CHURCH REFORM MOVEMENT IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE (476-1500 AD)

REFORM OF THE CHURCH IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE

In the early middle ages, the best monasteries had been the citadels of good Christian living centers of leaning. Between the 7th and 9th centuries, religious houses in Italy, France and England copied manuscripts, maintained schools and set high standards of monastic observances. Charlemagne, one of the Frankish/ Carolingian rulers of that period had encouraged and supported these monastic activities.
But, in the ninth and tenth centuries, Western Europe was disturbed by a wave of invasions by several non-Christian peoples---one old enemy, the Muslims, and two new ones the Magyars and the Vikings. They caused havoc with many monastic establishments by attacking and ransacking them. Some communities fled and dispersed.  Although battered by these onslaughts, Christian Europe hung on and, with the exception of the Muslims, wound up assimilating its assailants into Christian European civilization. In this period of political disorder, the Carolingian empire was disintegrated and many religious houses fell under the control and domination of local feudal lords.  Monasteries underwent a process of “privatization” as the local feudal lords took for themselves the lands and goods of monasteries, spending monastic revenues and selling monastic offices. Some became dumping grounds for aristocratic younger sons who entered the monastery without ever taking vows. Other monasteries had troops of knights, some even had lay abbots. These monastic cultures were in contrast with what Saint Benedict outlined in his Rule for monasteries. So, temporal powers all over Europe dominated the monasteries. The level of spiritual observance and intellectual activity declined. 

Since the eighth century, the popes of the Catholic Church had reigned supreme over the affairs of the church. They had also come to exercise control over the territories in central Italy known as the Papal States; this kept the popes involved in political matters, often at the expense of their spiritual obligations. At the same time, the church became increasingly entangled in the evolving lord-vassal (feudal ) relationships. Kings, as well as the more powerful feudal lords, began to appoint bishops, and protect churches.  High officials of the church, such as bishops and abbots, came to hold their offices as fiefs from nobles. As vassals, they were obliged to carry out the usual duties, including military service. Of course, lords assumed the right to choose their vassals, even when those vassals included bishops and abbots. Because lords often selected their vassals from other noble families for political reasons, these bishops and abbots were often worldly figures who cared little about their spiritual responsibilities. Lay control over the church was often the result (Lay investiture)

In the 10th century, the papacy provided little leadership to the Christian peoples of Western Europe. Popes were appointed to advance the political interest of their families not because of their special spiritual qualification.  The office of the pope including its spiritual powers and influence were frequently bought and sold, which simultaneously weakened the pope's religious prestige and moral authority (Simony). At the local parish level, there many married priests. Though the Roman church had always encouraged clerical celibacy majority of the priests were married and living with women. Such priests were called “Nicolaites”.

Priests, who back- slid into clerical marriage, were often incorporated into the great feudal clans. These priests focused less on the religion than on using church property to support their family and feudal lord. A similar process affected monasteries. Based on the St. Benedict's rule, monasteries were independent of each other. Thus, monastic discipline depended on individual abbots. When these abbots became agents of powerful lords, political as opposed to spiritual criteria came to dominate their selection. At times, secular feudal lords acted as monasteries' titular abbots. Under such conditions, clerical positions could be viewed as revenue-producing positions. This opened the way to simony, the auctioning of church posts to the highest, and most often least qualified bidder.

 
Church reform began at the grass-roots level in which masses of commoners protesting the violence of the age and the corruption of the churches by the warlords. The attack on the churches and the oppression of the poor, they proclaimed, was an offense against God and nature. Outraged by what they saw happening at all levels, and anguished over doubts about the efficacy of the corrupted clergy’s sacraments, they demanded change in large, though unorganized, numbers protesting made possible by the clustering of the rural populace under manorialism. Rural workers placed themselves under baronial lords’ care and offered their labor in return for protection, but they demanded that the lords release their stranglehold on the churches. Their ‘Peace of God’ rallies, as they became known, were the first mass peace movement in western history, and the workers regarded the ‘freedom of the church’ (libertas ecclesie) an essential component of that peace.

Monastic Reform (900-1050)
 

The first reform movement of the Church emerged of the tenth century Europe that of the Cluny in Burgundy. Cluny was a Benedictine house established by William the pious, duke of Acquittance in 910.

The house of Cluny was established with two important constitutional innovations:
In his charter of endowment, Duke William declared that Cluny was to enjoy complete independence from all feudal or secular lordship/local noble families or local bishops. The new monastery was to be subordinated only to the authority and protection of the pope or papacy. 

The second was that it undertook the reform or foundation of a large number of daughter monasteries. Whereas all the former Benedictine houses had been independent and equal Cluny established a network of dependent Cluniac houses across Europe, all of which remained subordinate to the mother house at Cluny. 

