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. 

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.