Pope.

But that episcopal autonomy--if we may so call it--under the presidence of
the three Petrine patriarchs, which was in full life and vigour at the
Nicene Council, which St. Gregory still recognised in his letter to
Eulogius, was greatly impaired. While barbaric inundation had swept over
the West, the struggles of the Nestorian and Eutychean heresies, especially
in the two great cities of Alexandria and Antioch, had disturbed the
hierarchy and divided the people which the master at Constantinople could
hardly control. That state of the East which St. Basil deplored in burning
words--which almost defied every effort of the great Theodosius to restore
it to order--had gone on for more than two hundred years. The Greek
subtlety was not pervaded by the charity of Christ, and they carried on
their disputes over that adorable mystery of His Person in which the secret
of redeeming power is seated, with a spirit of party and savage persecution
which portended the rise of one who would deny that mystery altogether, and
reduce to a terrible servitude those who had so abused their liberty as
Christians and offered such a scandal to the religion of unity which they
professed.

From St. Sylvester to St. Leo, and, again, from St. Leo to St. Gregory, the
effort of the Popes was to maintain in its original force the Nicene
constitution of the Church. Well might they struggle for the maintenance of
that which was a derivation from their own fountainhead--"the
administration of Peter"[217]--during the three centuries of heathen
persecution by the empire. It was not they who tightened the exercise of
their supreme authority. The altered condition of the times, the tyranny of
Constantius and Valens, the dislocation of the eastern hierarchy, the rise
of a new bishop in a new capital made use of by an absolute sovereign to
control that hierarchy, a resident council at Constantinople which became
an "instrument of servitude" in the emperor's hands to degrade any bishop
at his pleasure and his own patriarch when he was not sufficiently pliant
to the master,--these were among the causes which tended to bring out a
further exercise of the power which Christ had deposited in the hands of
His Vicar to be used according to the needs of the Church. No one has
expressed with greater moderation than St. Gregory the proper power of his
see, in the words I have quoted above:[218] "I know not what bishop is not
subject to the Apostolical See, if an