The Pope Who Quit
Page 20
Who made through cowardice the great refusal.15
This “great refusal” (gran rifiuto) was Dante’s way of expressing Peter’s unforgiveable sin: cowardice. He didn’t even have to name Peter in that passage since his readers knew what had happened. The abdication was fresh in their memories.
Still, there are other theories about why Dante didn’t explicitly name Peter. Some believe he intended Pontius Pilate, who, rather than following his own conscience, showed cowardice by releasing Christ into the hands of those who would crucify him. Others have guessed that Dante meant Flavius Claudius Julianus Augustus, who became known as Julian the Apostate. In any case, none of these characters is great company. The Dante Encyclopedia probably puts it best when it suggests that not naming the object of his contempt was precisely Dante’s intent—it was yet another way to emphasize what he believed to be Peter’s complete lack of character.16 No one likes a quitter. As one historian has pithily phrased it, this means that Peter’s entire papacy was “an act of pusillanimous irresponsibility.”17
Could It Happen Today?
The angelic pope responded to power in the only ways he knew how. He retreated and prayed. But that wasn’t enough.
The New York Times ran a story in April 2010 that began this way: “He is elected for life, by a group of elderly men infused with the will of God. People address him as Holy Father, not Mr. President. After bishop of Rome, his second title is vicar of Jesus Christ. Can a man like this quit his job?” The occasion for the story was to reflect on the possibility that the current Pope Benedict XVI could possibly abdicate.18 It’s not likely that he ever will. Nevertheless, some of Benedict XVI’s most recent predecessors were rumored to have considered stepping down.
Pope Paul VI is the only sitting pontiff ever to visit Celestine’s Fumone castle; he did so on September 1, 1966, and delivered a speech in which he showed admiration for the angelic pope. The precise reasons for this visit were never fully explained, although at the same time the sixty-nine-year-old pope urged all priests to consider retiring when they turn seventy-five, for the sake of the Church. Some in the media speculated that Paul VI might have been considering an abdication himself.19 Six years later his seventy-fifth birthday would come and go. Paul VI died in office in 1978.
Twenty years after the suggestion of Paul VI’s considerations, the hints of Pope John Paul II’s possible abdication began around the issue of his spending too little time focusing on administrative issues, leaving the running of the Vatican to others. Looking back, one observer has reflected: “While he lost nothing of his strength and power, the glory of his office, Wojtyla seemed at times almost sad about his own elevated position, suggesting that his real life was the one he spent alone in prayer and contemplation, the one we had seen when he sat without moving, his face covered. He was offering this rich private life of his to the crowd as the life they could have if they followed him.”20 This sounds almost precisely like the papacy of Celestine V. How intriguing it is to imagine our hermit in the light of this most recent and famous of papal examples. John Paul II’s biographer characterizes what happened during his papacy by saying, “[H]e was reinventing the papacy as an office of evangelical witness rather than bureaucratic management.”21
There are many differences between the two papacies, and the successes of John Paul II are surely much more numerous than were the failures of Celestine V. However, the most profound difference of all is that Celestine lived and ruled long before the digital and television age. There could be no positive effect of a profound personal, spiritual witness in a pope in 1294 that could compare to the effect today, when millions of faithful are able to witness images of piety in their holy father every day, live, streaming on the Internet or broadcast on television. A pope had no hope of saving the world through piety alone seven hundred years ago.
Being too good and holy to put his energy into acquiring the political savvy necessary to a medieval pontiff simply made Celestine appear inept. He was “pious but weak and incapable,” as one historian has written.22
Similar arguments have been recently made about Pope Benedict XVI. Incidents such as the 2006 Regensburg University speech, when he referred to Islam as “evil and inhuman,” and in 2010 as he failed to manage another growing sexual abuse scandal, have led some to say that a lack of administrative and diplomatic skills—the same sort of ineptitude shown by Celestine V—might be grounds for a twenty-first-century pope to resign.
