All created life was subject to the pope. And the pope was in turn subject to no one but Christ.
These notions endured into the thirteenth century. When Peter was a young leader of hermits on Mount Morrone, Innocent IV (1243–54) also took up Bernard of Clairvaux’s metaphor and instructed the use of the temporal sword in all manner of ways, showing that there was no distinction between the spiritual and temporal realms of his authority. He appointed an administrator of Portugal, granting kingdoms to princes just as emperors might do. He took sides with King Henry III of England, contrary to the wishes of the bishops of that land. He even sent ambassadors to the Muslim Mongols, telling them that as Christ’s vicar it was within his power to punish them if they continued to break the Ten Commandments.
Exercising power often turned into abusing power. In 1282, for example, only a dozen years before Celestine V was elected, Pope Martin IV excommunicated the entire island of Sicily as punishment for their revolt. Today a single papal excommunication can make headlines around the world, and the reasons are examined and debated on all sides. Imagine today: The pope excommunicates the inhabitants of … Scotland! But in the Middle Ages a pope was much more than a spiritual figure. He was more than a man with political influence. He was more than a king. He was, in effect, God on earth. It was a position that Boniface relished.
With Unam Sanctum Boniface argued that both the spiritual and temporal swords were in his power. Expanding on the famous analogy of Bernard of Clairvaux, Boniface wrote: “[T]he one is exercised for the church, the other by the church, the one by the hand of the priest, the other by the hand of kings and soldiers, though at the will and suffrance of the priest. One sword ought to be under the other and the temporal authority subject to the spiritual power.”14
Within a few years of the death of Boniface VIII in 1303, the city of Rome was being lamented as the capital of an empire that once was, and the papacy was in retreat to the South of France. Pope Benedict XI then ruled for less than a year, dying in 1304, most likely murdered. Pope Clement V was elected in 1305 and in 1309 began what is known as the Avignon papacy. After this Frenchman fled Italy for the next sixty-seven years popes were dominated by French politicians and noblemen, ruling entirely from Avignon. Seven consecutive popes ruled from southern France rather than from Rome:
• Clement V, 1305–14 (Raymond Bertrand of Got)
• John XXII, 1316–34 (Jacques d’Euse)
• Benedict XII, 1334–42 (Jacques Fournier)
• Clement VI, 1342–52 (Pierre Roger)
• Innocent VI, 1352–62 (Etienne Aubert)
• Urban V, 1362–70 (Guillaume Grimoard)
• Gregory XI, 1370–78 (Pierre Roger of Beaufort)
The last French pope in history to be recognized by the Church (there were antipopes after this), was Gregory XI, who died on March 27, 1378.
Following on the heels of the Avignon papacy was the Great Papal Schism of 1378–1415, when at least two men at once claimed to be pope, further undermining the prospects for a consolidated Church with temporal or spiritual authority. Birgitta Gudmarsson, the famous and wealthy widow with eight children who founded a religious order and experienced visions of Christ, known to history as Saint Bridget of Sweden, tells us a lot about what happened during these exile years. She was in Rome doing penance for the failures of Christendom, urging anyone who would listen that the pope must come home. The Church was in ruin and in need of saving. Throughout her Liber Celestis (Book of Heaven) Bridget laments like a Hebrew prophet the lost glory of the city of Rome:
I see with my own eyes that there are many churches where the bodies of blessed saints lie in rest. Some of these buildings have been enlarged, but the hearts of the men who administer them are away from God.
Rome, Rome, your walls are broken and your gates are unguarded! Your sacred vessels have been sold and your wine, sacrifices, and incense have all been wasted. No sweetness remains in your holy places.
Now I can speak to Rome as the prophet once spoke to Jerusalem—where people used to live in righteousness and where princes loved peace. But now Rome has turned the color of rust. Its princes are murderers. Romans, your days are numbered; you should be mourning rather than rejoicing.15
This prophetic and determined woman was right: the century after Celestine V was disastrous for the faithful, and the Church was in shambles. While Boniface VIII was still in power, Jacopone of Todi poignantly wrote:
Where are the Fathers, once filled with faith?
Where are the Prophets, full of hope and praise?
Where are the Apostles, filled with zeal?
Where are the Martyrs, full of strength?
Not one comes near.
All of these events—the popes’ claims of power and spiritual authority, the fleeing of successive popes to Avignon, counter-popes and antipopes, the second great schism of Christianity, and eventually, what became the Reformation—fell hard on the heels of what happened in 1294–96. One wonders if Celestine could have reformed the Church and put it on a different course from the one it would follow. He saw the problems clearly enough, but his decision not to act sent the papacy and the Catholic Church in these unfortunate directions.
20
IS SAINT ENOUGH?
One Sunday morning when Peter Morrone was a young hermit, one of his spiritual brothers had a vision. An angel appeared to him and said, “Have you noticed in the oratory where all of you pray, how the lamp moves back and forth in the air without anyone touching it? This is a sign that God is with you.” From that moment on, Peter’s Autobiography says, all of the hermits in that place were witness to this wonder, and there remained no question about the divine presence in their midst.
