Home
 Pope St. Gregory VII 9th Century of Death Scott 758-760 (1985) The feast day for Pope Saint Gregory VII is celebrated on May 25. Historian R. W. Southern writes that the eleventh century was marked by those who wanted to reform the Church and its institutions, making the Church separate from society, governed by canon law, and subject to the Successor of St. Peter. This is also an era when ‘church’ and ‘state’ were often co-mingled, with bishops and others serving as advisers to princes and kings. This explains much about the historical context of the pontificate of Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085). St. Gregory VII’s original name was Hildebrand. He was born ca. 1020 in Tuscany and received minor orders in Rome and accompanied Pope Gregory VI into exile at Cologne. He then entered the monastery at Cluny, France which was the center of monastic reform in Europe. Hildebrand was summoned to Rome by Pope Leo IX and he was appointed sub-deacon and treasurer of the Roman Church as well as prior to St. Paul’s Monastery. Hildebrand quickly became known as a reformer under Popes Nicholas II and Alexander II, after whose death he was elected pope in 1073, taking the name Gregory VII. Historian J.N.D. Kelly summarizes Gregory VII as follows: “A man of exceptional ability, determination, and experience, whose intellectual stature shines out in his letters, Gregory made reform the keynote of his program. His exalted mystique of the papacy, set out in the twenty-seven propositions of his Dictatus (March 1075), included not only the pope’s personal sanctity inherited from St Peter, but his supremacy over, and right to depose, all princes, temporal as well as spiritual; all Christians were subject to the pope, who had supreme legislative and judicial power.”  Ruins of the Castle of Canossa Photo by Eulalia Palmieri From Wikimedia Commons Used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license One of the foremost reforms he promoted was the prohibition of the lay investiture of the clergy, especially bishops. Perhaps the most famous episode in his papacy was the conflict with Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV who was forced to stand barefoot in the snow for three days begging forgiveness at Canossa (1077). In 1084 Henry seized Rome and Gregory was rescued by troops from Norman Sicily but their sacking of the city forced Gregory to flee south to Monte Cassino and then Salerno where he died and was buried. Kelly concludes that Gregory VII was ‘one of the greatest popes and most impressive figures of the medieval world,’ but the subject of controversy, ‘authoritative and unyielding,’ with a ‘single-minded fanaticism which dismayed some of his closest friends’ all on behalf of a ‘pure and free’ Church. REFERENCES: |
