Will Pope Leo turn out to be a lion or a pussycat? That depends on what he has to confront, but one hopes he will do better than Pope Siricius (384-399), let alone Kirill, current Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.
When the Roman emperor Constantine published a letter in 313 allowing freedom of worship to pagan and Christian alike, it opened the door to Christian leaders taking over the function of the old Roman elite. This at once presented a problem: if there really was one true God, whose will only bishops could interpret, was the emperor lord over the church or the church lord over the emperor?
In 390 Butheric, a close friend of the emperor Theodosius, arrested a star charioteer for homosexual rape. A riot ensued and Butheric was murdered. At the next games, Theodosius infiltrated armed soldiers into the crowd with instructions to close the gates and slaughter everyone. About 7,000 died.
Siricius, the pope at the time, did nothing, but Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, immediately excommunicated the emperor.
We have his lengthy, scripture-filled letter on the subject: ‘I have written this not in order to embarrass you, but to urge you to relieve your kingdom of this sin by humbling your soul before God. You are a man. Temptation came upon you. Conquer it. The only way to do that is by tears and penitence… Only the Lord, who forgives no one unless they repent, can say the word.’
Terrified at the prospect of eternal damnation, Theodosius, the Sacred Eternal Augustus, Lord of the World, appeared in the cathedral (as Edward Gibbon described it) ‘stripped of the ensigns of royalty… in a mournful and suppliant posture [to] humbly solicit with sighs and tears the pardon of his sins… an example which may prove the beneficial influence of those principles which could force a monarch, exalted above the apprehension of human punishment, to respect the laws and ministers of an invisible Judge’.
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