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. 

A Saint Whose Own Holiness Began Reform of the Church

The Basilica of San Appolinaire in Classe, the one

time monastic church where Saint Romuald began

his journey of holiness that contributed to the

Gregorian Reform

  One of earliest contributors to the “Gregorian Reformation” was Saint Romuald of Ravenna, a monk of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries.   Romuald is actually a bridge figure between the Ottonian and Gregorian Reformations.  As a young man, just out of his teens, he was appalled at the violence he saw around him, including in his own family—having seen his father kill a man in a duel—and he embraced the monastic life at the Monastery of Saint Appolinaire in Classe, a monastery just outside Ravenna that followed the Cluniac Reformation.  Desiring a more austere life, Romuald left Sain Appolinaire and  became a hermit with his spiritual master, a monk named Marinus whose vision was rooted in the austere eremitical life of the Irish monks who had Christianized much of what is today Switzerland and the Alpine areas of France, Italy, and the Austrian Tyrol.  This style of monasticism was much closer to the ideals of the desert abbas and ammas than the more cehobitic Benedictine monasticism.   
      Romuald’s fame spread and the Emperor Otto III asked him to reform several monasteries in his realm.  The monks in these monasteries were not anxious to be reformed however and Romuald quit in disgust, hurling his abbatial crosier at the Emperor in a fit of pique.  He retired to a hermitage at Fonte Avellana in Tuscany and then, as a monastic community grew up there, established a second hermitage at Camaldoli—also in Tuscany—and then a third, Val di Castro.  The hermits at Camaldoli eventually formed their own distinct branch of the Benedictine Family, the Camaldolese monks.  Romuald died in 1027.      
         Romuald’s monasticism was highly disciplinary but never rigid.  Like such later saints as Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Francis de Sales—Romuald understood that holiness, not austerity, was the virtue to which monks are called and what he really wanted his monks to learn was the path of contemplative prayer.   In this he veered somewhat slightly from the Cluniac ideal for Romuald did not short-change the liturgical services but neither did he let them take over and dominate the monastic life.  To the contrary—silence and solitude, not ceremony and ritual were the heart of the life that he envisioned for monks.  Drawing on the ancient monastic practices he taught his monks how to sit in silence, leaving their hearts empty for God to fill.  This principle of monastic spirituality is called vacare deo—to empty (oneself) for God.   “Sing the psalms in your heart and understand them with your soul” was his advice.  Today such spiritual masters as Abbot Thomas Keating, Father William Menninger, and the late Dom John Main draw on these same spiritual techniques, referred to as “Centering Prayer,” or “Christian meditation.”                       
      Romuald’s focus was not the Reform of the Church, but reform as spiritual renewal of the individual monk but his communities, especially Fonte Avellana, would become centers of spiritual renewal that would not only engender a monastic reform but reform of the Church.  In our next posting we are going to look at Peter Damian, a monk of FonteAvellana who will have tremendous impact on the Church and its reform in the 11^th century, more impact than any other individual including Pope Gregory himself.   When we speak of the need for Reform in the Church, we must remember that it begins with individuals who have a quest for holiness.  The reform of structures comes after the change of heart.  Holiness is neither moral righteousness--though there is always a need to mature in integrity if the holiness is to be real and not merely superficial--nor is it mere piety.  Indeed, as we mature in holiness piety becomes almost an impediment to genuine prayer; it gets in the way of the deep and silent prayer--the cor ad cor loquitor (heart speaks to heart) with which God is anxious to fill us.  You don't have to be a monk or a nun to mature in contemplative prayer.  Indeed the monk or the nun is nothing other than an ordinary woman or man who trusts God enough to open the deeper recesses of his or her being to the profound grace, the fullness of Grace, of the Indwelling Trinity.  This requires not the fuss and bother of busy prayer, but the stillness, solitude, and silence of deep prayer.   There are those who fear contemplative prayer, who discourage people from practicing it, who claim that it is only for the clergy or the monks. They only betray their lack of knowledge of our Catholic mystical tradition.  Any renewal of our Catholic faith must be rooted in a spiritual renewal of the Catholic faithful. 
Romuald's Sayings:

Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it. Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish. The path you must follow is in the Psalms — never leave it. 
If you have just come to the monastery, and in spite of your good will you cannot accomplish what you want, take every opportunity you can to sing the Psalms in your heart and to understand them with your mind.
And if your mind wanders as you read, do not give up; hurry back and apply your mind to the words once more.
Realize above all that you are in God's presence, and stand there with the attitude of one who stands before the emperor.
Empty yourself completely and sit waiting, content with the grace of God, like the chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing but what his mother brings him.
 