Could it happen today? On a Sunday in April 2010, a parish priest in Massachusetts became the first authority from within the Catholic Church to suggest that this pope should quit. The story ran on the front page of The Boston Globe, with Reverend James J. Scahill of East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, telling about how he had received a standing ovation at Mass that day. “The right thing is to be truthful, and if he is not up to dealing with this, then he should have the integrity to resign,” he said, summarizing his sermon from that day.23
Since that time it has become clear that Benedict XVI is willing to engage with the problems that the Church faces. He has never been, and will never be, a leader like Celestine V. Yet Benedict XVI has chosen to align his papacy with the memory of our hermit pope. As you may recall from earlier in this book, he laid his pallium on Celestine’s tomb in April 2009. Also consider this incredible paragraph from Benedict’s first homily at his Mass of inauguration exactly four years earlier:
One of the basic characteristics of a shepherd must be to love the people entrusted to him, even as he loves Christ whom he serves. “Feed my sheep,” says Christ to Peter, and now, at this moment, he says it to me as well. Feeding means loving, and loving also means being ready to suffer. Loving means giving the sheep what is truly good, the nourishment of God’s truth, of God’s word, the nourishment of his presence, which he gives us in the Blessed Sacrament. My dear friends—at this moment I can only say: pray for me, that I may learn to love the Lord more and more. Pray for me, that I may learn to love his flock more and more—in other words, you, the holy Church, each one of you and all of you together. Pray for me, that I may not flee for fear of the wolves.
It is impossible to read these words now—especially the last sentence—without recalling the life and death of Celestine V.
Italian historian Sergio Luzzatto has said, “Saints exist mainly to perform miracles.”24 And for those who pray to the saints, asking for help in some particular aspect of life, it’s never been quite clear what Saint Pope Celestine V is good for. Alban Butler long ago said that Celestine should be the saint of retirees: “Those who are destined by heaven to a retired life, in it become most eminently serviceable to the world, by proving excellent examples of innocence, and the perfect spirit of every Christian virtue, and by their prayers and continual pure homages of praise and thanksgivings to God, from which others may reap far more valuable benefits than from the labors of the learned or the bountiful alms of the rich.” The hermit pope has also been claimed as the patron saint of bookbinders, and of L’Aquila. None of these is very compelling.
Celestine V’s original coronation took place on August 28, 1294, and to this day each year on August 28 the holy doors of the Basilica of Santa Maria of Collemaggio are ceremoniously opened and pilgrims flood inside. Despite the fact that one of Boniface VIII’s first acts was to rescind what has come to be known as the Saint Celestine Pardon (the plenary indulgence he granted for those who come), the festivities are still broad and colorful. Celestine’s original bull is read out to the public and then publicly displayed until midday the following day. It is an occasion for festive celebration as well as some traditional confession and reconciliation between the devout and their priests. On at least those two days, thousands of people consider who this man was.
There is clearly more to this saint than retirement, bookbinding, or a small town in Italy.
Finally, the story of Celestine V warns us of the dangers of religious power: giving us some insight into how to know when it is being inappr
opriately wielded, and what to do to appropriately diminish it. Ignazio Silone was the first person to suggest as much in the introduction to his book The Story of a Humble Christian. He recounts saying something to that effect to a simple Italian peasant whom he met along the path toward the Onofrio hermitage on Mount Morrone. And then, “When the peasant finally understood the meaning … he was overcome with irrepressible hilarity,” Silone writes. “Afterwards, he said gravely: ‘Then he’s not a saint for us poor people; he’s for the priests.’ ”25 And perhaps that’s the truest statement of all.
In the end, no life may be easily understood. Does the cowardice of Celestine’s final years of life provide the best summary of who he was? I don’t believe so.
Peter was a man of paradoxes rather than a cookiecutter saint. When the entourage marched up Morrone to tell him of the papal election, perhaps the wisest instinct he’d ever had was the one that told him to flee. He should have run. It wasn’t that he did not know, or was unprepared for, the rigors of the corrupt late-medieval papacy. He knew better.
