John XXII

Traditional teaching held that the souls of the blessed dead enjoy the beatific vision, direct sight of God, immediately upon death, an assurance embedded in centuries of preaching, art, and prayer for the dead. In the winter of 1331 to 1332, John XXII preached a series of sermons arguing instead that because a human being is composed of both body and soul, the full reward of seeing God cannot be granted until body and soul are reunited at the general resurrection on the Last Day. Until then, he taught, even the souls of the saints in paradise see only the humanity of Christ, not the full vision of the Godhead.

The reaction was immediate and came from the heart of the church's own theological establishment rather than from a fringe. Masters of theology at the University of Paris, the leading faculty in Western Christendom, argued publicly against the pope's position, and the Dominican friar Thomas Waleys was tried and imprisoned for preaching against it from the pulpit in Avignon itself. The French king Philip VI convened theologians to examine the question and pressed the pope to retract, treating the matter as a threat to the faith rather than an open scholarly dispute.

John XXII never fully backed down in life, continuing to hold the position was open to debate rather than settled doctrine, but on 3 December 1334, the day before he died, he issued a formal retraction affirming that souls who need no purification do see God fully immediately after death, restoring the traditional teaching his own successor, Benedict XII, would define as dogma four years later in the bull Benedictus Deus.

John XXII inherited a papacy already relocated to Avignon by his predecessor Clement V, and rather than treating the move as temporary, he built the administrative machine that would keep the papacy there for decades. He centralized taxation of the clergy across Western Christendom, expanded the system of papal appointment to benefices, and left the treasury far stronger than he found it, an efficiency later critics of the Avignon papacy would cite as evidence of a church grown too focused on money and bureaucracy.

His pontificate also reopened a dispute within the Franciscan order that had simmered since the death of Francis of Assisi a century earlier. A faction called the Spiritual Franciscans held that Christ and the apostles had owned no property whatsoever, individually or in common, and that the whole church should imitate this absolute poverty. John XXII, in the bulls Cum inter nonnullos of 1323 and others that followed, declared this specific claim, that Christ and the apostles owned nothing at all, to be heretical, since scripture itself records the apostles holding a common purse. The ruling put the pope in direct conflict with much of his own Franciscan order and, more dangerously, with the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV, who sheltered dissenting friars and had John XXII declared a heretic in turn by an antipope he set up in Rome.

The dispute was never simply theological. Apostolic poverty was also a claim about how much authority and wealth the institutional church itself was entitled to hold, and John XXII's ruling against the strictest reading of Franciscan poverty was, in practice, a ruling in favor of the church's right to own property at all.