 

The Gregorian Reform and the Political Independence of the Church

The Emperor Saint Henry, the last
of the Ottonian Dynasty, with a
German Archbishop

Well we have looked at the Carolingian and the Ottonian Reformations  and now we can take a look at the Gregorian Reformation—named after Pope Gregory VII—one of the greatest men to occupy the Chair of Peter.  The name is a bit misleading, however, as Gregory didn’t start this Reformation and there were many other players, several of whom played as crucial a role.  In many respects it was simply the second phase of the Ottonian Reformation—it proceeded almost seamlessly from the Ottonian Reformation and yet it took a remarkably different course and in fact it overthrew the Ottonian Reformation in its efforts to purify the Church even further than the Emperors had.  Indeed it wanted to purify the Church from Imperial control.   
    The Ottonian Reformation, you may remember, is named after the Emperors Otto I, II, and III—a series of German Holy Roman Emperors in the tenth century.  Otto I (912-973), a descendent of Charlemagne but in the matrilineal line, in fact had restored the Empire in 962 after it had all but ceased to exist.  His policy was to strengthen the Church by appointing capable bishops and abbots who, loyal to him, were a counterweight to the secular nobility who resented the expanding Imperial control over their ancestral princedoms, duchies, and counties.  To do this Otto and his successors endowed the Church with considerable wealth to make it independent of all outside (except his, of course) control.  He also needed to have capable men as Archbishops, bishops and Abbots—and capable women too as Abbesses who often held political and religious power and authority  equivalent to the Abbots and Bishops—and not mere sycophants and dependants of the various dukes and counts who were threats to the expanding Imperial power.   
      There were two other aspects, also important, to the Ottonian Reform.  The Emperors used the Church as a tool to expand the imperial power, particularly eastwards into the Slavic lands that today comprise the Czech Republic, southern Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary.  Establishing Archdioceses, dioceses, and abbeys in these new lands they expanded the Church and also brought the subjugated and converted peoples into the Empire as well as into the Church.
     The final characteristic of the Ottonian Reformation was that after long struggles with the old Roman families (and here you should probably read “Mafiosi,” which while not technically true captures the nature of the problem) who controlled the papacy which they filled with some of the most profligate men known to history.  The Roman Church was and had been through most of the ninth century and well into the tenth a scandal to Christendom and had lost the respect of all and thus any real authority.  The Church in Rome, throughout most of Italy, and beyond the Ottonian Realm was of no better moral character than the secular nobility.  There were isolated men and institutions of character—the Abbots and Abbey of Cluny and its dependencies being most notable—but the Church was almost universally beholden to the secular powers for its wealth, and bishops and Abbots were most frequently appointed not for their moral character but their family connections.   
     I do need to be careful here when I say “appointed,” as technically bishops and abbots were elected—bishops by their cathedral chapters, abbot by the monks of their abbey.  But such “elections” were all but universally directed by the king or a more local political authority who had his favored candidate who, once installed as bishop or abbot, would do his bidding.  And this would be the very abuse the Gregorian Reform would seek to end. Political control of the Church all worked fine where the Emperors Otto held sway, but what of the day when kings of lesser character sat on the Imperial throne and abused their powers over the Church?  No, the honest prelates put in place by the Ottonians knew that the Church could not risk remaining under the imperial thumb.  Otto III was succeeded by the last of his dynasty, the saintly (and indeed Sainted) Henry II.   But Henry would die without an heir—supposedly he and his wife, also Sainted, Kunigunde, had committed themselves to celibacy within their marriage (no virtue in light of the royal responsibility to provide an heir)—and a new dynasty, the Salians, came to the throne.  This was not good for the Church, but that is what we shall look at over the next few weeks with the Gregorian Reform.         