His sanest expectations were confirmed within weeks of ascending the chair of St. Peter, prompting him to make the decision that would save his soul—if not the Church. He quit. And for that single act, he showed himself to be enlightened, not naïve.26
NOTES
TIME LINE OF KEY EVENTS
1. In the Middle Ages and until 1939, L’Aquila was known simply as Aquila, but for purposes of clarity, the town is referred to by its current name throughout this book.
PROLOGUE
1. Despite the fact that seventy-five years ago, Maurice Powicke wrote the following overstatement: “Few episodes in medieval history are better known than the brief pontificate of Pope Celestine V in the year 1294.” Sir Maurice Powicke, The Christian Life in the Middle Ages: And Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935), 50.
2. Dante, Inferno, canto III, lines 58–60. All quotations from Dante’s Divine Comedy are taken from the legendary translation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
3. Anne MacDonell, Sons of Francis (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902), 318.
4. I am particularly indebted to Medieval Italy: Texts in Translation, ed. Katherine L. Jansen, Joanna Drell, and Frances Andrews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
INTRODUCTION
1. Monsignor Slawomir Oder with Saverio Gaeta, Why He Is a Saint: The Life and Faith of Pope John Paul II and the Case for Canonization (New York: Rizzoli, 2010). Oder made this announcement in January 2010 when the book was first published in Italian. The English translation was published in October 2010.
2. These public assemblies were outlawed by papal decree of Pope Clement VI in 1349.
3. Luke 9:58. All quotations from the Holy Bible are taken from the Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition.
4. Sophia Menache, Clement V (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 202.
CHAPTER 1
1. See Emma Dench, From Barbarians to New Men: Greek, Roman, and Modern Perceptions of Peoples of the Central Apennines (New York: Clarendon Press, 1995), 127.
2. Dench, From Barbarians to New Men, 111.
3. Consider the handwritten note that a young King Henry VIII addressed in French to his lover Anne Boleyn, pledging loyalty to her despite the fact that he was already married to Catherine of Aragon. With that letter, some historians believe, Henry committed himself to the course of action that would end his marriage and lead to England’s formal break with Rome and the Catholic Church. It is owned and housed today in the Vatican Museum.
4. Quoted in Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 6.
CHAPTER 2
1. Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, Second Edition (New York: Continuum, 2005), 192–93.
2. Eleven years after the siege that brought down Acre, only one small island off the Syrian coast remained in Christian hands, and then it too was lost. Centuries would go by before Christians would again travel freely to or reside in the Holy Land. Napoleon attempted an unsuccessful attack on Acre in 1799.
3. Peter Barnes, Sunsets and Glories (London: Methuen Drama, 1990), 1.1.2.
4. Quoted in Patricia Ranft, The Theology of Work: Peter Damian and the Medieval Religious Renewal Movement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 50.
5. T. S. R. Boase, Boniface VIII (Toronto: Macmillan, 1933), 29.
6. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince: A New Translation, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 46.
7. Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, Tertullian, and Hegesippus. See John-Peter Pham, Heirs of the Fisherman: Behind the Scenes of Papal Death and Succession (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 42.
8. Pham, Heirs of the Fisherman, 45–59.
9. See Frederick J. Baumgartner, Behind Locked Doors: A History of the Papal Elections (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 39–41.
10. It wasn’t until the Western Schism in 1378 that all papal elections would take place at what we now know as Vatican City. Only in the last century have they always taken place in the Sistine Chapel. Each elector of a conclave has to make a solemn oath that he will keep the secrets within those walls, and he makes a vow not to serve the interests of any nation or government other than the Church in his discernment and voting.