This monastery and its foundation of charter came to exert vast religious influence and entirely free from the control of local secular or ecclesiastical powers. The first two abbots of Cluny Berno and Odo/Ado set very high standards of religious behavior. They stressed strict observance of the Rule of Saint Benedict, the development of a personal spiritual life led by the individual monk and the importance of liturgy. Around the 11th century, after so many monasteries had been taken out of the control of secular authorities, the leaders of the monastic reform movement started to lobby for the reform of the clerical hierarchy as well.  They also stood for clerical celibacy and the suppression of Simony (the sale of Church Offices). The entire program was directed towards depriving secular powers of their ability to dictate appointments of bishops, abbots, and priest and towards making the clerical estate as pure and as distinct from the secular one as possible. 

Cluniac influence was strongest in France and Italy where the royal sponsored monastic reforms appeared impossible as a result of the absence of effective kingship. So, in this process the pious nobles usually took the lead in promoting monastic orders. However, in Germany and in England, monastic reform emerged during the 10th and 11th centuries with a royal support from a Christian king, who followed Cluniac example of Benedictine tradition.  By the start of the eleventh century, Cluny governed a network of several dozen monasteries, both male and female, and the Cluniac abbot was the single most powerful figure in the Latin Church.

The Papal Reform Movement:

Some scholars believe that the monastic revival movement spreading from Cluny influenced reform of Roman Papacy and eventually the entire Christian Church. Pope Gregory VII who carried the ideals of reform to extreme length had spent sometimes at Cluny. And the man who consolidated the reform movement and strengthened the medieval papal monarch Pope Urban I had been a monk at Cluny. So, the broad goals of the Cluniac movement and those of the Roman papacy were the same.

Yet for a time the Holy Roman Emperors assisted in the reform of the Church. Henry II the Saint, did much to improve the monasteries and cooperated on several occasions with the pope, who in 1018 held a council at Pavia which forbade the marriage of the clergy. The next emperor, Conrad II, was absorbed in politics and gave the Church little thought. Meanwhile the Papacy fell again under the control of a powerful Roman family.

In Rome, the most powerful bishopric of all remained resolutely unreformed until 1046, when the German emperor Henry III deposed three rival Roman nobles who claimed to be pope and appointed in their place his own relative, a monk who adopted the name Leo IX (r. 1049–54).  Leo IX was a German monastic reformer and most of his supporters were Germans and Italians.  Leo IX is generally regarded as the first “reformed” pope. He certainly was a charismatic and talented figure. Leo recognized two things from the very start: first, that the papacy could not be properly reformed so long as it remained mired in Roman factional politics; and second, that the papacy needed to be seen by the faithful in order to secure the gains of the reform. Leo and his supporters took control of the papal court and began to promulgate decrees against simony and clerical marriage. They then took steps to enforce these decrees by traveling throughout the Continent, disciplining and removing from office clerics deemed guilty of simony.

Everywhere he went, Leo staged large-scale Masses, pronounced Peace and Truce decrees, and offered all the faithful the opportunity to air grievances about their local churches and ecclesiastical leaders. All clergy tainted to any degree with simony, he declared, could remain in office if they publicly confessed their faults and swore to dedicate themselves to the reformed Church. These acts of contrition and forgiveness were performed in front of the crowds, which served two purposes: first, the people themselves got to hear the confessions of their clergy, and second, the pope got the pleasure of having the faithful see the priests, bishops, and archbishops kneeling before Leo himself in order to be reconciled to the Church and restored in office. The papacy, in other words, used the reform celebration itself as a means for establishing papal authority over the episcopacy and the ‘collection of 74 titles’ which laid emphasis on papal authority was compiled. Thus Leo's reforming efforts reinforced a hierarchical organization in which priest obeyed bishops and bishops obeyed the pope not only as a spiritual leader but as legal and jurisdictional leader of the entire Christian Church.  Henceforth, everyone understood that the bishops served as the legitimate leaders of the Church because the Holy Father himself had publicly bestowed their office upon them. The papacy now stood at the head of a new hierarchy and determined its legitimacy.

Leo IX’s pontificate marked a turning point for the Church. His last significant achievement was the creation of the College of Cardinals. Recognizing that the Church was intellectually ill-equipped to deal with all the issues confronting it, Leo decided to create a special body of advisors to the papacy theologians, lawyers, philosophers, historians, scientists, and diplomats who could lend expert counsel. These figures became the College of Cardinals. They figured prominently in the effort to resolve many of the long-pressing doctrinal issues that had never been wholly settled within the Church.

After Leo, reform movement was continued by Pope Nicholas II(1059-–1061).  In 1059, a synod at Rome made two decisions that started to turn the reform movement into a revolution.  Under Pope Nicholas's leadership the council condemned the practice of lay investiture that is, the tradition by which secular rulers installed all clergy in their offices. The ritual by which a lay prince “invested” a priest or bishop with the insignia of his office suggested that the ecclesiastical authority was subordinate to the secular, and therefore the practice now stood condemned. During a short reign of Nicholas, a council held in Rome in 1059 produced a momentous decision i.e. a new method for electing the pope known as the Papal Election Decree (1059). The decree asserted that henceforth and for all eternity the legitimate pontiff of the Holy Catholic Church was to be freely elected to the position by the College of Cardinals. This decree declared the papacy's independence from the imperial power. Emperors had dominated the Church ever since Constantine, the synod declared, and in so doing planted the seed of corruption that took seven centuries to root out. This took the election of the pope out of the hands of the Roman mob and influential families, but also out of the control of the emperor. When the office of the pope was vacant, the cardinals were responsible for governing the church.