Not long afterward, on a Sunday evening, as the hermits were about to rise in the middle of the night to pray vigils, the devil grabbed four of them in such a way, the Autobiography says, that they cried out for help. One of them lifted his hands to the sky in fear and all who saw him witnessed that his fingers were twisted and deformed. The holy men were scared out of their wits. Then Peter (who describes himself humbly as “the brother who was at that time still in his cell”) heard what was happening and went to see it firsthand. Without hesitation Peter told the others, “Whoever is able, keep praying!” By that next morning, prayer had overcome the evil spirits and they were gone from that place.
This was the work of Peter Morrone’s entire life: to keep praying despite whatever happened. In the century after Peter’s death, Petrarch would defend Peter’s decision to abdicate as evidence that he understood his most important calling of all—to be a contemplative:
Renouncing the papacy was an awful burden, he anxiously returned to his previous way of solitude. It was as if he’d freed himself from the clutches of an enemy. One could attribute this to cowardice, but seeing what were his true gifts, I see it another way. I praise him for making himself once again most useful to the world.1
Petrarch praises Peter for leaving the Holy See behind in order to do what he did best. The essential work of a contemplative monk is to pray for the world—to offer up to God, with the utmost attention and persistence, what the rest of us do not bother to offer. It has always been a comfort to Christians to know that men such as Peter are praying for them, even when they do not or cannot pray for themselves.
Is this what we are to make of the life and legacy of Peter Morrone-cum-Celestine V?
There is a miniature painting, a manuscript illumination housed in the Vatican Libraries, depicting James Stefaneschi interviewing the retired Celestine. In the simple, arresting image, James the historian sits at a scribe’s desk with pen in hand before a bearded and slightly confused-looking Celestine, who is peeking out of the small window of his hermitage of Onofrio. The sense is that no one will ever quite know the essence or heart of that essentially very private man.2
In Catholic history, this tale ends in heavenly glory. A Catholic believes that he or she will one day know the truth of all things in
the life to come. Saints know this more quickly than others. Less than a decade after Peter’s death, Pope Clement V instructed the archbishop of Naples to begin a formal inquiry into Peter’s sanctity. More than three hundred witnesses appeared before the religious court that was assembled in 1307, representing all walks of late-medieval society, testifying to his character, his witness, and the miraculous nature of Peter’s life.3 The austerities of his life were testified to. Nineteen miracles were presented by witnesses who had prayed to Peter for help to cure their illnesses, and fourteen of these were confirmed as irrefutable evidence, or true miracles, since the diseases were otherwise known to be incurable.4
It is rare that a saint’s reputation is fixed before a century has gone by since his death, and in Peter’s case there were competing claims and visions about his martyrdom, resignation, piety, and incompetence. All of this played out during the hearings, and on May 5, 1313, Clement V declared that God had made Peter a saint. The pope preached a homily that day on a short text from the prophet Isaiah: “Shout, and sing for joy, O inhabitant of Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel” (Is. 12:6). Peter Morrone was henceforward to be known as Saint Pope Celestine V and his relics would be permanently housed in the church in L’Aquila.
Alban Butler begins his entry for May 19, the traditional feast day for Saint Pope Celestine V, with this somewhat shocking statement: “In all papal history no figure is more pathetic than that of Peter di Morone.”5 How odd that seems by this time in our story. What happened to Peter was the stuff of pathos, but was he pathetic? It was Edward Gibbon who said, “The pathetic almost always consists in the detail of little events.” It is true that many of the details of the last two years of Celestine’s life were miserable, eliciting pity, but the full meaning of his life, his motivations and decisions, amounts to much more than that. Still, two and a half centuries would go by before the world would see another pope raised to the ranks of the saints (Pius V), and no pope has ever taken the name Celestine, since.
Peter’s Autobiography ends when he was only about thirty years old. What does it mean that he left no record of his doings or feelings beyond that time? It is as if nothing very important happened in Peter’s life once he found his way from the monastery to the mountains. Perhaps in the hermit’s mind that was true. A fierce and independent character, he always valued remote locations as spiritual teachers more than wise elders. He loved his life as a religious man, and he embraced the austerities of eremitism with gusto. And yet he was no simple hermit. Peter had a conflicting relationship with power and position; he had shown an interest in both as a younger man, and then in later life a lack of understanding of both. Lacking a subtle mind, he didn’t trouble himself or his followers with theological or spiritual controversies. This tendency worked in his favor while he was a hermit, but it worked against him in the papacy. While he served as pope, the cardinals and curia must have been both baffled and threatened by how Peter often opted for an evangelical purity that they viewed as too simple.
It is intriguing that a monk who valued humility and privacy would come to sit on the throne of Saint Peter at all—a throne that came with both the keys to heaven and a sword to hold over the heads of all the inhabitants on earth. As Frederick Rolfe once riffed about the character of late-medieval churchmen, “Now we pretend to be immaculate, then they bragged of being vile.” But this angelic pope was cut from a different cloth. To illustrate the point, playwright Peter Barnes has Celestine innocently say to one of his cardinals, “What has Christ’s Church to do with monies and taxes?”
