The Pope Who Quit

by Jon M. Sweeney

  Celestine’s awkwardness was palpable. A powerful man of the Spirit, he did not understand how to live and succeed among powerful men on earth. The values of the world were foreign to him.

  The Pope and His Curia

  The most dominant force in the late medieval Church was the practitioners of canon law. They were necessary to the growth of Christendom in the second half of the thirteenth century. The rise of powerful city-states, increased trade and communication between kingdoms, the transition from demonizing Eastern Christendom and Islam to attempting to understand them, and the burgeoning of universities throughout Europe—all of these matters required specialists. The experts in canon law inhabited the papal curia. They ran Western Christendom by an elaborate system of researchers, advisors, lawyers, judges, and courts. Originally intended to be a representative sample of the universal Church, the curia had by the time of Celestine V become the religious counterpart to a massive royal court. One scholar has referred to the curia as “the new bureaucratic superpower” that emerged during this era, as the papacy and its machinery came to dominate both the spiritual and temporal landscape.4 There was nothing to compare to its power in any of the royal houses of Europe. Every single pope of that era was a canon lawyer, except Celestine.

  Dante in the Divine Comedy disparages the way in which the Church was ruled by these legal experts who were schooled in the ability to judge and adjudicate. In the Paradiso, he laments how the “decretals,” or books of church laws, had captivated the officers of the Church to the great neglect of the Gospels (“Evangel”) and the Church Fathers (“the mighty Doctors”).

  For this the Evangel and the mighty Doctors

  Are derelict, and only the Decretals

  So studied that it shows upon their margins.

  On this are Pope and Cardinals intent;

  Their meditations reach not Nazareth,

  There where his pinions Gabriel unfolded.5

  More obsessed with the details and “margins” of ecclesiastical laws than the life and teachings of Jesus, these canon lawyers were consigned by Dante to the most undesirable eternal resting places.

  In Celestine’s case, the curia took over where Charles II had left them room. The hermit pope’s spiritual charisma was a mismatch for the worldly leadership required for such an intricate, multilayered bureaucracy. They quickly followed their own agenda, knowing that their leader would have trouble discerning what they were up to.

  The Final Weeks

  As every area of his papal responsibilities fell into disarray, Celestine no longer felt capable of being either a spiritual leader or a manager of papal affairs. The curia didn’t know how to function under a leader who was seemingly so disinterested, and they began to resist doing what the newly appointed agents of Charles II were insisting upon. Celestine, for his part, was not unaware of the disappointment he was causing. But there was little by then that he could do about it. He began to be addled, or simply confused, by difficulties. His contemporaries remarked at how unsophisticated his speech seemed to be. He often spoke in Italian, having little ability in the Latin used in church affairs.

  He was communicating less and less with everyone at Castle Nuovo. He avoided contact with the curia, even Charles, and retreated more and more, spending time with his spiritual brethren only. The cardinals were more worried than ever, and on simple matters of governance they began to insist on face-to-face meetings with their pope, who needed to make decisions whether he wanted to or not. At these meetings it became clear that Celestine was either afraid or confused “and could only stammer out halting statements.”6 As one sympathetic archbishop summarized it, “He gave dignities, prelacies, offices, against all custom, at anyone’s suggestion and the dictates of his own untutored simplicity.”7

  For a man like Peter, so strong with emotion, opinion, and desire, these final weeks must have been intensely difficult. To become head of the Western Church one had to be political, and Celestine did not have a political bone in his body. One had to be seeking power and influence, and the evidence seems to be that although Peter enjoyed the influence he’d held as a spiritual leader, he had the desire but not the understanding to wield his power in the world. A strong man in spiritual and physical terms, he was weak in the eyes of those who were better schooled in the ways of court, diplomacy, and chancery.

  In early December 1294, Celestine attempted to turn over most of his responsibilities to a team of three cardinals. It’s not unusual for a pope to delegate certain aspects of his responsibilities; what is unusual is the extent to which it has been done.

  Pope John Paul II, for instance, was often lax in governing the late-twentieth-century curia, often leaving the everyday running of the Vatican to a variety of deputies. Benedict XVI has also indicated that his gifts and primary roles as holy father lie in teaching and writing, not in administrative duties. He also leaves the running of many things to others. But Celestine V’s plan was far more extreme; it essentially would have created three popes instead of one, his advisors immediately said. The idea was promptly and wisely rejected, largely on the strength of the arguments of Cardinal Matthew Orsini, one of the most experienced members of the Sacred College, and a cardinal who participated in a total of thirteen papal conclaves over a long career.8

  In the midst of all this, there was at least one group of people who were still excited about Celestine’s ascension: the Franciscan Spirituals. Nicholas IV had been the first Franciscan pope, but as a Conventual he had felt threatened by these zealots and ordered that all Franciscans accept the ownership of property in common and pursue learning and education—pursuits that were contrary to the ideals of the Spirituals. Celestine became their champion.