Roots of the Reformation XXV: Sylvester II and The Peak of the Ottonian Reformation

The Tomb of Sylvester II
(Gerbert of Aurillac) in the
Basilica of Saint Johnb Lateran

Yesterday we started the story of Gerbert of Aurillac, one of the most intriguing men to become  pope—and one of the more successful reformers of the Church.  Gerbert was anxious to assume his role as imperial tutor to the young Otto II, but realized that while he had learned much of Arabic culture and science during his time in Spain, he was deficient in traditional philosophy and theology.  With Otto’s permission he went to study at the Cathedral School at Reims in France, at that time (late 10^th century) the leading intellectual center in Christian Europe.  He quickly moved from being a student to being a professor.  Otto II tried to lure him away from France and appointed him Abbot of Bobbio in northern Italy and also established him as the secular power in that region but Gerbert was not cut out for the military duties involved and the abbey was in great disrepair so he returned to the academic life in Reims to which he was more suited.  It was at this point when he got involved in the political mess when Hugh Capet deposed Archbishop Arnulf and made Gerbert Archbishop only to have John XV send a delegate who deposed Gerbert and restored Arnulf. (See the entry for July 1^st.) This is not unlike the mess in China today when Pope and government struggle to name bishops, and Gerbert was—in this case—on the government side, not the pope’s.  One would think that being on the opposite side from the pope in a ecclesiastical/political struggle would destroy a priest’s chances of advancement once and for all, and indeed it probably would have then (and it probably would now) but Gerbert was the favorite of the Emperor and the fiasco over the Archdiocese of Reims was only a blip in his career. 
     Gerbert was brought back to the Imperial Court as the tutor to the young Emperor Otto III even as he had been tutor to Otto’s father, Otto II.  At imperial insistence he was made Archbishop of Ravenna and then in 999—again at imperial insistence—he was made pope.
      Gerbert took Sylvester as his regnal name in tribute to Sylvester I who had been an advisor to the Emperor Constantine even as he intended to be the advisor to the Emperor Otto.  And he was an energetic pope.  As a monk himself, he was determined to enforce clerical celibacy and outlaw the practice of clerical concubinage.  (We have to talk about that in a future entry.)  He also was determined to eliminate simony—the practice of buying and selling church offices.  These reform measures did not endear him to the prelates of the papal court who depended on bribes and payments to support themselves in some style.  (Imagine that!)
       His unpopularity led to many rumors about Sylvester. An ardent scholar and scientist he was given, like a kid with a chemistry kit, to various experiments.  The loud explosions, smell of sulfur, and flashes of light in his apartments led to suspicions that he was a sorcerer or in communication with demons.  There were stories that he had books of spells given him my Islamic magicians during his time in Spain or that he had a demonically possessed large bronze head built which he could consult and which would answer his questions with a “sic”(yes) or “non.”  Despite these rumors, he was not only a capable pope—a very capable pope—but a man of personal integrity and piety.  Though his papacy only lasted four years, it was in his reign that the reform finally began to take hold in the Church and the Church reached a high-water mark of reform that would be surpassed only at the end of the eleventh century in the next reform we will talk about—the Gregorian Reform. 
        One final legend.  In Rome it is said that the tomb of Sylvester—which is in the Basilica of Saint John in the Lateran—“weeps” before the death of a pope.  I happened to be living in Rome during the final days of John Paul II, and went faithfully every day to see if I could verify the tears.  (If such tears ever existed they were probably condensation forming on the outer surface of the tomb.)  Alas, I never found any “tears.”  Nor did I find any condensation—but then it was pleasant April weather—not a time of the year of condensation. 
        An alternative legend derived from some priests’ inept translation of the Latin inscription on the tomb (few priests ever really learn Latin—even those who like to “say Mass” in it, perhaps especially those who like to say/play Mass in it) is that Sylvester’s bones will rattle in the tomb before the death of each of his successors.   But in April 2005 Sylvester rested in peace as his 125^th successor drew his final breathes.  Pity, really, these legends give so much color to being Catholic.   

Roots of the Reformation XXIII: The Ottonian Reformation falters (briefly)

Otto II

Sorry--our network was down last evening when I went to post this. 

