Papal Resignations! III

As I have written in other postings, I am reluctant to call the bishops of Rome “popes” until the beginning of the fifth century, not because I don’t think they exercised a leadership role that extended beyond the Church of which they were bishops, but for several reasons, not least of which is that the title “pope” was not used in its modern sense of the Universal Pastor of the Church at least until the time of Leo I.  The Roman Church—and its bishop—certainly had an influence that extended throughout the Christian communities of the vast Roman Empire from at least the end of the first century, but the word “pope” gets very much overloaded with significance and authority, and power that becomes part of that office only later is too often projected back upon the Roman bishops of the first centuries making them retroactively something that does not fit the historical facts.   This is a problem with those who do “Church history” which is a branch of apologetics rather than “history of the Church” which is held accountable to the same standards of factual accuracy as the history of any secular institution.  Nevertheless, if one is looking at the subject of papal resignations, we can certainly begin by looking at the resignation of Pontian who was the Roman bishop from 230 until 235. 
Pontian was Bishop of Rome during a time of relative peace for the Church during the reign of Alexander Severus.   He held a synod that condemned Origen though I am not sure on precisely which counts as much of Origen’s work survives in orthodoxy while some of his ideas are clearly heretical.  More to our point, at the death of Alexander Severus the new Emperor, Maximinus the Thracian, initiated a persecution of the Church and Pontian was deported to the mines of Sardinia. Rather than leave the Roman Church without a shepherd, Pontian resigned the See.  Anterus, a Greek freedman, was elected to replace him in Rome. Pontian was to die after only a month or so in the mines.  His remains were brought back to Rome by Fabian, his successor but one, two years after his death.    
A less noble figure to resign the papal See was Benedict IX.  He was young—barely 20 and maybe not even that, but he came from the family of the Counts of Tusculum—a noble family that dominated the papacy in much of the ninth and tenth centuries and put the porno into what is called the papal pornocracy. (See entries for Jan 15 and June 6 2011.)  Benedict’s father was Alberic III, Count of Tusculum and the great-grandson and great-great-grandson respectively of Marozia and Theodora, who were in their day each mistresses of various popes. Two uncles, brothers of his father, had been Popes Benedict VIII and John XIX.  Benedict VII and John XI were also apes in this family tree. Benedict was cut of a somewhat different bolt of cloth than his ancestors—not that he was virtuous but more that this preference in lovers ran to men rather than to the ladies and he delighted in having orgies in the Apostolic Palace.  He was forced from Rome in 1044 and Sylvester III was elected in his place.  There is no record of Benedict’s resignation at this point, yet Sylvester is recognized as Pope and not called an anti-pope by historians.  I am not sure why.  The following year, however, Benedict’s godfather, a pious man and a cardinal, John Gratian, persuaded Benedict to resign.  He gave Benedict a handsome endowment on which to live.  Gratian was then elected as Gregory VI. 
Gregory VI was soon to resign himself.  Benedict rethought his resignation and tried to reclaim the papal throne.  So now you have three men claiming to pope—Sylvester III, Benedict IX, and Gregory VI.  The Emperor, Henry III, convoked a council at Sutri which deposed Sylvester and Benedict.  Gregory was acknowledged as true pope but asked to resign because in providing the endowment for Benedict to live on in retirement, it appeared that he, Gregory, had “bought” the papacy—paid Benedict for it.  Gregory resigned the papacy and was taken to Germany by the Emperor to remove him from Rome and interfering with his successor, Clement II.

A Good Pope Goes Bad

The Papal Throne in the Pope's

Cathedral, the Basilica of Saint John

Lateran--at the time of Gregory VI

the popes lived in a palace adjoining

the Lateran Basilica.