  The Spirituals were the most sincere believers that the papacy of Celestine signaled the advent of Joachim of Fiore’s long-expected era of the Spirit of God. Under the previous pope they had been hiding—fearing for their lives—in the Marches of Ancona and other remote places throughout Italy—but now they came into the sunlight trusting that they would be protected. Celestine felt deeply for their plight. The venerable hagiographer Alban Butler writes: “To the rigorist Spirituali movement he was a pope sent direct from Heaven.” Celestine gave his papal blessing to the efforts of the traditionalists, many of whom he knew personally, honoring their desire to remain faithful to the saint of Assisi. He gave them permission to live in separated, small hermitages, similar to those that once surrounded Francis’s Portiuncula, and to practice Francis’s Rule free of any outside interpretations from the papacy or elsewhere.

  He also appointed one of their friars from the Marches, Ugolino of Brunforte, as the new bishop of Teramo. Notably this decision would be overturned by Boniface VIII within days following Celestine’s abdication. In a papal bull Boniface declared: “That which was previously stipulated as righteous we are now expunging.” Celestine also elevated to cardinal Berard of Got, the archbishop of Lyon who had ascended Mount Morrone in July to bring Peter the news of his election as pope. And he appointed Charles II’s son, Louis, the next archbishop of Lyon—and Louis was only a twenty-one-year old layman. To his credit, Louis appears not to have accepted the appointment. His only qualification was that his private tutor had been a Spiritual Franciscan. He was to go on to become a saint himself (Saint Louis of Toulouse) and knew better than to accept what he was not yet ready to attain.

  True to form, Celestine continued to exercise his spiritual authority in ways that demonstrated no understanding—or at least little fear of consequences—in his relationships with the leaders of the world. He grafted the Spirituals to himself. He made one of the Orsini family, Cardinal Napoleon Orsini, their official protector and guide, and for a time the Spirituals became known as Pauperes eremitæ Domini Celestine, the Poor Hermits of Pope Celestine, in honor of their champion. They were ordered to dress and live as hermits, a decision welcomed by the Spirituals as long as they would be safe. This was Celestine’s greatest accomplishment as well as his final blunder.
In the months and years after his death, it was the Spirituals who would most ardently maintain the holiness of the angelic pope, and bemoan how the world had destroyed him.

  Peter of Morrone … great is your rank and your worthiness,

  But the tempest around you is no less,

  Why, then, within your mansion

  do you sit, questionless?

  —JACOPONE OF TODI

  “Epistle to Pope Celestine V”

  16

  I, PETER CELESTINE, AM GOING AWAY

  One hundred and forty miles away from Naples, the inscription on the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica is taken from chapter sixteen of the Gospel of Matthew. It reads: Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam et tibi dabo claves regni caelorum. This was Latin that Peter actually knew, for he’d committed to memory most of the Gospels. “You art Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.”

  He also knew the words of Christ from the cross: Consummatum est—“It is finished.” It was this last utterance that Peter would emulate, much to the shocking of the world.

  On the ceiling of the nave of the Church of Saint Peter of Maiella in Naples a Baroque fresco depicts Pope Celestine V removing his papal tiara from his head and handing it to someone else. Six monks look on with resignation and a single cherubim offers what appears to be a halfhearted blessing; the pudgy angel lackadaisically leans on his left hip and raises his right hand.

  Celestine had renounced the papacy. How did it come to this? No pope ever before had resigned. There had been plenty of forced resignations by methods such as poison (John VIII, 872–82, and his successor, Adrian III, 884–85); strangulation (Stephen VI, 896–97, and Leo V, 903); and other sordid means (see the next chapter), but never a willful resignation.

  After all of the problems that had been encountered over the weeks Peter had spent as holy father, Charles II began to shelter the pope less and less. The king was just as baffled as were others about what to do. How can we get this pope to become more engaged in the affairs of the Holy See, to direct the clergy of Rome, to motivate the missions abroad, to inspire the world with the charisma and spiritual leadership that his reputation had promised? Why doesn’t he seem to care much about his duties? The hermit pope had retreated fully into his shell. He was living a self-imposed exile within the king’s estate. By December 1, 1294, the papal curia and conferences were humming along without much expectation that they would see their holy leader. From the beginning it had been obvious that Celestine was unprepared for his office, but now he seemed unwilling to even try.

  In his cell the pope was contemplating abdication. First he weighed the spiritual justifications. He remembered the teachings of Peter Damian that he’d carried with him since his teenage years in Faifula: personal sanctity is the only sure path to genuine reform.

  Celestine knew the ways to holiness better than he understood the ways of the papacy. As he considered the unthinkable—leaving his office behind—he prepared for what he believed to be the mature step of a Christian mystic: to follow Jesus into great suffering. The most famous Christian of that century had identified with Jesus so completely as to be gifted with the world’s first known stigmata, and now a pope would identify with Jesus to the point of entering into a deep understanding of his passion. To abdicate would be equivalent to admitting weakness and failure—at least to those in the “world,” but not to Peter Morrone. He knew the greater good of suffering. For him, walking away meant becoming a witness to sanctity. Stepping down from the Holy See was, in his mind, similar to Christ’s willingly accepting his heavenly Father’s will. The hermit pope felt ready for what might come next.

