at people who, without fault of their own, do not know Christ and his church (Catechism of the Catholic Church 846–847).