While Romuald was reforming monasteries and Peter Damian was going after gay clergy, the eleventh-century papacy was having its ups and downs.  We saw (July 17) that Sylvester II, Otto III’s candidate for pope who reigned from 999 until 1003 was a reform pope who brought stability to the papacy after a long period of immoral and/or incompetent popes.  (History shows us that some bad men were, in fact, good popes and some bad popes were good men even as some bad men have been among our best presidents and some exceptionally good men among our worst.)  The period immediately after Sylvester saw the papacy fall again into the control of the Roman mob which, in turn, was driven by the Crescentii family. (Crescentii is the plural of Crescentius in case you see that name somewhere.)  Some of these, such as Sergius IV, was a good man, but all of them—John XVII, John XVIII, Sergius IV—were  controlled, good and bad alike, by the Crescentii.  The Ottonians—the reform party—were able to regain control of the papacy with Benedict VIII (reigned 1012-1024) who was a good man but who was part of the Theophylact clan—those wonderful people who had brought you the pornacracy  (see entries of January 15, and June 9, 6, 18), the so-called “Rule of Whores” when a Roman mother-daughter team slept their way into control of the papacy in the tenth century.  (The Theophylacts were political rivals of the Crescentii.) Despite his shady relatives, Benedict was a capable pope and enjoyed the confidence and patronage of the last of the Ottonian Emperors, Saint Henry II.  He was succeeded, in turn, by his brother as John XIX.   OK—, while Benedict may have been a good man this isn’t a good sign as it indicates a family control of the papacy, and again by a family that had controlled the papacy before and had exploited it for the sake of family wealth and power.  Moreover, John was a far more mediocre pope than his brother, Benedict, had been.  And it gets worse.  John is succeeded by another family member—his nineteen year old nephew, Benedict IX. 
      Benedict was a pretty dissolute character—but hey, he is at that age where hormones are raging.  Nineteen-year-old popes are not a good idea. In the Liber Gomorrhianus Peter Damian called him a “demon in the mask of a priest.”  He did not let his being an active homosexual get in the way of the occasional heterosexual adultery or rape and allegedly was responsible for more than one murder.  But then boys will be boys. 
      Fortunately, Benedict IX did not want to be pope—at least not at that time in his life.  (He would become a problem, like a bad penny he kept turning up in the papal chair—three terms but we will save that story for later.  At this point he wanted out, but he had no money.  He may not have wanted to be pope but frankly he needed the job.  Along came his godfather with a solution that appeared to be a win/win scenario—win/win for Benedict, for the godfather, and for the Church.  Unfortunately they overlooked two details—one was Benedict’s character and the other was the godfather’s naiveté.  
      The godfather was a priest by the name of John Gratian.  You have to be careful because there is more than one Gratian in the history of the Church and several of these Gratians are named John.  This one was the Archpriest of the Church of Saint John at the Latin Gate.  That church still stands today.  Gratian was a canon lawyer and a pious man but he lacked some discretion.  He suggested that if Benedict resigned the papacy in his (Gratian’s) favor, he (Gratian) would make sure that the young man would have sufficient means for a life of comfort and ease.  (He didn’t say debauchery, but if you have money debauchery is cheap.)  Thus Gratian became Gregory VI.  The new pope did not want power, he wanted to reform the Church.   
   The reform party was delighted with this deal—the papacy was now in the hands of a reform minded pope and both Peter Damian and the monk Hildebrand, the future Gregory VII for whom the Gregorian Reform is named, were ecstatic.  But there was a problem and the problem is that technically Gratian had bought the papacy from Benedict and thus was guilty of simony.    Many of the clergy resented—or actually actively opposed Gregory’s reform program, especially regarding celibacy and forbidding the clergy to engage in the political strife that was responsible for all the fighting over the papacy that had almost destroyed the Church over the last two centuries.  They were quick to bring charges of simony against their bishops.  Complicating this was the fact that Benedict soon came to regret having given up the papacy and tried to reassume it. Complicating it even further, there was a third claimant to the papal throne, one Sylvester, who had been the Crescentii family candidate chosen for the papacy at a time when the Roman mob had forced the young Benedict to flee Rome, and thus, according to some, forfeited the papacy.  It was a mess—three popes and two of them no good whatsoever.  The Emperor Henry III came down to Italy and convoked a synod at Sutri that recognized Gregory as the authentic pope and declared Benedict and Sylvester to have no legitimate claims to the papacy.  That same synod, though it acknowledged Gregory as legitimate pope, also told him that because he had bought the papacy he did not in fact have the moral authority to govern the Church and that he should resign.  A good man, he did.   Henry’s candidate for the job, now that it was open, was a German by the name of Suidger of Morsleben and Hornburg and he was elected Clement II.  It’s good to have an emperor for your campaign manager—it more or less guarantees success.  Especially if the Emperor has an army sitting by watching.  Clement  too was an ardent reformer and continued Gregory VI’s program of Reform with the power of  the Emperor to back him up.  Gregory went into exile in Germany where he died.  He was accompanied in exile by his chief supporter, the monk Hildebrand.  Remember him.  He is the key player in this reform. 
      What we see here is that a good pope is not necessarily a good man and a bad pope is not necessarily a bad man.  We also see that sometimes in history good popes have come to power in sinful ways—either through naiveté or an ends-justifies-the-means desire to do good for the Church.  Of course we also see that some popes have led very immoral lives and that does not mean that they are not true popes.  We see too that one of the key needs that the Church had in the central Middle Ages was to free the papacy from mob control and we see that in an effort to do this the papacy  actually became beholden to the Emperor.  In fact, the papacy ended up in the gift of the Emperors who had the  power, if not the authority, to name popes or force them to resign.  And we see that a man, even a good man, may be pope but still lacks the actual moral authority to give the Church the leadership it needs.  Popes may be, under certain restricted circumstances, infallible but they are never about the ability to make some very crucial errors in judgment, much less are they ever unable to sin.  Beneath the robes and triple crown is a very ordinary man.   Wisdom, much less sainthood, does not go automatically with the papal office.