  Again the example of Peter Damian took on great significance for Celestine, because Damian had once abdicated episcopal responsibility. Made the cardinal-bishop of Ostia by Leo IX, Damian served for a time with his usual aggressiveness. But after a short while, he pleaded with the pope to relieve him of the responsibilities of his see, so that the good and earnest monk could return to his primarily contemplative life, and Leo’s successor finally allowed Damian to resign.

  Damian always seemed to feel pessimistic when he was engaged in church business, and this feeling carried over to his experience as a cardinal. He never felt that he could make changes or bring about any reform when he was clothed in the finer garments of ecclesiastical leadership. Celestine imbibed these teachings deeply.

  The world appeared to Damian to be on the threshold of its final end, according to him in this letter written at the end of his life, soon after he had returned from a churchwide synod:

  The world … is daily deteriorating into such a worthless condition, that not only has each rank of secular and ecclesiastical society collapsed and fallen from its [former] state, but even monastic life, if I may put it so, has declined and lies prostrate, deprived of strength to climb to its accustomed goals of perfection. Decency has gone, honesty disappeared, religious devotion has fallen on bad times.1

  Damian goes on to exhort his readers to practice a true spiritual life, which is possible only apart from the world. He makes it clear that he himself has given up on other courses of action. “Now, in the contract we made with our God, it was we undoubtedly who said that in following Christ we promised to renounce the world and everything for which it stands.” If we don’t, he says, quoting the words of Jesus from chapter nine of Luke, “if we look back, we shall promptly hear the terrible pronouncement of a threatening God: ‘No one who sets his hand to the plow, and then keeps looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.’ ”2

  Celestine knew that as pope his personal limitations were hurting, rather than helping, the God that he adored. His love for the Church persisted in the fire of his devotion and piety, making it more poignantly clear that he was unable to do his work. One historian of that age, Ptolemy of Lucca, a Dominican who had been a friend and spiritual counselor to Thomas Aquinas, even says that there were cardinals in the Sacred College who told Celestine to fear for his soul, so confusing and dangerous was his papacy for people everywhere. Ptolemy said that Celestine was so disengaged in his final days at Castle Nuovo that he was signing blank bulls put in front of him—which the unscrupulous would later fill in to suit their purposes. Perhaps Celestine began to fear for his salvation if he were to remain in his lofty position. And he knew that the poor were blessed and the rich have difficulty entering heaven.

  When Celestine let it be known that he was thinking of abdicating, Charles II immediately voiced his opposition. We can imagine that the king set to work behind the scenes as well, asking every cardinal under his sway what could be done to keep his pope in place. Charles had a lot to lose, much more, in fact, than Celestine. He had accomplished what no sovereign before him had. He had kept the Christ of this earth in his own rooms, closely guarded his comings and goings, monitored who might be permitted to visit and counsel with him, and put in positions of power many from his own relations and personal interests. He couldn’t allow all these accomplishments to amount to nothing.

  In those first days of December, word began to spread that the pope was considering stepping down. Celestine clearly no longer desired the position and was making those feelings known to anyone who was paying attention.

  On December 6, the Feast of Saint Nicholas of Myra, outside of the papal residence Franciscan Spirituals and Celestine monks began to gather, having heard the rumors through leaks in the papal entourage and among the cardinals. They surrounded the castle and carried on demonstratively in intercessory prayer for both the pope and the future of Mother Church. Charles II was there. Some say that he organized the rally. Ptolemy of Lucca was also among the crowd that day, just as he had been a witness to Celestine’s election in Perugia.

  These were the very last days before the onset of winter, when cold rain falls in Naples. The people were dispirited, full of dread, some even terrified. What would happen if a pope left his holy office? Some, believing that God
might become furious, were on their knees with their rosaries. Others said that such an act could bring on that long-awaited dread, the advent of the true antichrist. Texts from the book of Daniel were read out:

  Daniel said, “I saw in my vision by night, and behold, the four winds of heaven were stirring up the great sea. And four great beasts came up out of the sea.… The first was like a lion and had eagles’ wings. Then as I looked its wings were plucked off, and it was lifted up from the ground and made to stand upon two feet like a man; and the mind of a man was given to it. And behold, another beast, a second one, like a bear. It was raised up on one side; it had three ribs in its mouth between its teeth; and it was told, ‘Arise, devour much flesh!’ ” (Dn. 7:1–5)

  Penitents emerged, battering themselves in the hopes that whatever punishment they dealt to their own bodies God would not desire to bestow on them. A quitting pope could become a humiliation for the Church. Or, worse, some believed that it was like spitting in the face of God.

  How could a pope relinquish something so precious and divinely appointed as the very “keys of heaven”? The eighth-century pope Adrian I had stated the importance of the papal office as follows: “The Lord set him who bears the keys of the kingdom of heaven as chief over all and by him is he honored with this privilege, by which the keys of the kingdom of heaven are entrusted to him. He, therefore, that was preferred with so exalted an honor was thought worthy to confess that faith on which the Church of Christ is founded.… And that power of authority, which he received from the Lord God our Savior, he too bestowed and delivered by divine command to the pontiffs, his successors.”3 Would Celestine throw this away, like casting scraps to the dogs?