11. Giovanni Boccaccio describes such a scene—a similar summer of plague in Florence one generation later—in the introduction to his Decameron, colorfully painting the picture of what was probably happening during those summers of 1292–94: “Some say it descended on the human race through the influence of heavenly bodies. Others say it was a punishment of God’s righteous anger looking on our iniquitous ways.… The plague began in the early spring in a terrifying manner. It didn’t take the form it had assumed in the East, where if one began to bleed from the nose it was a sign of certain death. Here, its earliest symptom in men and women was the appearance of swellings in the groin or armpit, sometimes egg-shaped and other times the size of an apple.… Very few people ever recovered from it … and whenever those in suffering mixed with those who were unaffected, it rushed onward with the speed of fire spreading through dry wood or oil.… This led some people to callously say there was no way to remedy against a plague than to run from it—and without thinking of anyone but themselves, large numbers abandoned the city, their homes, relatives, and belongings, and headed for the countryside.” (My own translation. Compare to Giovanni Boccaccio; The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam [New York: Penguin Books, 1972], 50–53.)
CHAPTER 3
1. Frederick J. Baumgartner, Behind Locked Doors: A History of the Papal Elections (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 44.
2. Edward Armstrong, in The Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 7, Decline of Empire and Papacy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 4.
3. Sir Maurice Powicke, The Christian Life in the Middle Ages: And Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935), 50.
4. It was Philip the Fair and the Colonnas who would, sixteen years later, pressure Pope Clement V to canonize Celestine V, in part as a rebuke to the papacy of Boniface VIII.
5. This is my own rendering. A previous version in English can be found in G. G. Coulton, Life in the Middle Ages (New York: Macmillan, 1935), vol. 1, 235.
6. Quoted in Peter Hebblethwaite, The Year of Three Popes (New York: Collins, 1979), 56.
7. All quotations from John Paul II’s “Apostolic Constitution,” Universi Dominici Gregis, are taken from the English-language translation available on the Vatican’s website. Composing a document such as this was not in itself suggestive of anything; many popes throughout history have sought to bring the rules of conclaves and elections into a contemporary perspective.
8. It wasn’t until the end of the Great Schism (1378–1417), when two men simultaneously claimed to be pope, that elections were consistently held in Rome, and it wasn’t until the sixteenth centur
y that a strict conclave was consistently maintained during papal elections. Since the February 1878 election of Pope Leo XIII, every papal election has been decided by a two-thirds majority vote from within the safe, enclosed hall of the Sistine Chapel.
9. Instead of leaking anything, Cardinal John Joseph Carberry, archbishop of Saint Louis (USA), said at a press conference the day after the election of John Paul II: “I would like to tell you everything. It would thrill you. But I can’t.” Quoted in Hebblethwaite, The Year of Three Popes, 146.
CHAPTER 4
1. Norbert Ohler, The Medieval Traveller, trans. Caroline Hillier (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1995), 66.
2. For example, see Peter Herde, “Celestine V,” in Philippe Levillain, general editor, The Papacy: An Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 279–83.
3. T. S. R. Boase, Boniface VIII (Toronto: Macmillan, 1933), 37–38.
4. “Donation of Constantine,” The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1913).
CHAPTER 5
1. William Langland from Piers the Ploughman, quoted in Virginia Davis, “The Rule of Saint Paul the First Hermit,” in Monks, Hermits and the Ascetic Tradition, ed. W. J. Sheils (London: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 213.
2. Thomas Aquinas, in Albert and Thomas: Selected Writings, ed. Simon Tugwell (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1988), 559. Aquinas was also a strong advocate for the need of the state to aid human beings to find full happiness. He wrote: “It is … necessary for man to live in a multitude so that each one may assist his fellows, and different men may be occupied in seeking, by their reason, to make different discoveries—one, for example, in medicine, one in this and another in that.” (Quoted in Dino Bigongiari, Essays on Dante and Medieval Culture [New York: Griffin House, 2000], 106.)
3. Peter Damian Letters 151–180, trans. Owen J. Blum and Irven M. Resnick (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 181.