It is unfortunate that Otto II died so young—at only 28—and that his heir was only three years old  when he came to the throne because Otto and his father (Otto I) had managed to make some remarkable headway into securing good order in both Church and State and a regency provided both the German nobles and the Roman families with the opportunity to undo the political and religious progress that had been accomplished.  Otto’s widow, Theophanu, gets mixed reviews as regent, though the negative opinons of her own day might be biased against her being a woman and her being Greek.  She seems to have preferred Italy to Germany, probably because it was more like her native Greece but also because she was detested in Germany for her sophistication which made her seem affected and pretentious.  Raised in the imperial court of Constantinople where her uncle reigned, she was given to a high degree of luxury and her preference for rich fabrics and elegant jewelry made her appear decadent to the more battle-hardened Germans.  Among her “affectations,” she seems to have been the one who introduced the use of the fork to Europe.  She had a two pronged golden instrument with which she lifted meat and other greasy foods to her mouth. The Germans couldn’t understand this—why, after all, had God given us fingers if not to slobber grease-dripping  globs of fat into our mouths?  On the other hand, lazy, sunny decadence was familiar to Rome and the Romans (where it is still the fashion), and while Italy may not be Greece, at least it wasn’t the frigid, Spartan forests north of the Alps. 
Germany was in turmoil through much of Otto’s childhood due to the rebellion of Henry the Quarrelsome whom Otto II had deposed as Duke of Bavaria.  At one point Henry had actually kidnapped the young Otto III and in his rebellion he tried to seize the imperial crown for himself.  It is never healthy for a kingdom or an empire to have a child on the throne.  Quarrelsome Henry's quarrels were not the only issue causing trouble in Germany.  Hungarians ravaged the eastern fringe of the empire, Vikings the north.  France, under Lothair IV used the chaos created by Henry the Quarrelsome to make itself independent of Imperial oversight.  On the other hand, Theopanu was able to arrange for Bohemia under Duke Boleslaus II to become part of the Empire. 

Otto, or rather his regent and mother, Theophanu, had better luck with their Roman policy.   You may remember that one of Otto II’s last acts was to name John XIV as pope, but with Otto’s death five months into that papacy, John was left vulnerable to the enemies of the Imperial party and the antipope Boniface VII had returned from exile and imprisoned John in the Castle Sant’ Angelo where he was murdered.  Boniface held the Chair of Peter for a year until he died.  (He is the one whose corpse was dragged naked through the streets and flung at the statue of Marcus Aurelius.)  John XV was elected to succeed him.  John was a client of Theophanu and the Imperial party and her presence (at times personal, at times through a strong envoy) kept him safe. 

As pope John was not remarkable in any way other than to say he was noted for his love of luxury and a tendency to enrich family and retainers with Church offices.  Those are not virtues in a pope, though they were common enough faults. There are two important events in his papacy however. 

The first event was that the new King of France, Hugh Capet, who had replaced the old Carolingian dynasty wanted to depose Arnulf, the Archbishop of Reims who was a relative of Hugh’s rival for the French Crown, Charles of Lorraine.  When John XV failed to act promptly at Hugh’s request, the French King convoked a synod and deposed Arnulf choosing the abbot Gerbert of Aurillac to succeed him.  We will hear more—much more—about Gerbert later.  Instead of being angry at the King, Arnulf turned on the pope saying of John XV:

Are any bold enough to maintain that the priests of the Lord all over the world are to take their law from monsters of guilt like these—men branded with ignominy, illiterate men, and ignorant alike of things human and divine? If, holy fathers, we are bound to weigh in the balance the lives, the morals, and the attainments of the humblest candidate for the priestly office, how much more ought we to look to the fitness of him who aspires to be the Lord and Master of all priests! Yet how would it fare with us, if it should happen that the man the most deficient in all these virtues, unworthy of the lowest place in the priesthood, should be chosen to fill the highest place of all? What would you say of such a one, when you see him sitting upon the throne glittering in purple and gold? Must he not be the "Antichrist, sitting in the temple of God and showing himself as God"?

This might be the first time that the Pope has been termed the Antichrist.  That is a theme that would be picked up by Luther at his Reformation, shared by other Protestant Reformers, and still a popular theme today among some of the more exotic millenarians on the right fringe of Christianity.  Hugh's evaluation of John might be more out of anger that John wasn't supporting him in his struggles for the French throne, but it does serve as a warning that people are not necessarily impressed by papal pomp. 

The other event that made John’s papacy noteworthy from a historical point of view is that on January 31 995, just a year before his death, John canonized Bishop Ulrich of Augsburg.  This is the first record of a papal canonization of a saint.  John died in March of 996 as he was preparing to crown the young Otto III as emperor.   Otto III named his 24 year old cousin, Bruno of Carinthia, as Gregory V.  At this point in history we see that the papacy is totally in the control and gift of the Emperor.  By amd large, the imperial popes were good popes, or at least not bad popes--certainly better than the ones the Romans tended to elect.  We will see Bruno's efforts at Reform and then his successor who is one of the better popes, and one of the most idiosyncratic, of the period.