Diarmaid MacCulloch: evaluation

Transcript context

…Is there some institutional innovation from decentralized bishops competing against each other through monastic orders? Something’s paying for all this, right? Yes. The secular nobility are paying for it because they’re endowing these places with land for the sake of prayer. It is not exactly a decentralized system. It is a system, you must remember, which actually, literally covers the map of Europe. There are virtually no places not contained within the system. Within the diocese, that is the institution run by the bishop, are what are called parishes, which again, virtually cover the map of Europe. Not that they had maps, but they knew the boundaries of every parish. A parish is a very interesting institution. It’s new in the 9th century onwards in the West. The idea is that you have one priest in each of these parishes, and the area of land that he patrols is more or less patrollable in a day, that he can meet and visit all his parishioners. I speak with feeling about this because I am the son of one of those parish priests in the Church of England, and his first parish — in which I grew up — was about a couple of square miles each way. He could have walked it and often did. This is an extraordinarily effective way of giving everyone in Europe pastoral care. In fact, not just the nobility. The nobility get the deluxe end of it with the great monastery, the endowments of cathedrals, but everyone has a parish church. It’s an extraordinarily wonderfully integrated system. I think we, with a Western tradition, often forget how absolutely unusual that is within world religions, to have a single form of a religion absolutely dominating everything within a particular continent. Nothing else like it, except perhaps Saudi Arabia in the 20th and 21st centuries. Don’t you find it striking how few of those structures are mediocre? There may be some survival bias, but it’s very hard to just find an ugly-looking church from that time.…

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