“Everything, Your Holiness. Everything,” the cardinal responds.6
A Saint of Paradoxes
The traditional way of understanding all of this is to say that Peter was a naïve saint: a man who couldn’t function in a world of scheming and sin because of his otherworldly holiness. This sentiment is expressed again and again in the late-medieval chronicles and stories about him. If Shakespeare had written a tragedy about Celestine, naïveté would have been his fatal character flaw. If an opera were written about him, Celestine’s character would sing dramatic arias about his devotion to God without noticing the powerful men scheming in the dark recesses on stage behind him. Eamon Duffy represents this common interpretation when he refers simply to “the saintly but hopeless monk-hermit Celestine V.”7
King Solomon is supposed to have said, “Like a lame man’s legs, which hang useless, is a proverb in the mouth of fools” (Prv. 26:7). In other words, just as the legs of a disabled man might be of no use to him, so is wisdom of no use to a fool. Peter was the Don Quixote sort of fool: one who either doesn’t realize his buffoonery or acts the jester in order to make a deeper point. But which was it? He donned simple clothing. He rode an ass to his coronation. He insisted on eating almost nothing while pope—“munching a dry loaf … declaring it the only savory food”8—and acted simply. He behaved in ways that were unlike any pope before or after him. During his brief papal sojourn, he safeguarded the rights of the Spiritual Franciscans who were being physically threatened by leaders of their order and were, themselves, accused of being fools. He refused to fight, to play the political games that his contemporaries expected of him. As a scholar of the Franciscan movement has summarized it, “The reign of this holy but most inefficient of Popes was a short and unhappy one, and his successors were men of a very different stamp.”9 But was Peter foolish?
The hagiographers will say he didn’t know any better—that’s the sort of fool that Peter was. This “innocent as doves” explanation is one way of looking at his failures. Some historians put it most critically: “The fact was that, for all his piety and reputation for holiness, the new pope was hopelessly naïve, almost ridiculously incompetent, and rather ill educated—a dangerous combination in those troubled times.”10
In the end, looking at the full breadth of his life, both of these interpretations miss the mark. There is more to the pope who quit than saintliness and foolish ineptitude. Peter had as much charisma as he possessed piety, and he was bold and perhaps arrogant enough to be a medieval pope. He’d been an able organizer and charismatic leader. He clearly had the ability to stir souls by the power of his personal presence. His ascetic qualities were unflaggingly inspiring to those who were drawn to him, wanting also to renounce a confusing and dispirited worldly existence for the Kingdom of Heaven. By most accounts, “[Peter Morrone] had a remarkable record as the creator of a congregation of hermits within the Benedictine order.”11 Why then did this accomplished man become an incredibly incompetent pope? “His reign was an absurdity; under the thumb of Charles … a few months reduced the Curia to chaos,” quips Edward Armstrong in The Cambridge Medieval History.12
I believe that the solution to this puzzle is not to be found in the theories of foolishness or holy naïveté. Instead, it is hinted at in this comment from contemporary British writer A. N. Wilson: “I bend my knee to the unwilling holy man who knew there was no meeting place between the pursuit of power and the worship of God.”13
Peter clearly wasn’t simple. He wasn’t a mountaintop hermit without regard for public opinion. “Ignorant of the intricacies of papal business, too old and dreamy to shape a resolute policy, he longed for solitude,” as one historian has put it.14 But his story isn’t that easy either. It’s not that he was so adept at mystical spiritual practices that a taste for power and influence had been driven from him. That’s not what comes through most clearly in the stories from those days.
Perhaps he found himself unable to function, psychologically and spiritually, in the midst of the power plays of the loggia and the court. He’d succeeded brilliantly in organizing and leading a monastic order of his own founding, in a situation where he was the only minister-general, but when forced to engage with others holding alternative views, he folded. He became spineless. Was he able to lead only when he would lead completely unchallenged?
Perhaps, but in all of the mess of those fifteen weeks, it is intriguing to consi
der an alternative possibility. Was Celestine essentially an obscurantist? Perhaps he wasn’t inept so much as he was ruling from a stance of passive protest. Shocked to discover what it meant to be holy father, he may have quietly resolved at some point simply not to do it. Perhaps he believed himself to be the head of an ecclesiastical bureaucracy that he didn’t acknowledge as entirely legitimate as it was structured. This theory would explain many of his actions in office and would also fit the pattern of where he had come from. But ultimately the evidence also points to something that Dante said long ago.
A Moral Failing
Perhaps it was once possible to be a heavenly saint without being a human one. To have spiritual qualities without using them to respond to the world one is confronted with. We wouldn’t allow this contradiction to stand today. And not everyone did then either. For his moral failures, Dante assigned Peter to milling around the vestibule of the Inferno for eternity:
And after it there came so long a train
Of people, that I ne’er would have believed
That ever Death so many had undone.
When some among them I had recognised,
I looked, and I beheld the shade of him
The Pope Who Quit Page 19