These actions directly challenged state authority, especially that of the Germans who held the imperial title. Each side prepared for the inevitable clash by courting intellectual, diplomatic, and military support. The reformist emperor Henry III had died in 1056; his infant son Henry IV (1056–-1106) inherited the imperial title but could do no more than watch his authority be undermined until he reached adulthood.

Gregorian Revolution:
 
The reform of Papacy took a new dimension when the new College of Cardinals selected as pope, a zealous reformer, Hildebrand a Cluniac monk of Tuscan origins who had been a protégé of Leo IX. Hildebrand took the name Gregory VII (1073-1085). After him the Papal reform movement of the  11th century was called the Gregorian Reform Movement. Though reform had already began long before Gregory's pontificate, his reign did, however inaugurated radical or revolutionary phase that had important social and political consequences. 

The pontificate of Gregory was coincided with Henry IV’s reaching adulthood and taking over control of the government. Henry was kept busy for two years putting down rebellions by various princes, during which time he and Gregory maintained cordial though tenuous relations. 

Initially, pope and emperor treated one another with deference. Henry IV’s position in Germany had been weakened by his wars with the Saxon nobility, and he needed papal backing to restore his authority. In his letters to the new pope, he therefore blamed the advisers of his youth for the troubles that had arisen between his own court and that of Rome, and he promised to make amends. 

Gregory VII was determined to enforce strictly the decrees against marriage of the clergy, simony, and lay investiture, which his predecessors had already promulgated. He also regarded the pope as entrusted by God with supreme oversight and control of all human society; he believed himself to be above kings, and empowered to issue orders to them and to punish them if they did not obey. He thought the State a worldly institution built up by sinful men who often were violent and unjust, whereas the Church was a divine foundation. Consequently the pope should correct erring or incompetent monarchs. Gregory was not content to try to free the Church from the control of feudal lords; he also attempted to bring various European states into feudal subjection to the Papacy. Corsica and Sardinia he regarded as his fiefs; the Norman ruler of southern Italy had become the vassal of the pope in 1059; and Gregory endeavored to make the rulers of Spain, England, Hungary, and Denmark his vassals. This on the other hand, illustrates how universal were feudal conceptions, that even a pope who tried to free the Church from feudalism could not free his own mind or government from feudal methods.

Gregory is distinguished by the violent and extreme methods which he did not hesitate to adopt in the effort to enforce his ideals. In order to root out the married clergy, he deprived them of their revenues, forbade the laity to recognize them any longer as priests, and even required their parishioners to rise against them and drive them out. He not only excommunicated worldly rulers with whom he had differences, but deposed them and encouraged their vassals and subjects to revolt, thus inciting sedition and civil war.

 The pontificate of Gregory was full of struggles, but the chief conflict was with the young emperor, Henry IV. Henry deeply resented the papacies actions during his minority of pressing for more radical reform of the churches and encouraging the princes to undermine imperial power, while Gregory feared that it was only a matter of time before Henry would attempt to attack the crowning achievements of the reform by contesting papal independence from the emperor. In 1075 Henry finished dealing with his rebels and prepared to confront Rome, and Gregory responded with a preemptive strike that surprised everyone, including the most ardent pro-reform enthusiasts. Gregory penned a declaration called the Dictatus Papae (“Dictates of the Pope”) in that year. It consisted of a list of twenty-seven single sentence statements about papal power. It asserts that the pope never errs; that he is above criticism, supreme over bishops and even a church council; supreme also over the State, the law, and literature. It is said that the Dictates triggered an angry reaction from Henry, who viewed them as an unprecedented open attack on imperial rights.

Relations between papacy and empire were riven by a conflict that would permanently alter the relationship between spiritual and temporal leaders in Western Europe. Superficially, the issue that divided Gregory and Henry was that of investiture, the right to appoint bishops and to equip them with the trappings of office (or the selection and appointment of Church officials by secular authority). Since the time of the Carolingians, this had been the right and sanction of the emperor as it was in Byzantium. But to Gregory, this practice smacked of simony, since a lay lord would obviously choose bishops who would be politically useful to him, regardless of their spiritual qualifications.

Ecclesiastical opposition to lay investiture was not new in the 11th century. It too had been part of Church theory for centuries. But Gregory's attempt to put into practice was a radical departure from tradition. Since feudal monarchs depended in churchmen for the operation of their governments, Gregory's program seemed to spell disaster for stable royal administration. It provoked terrible crisis. In February, 1075, Pope Gregory held a council at Rome. It published decrees not only against Nicolaism and Simony, but also against lay investiture. Clerics who accepted investiture from laymen were to be deposed and laymen who invested clerics were to be excommunicated. Since most Europeans favoured Gregory's moral reform, he believed that excommunication would compel rulers to abide by his changes. 

Immediately however, Henry IV protested and regarded Gregory VII as a fanatic who trampled on custom, meddled in German state affairs, and challenged legitimate rulers established by God, thereby threatening to subordinate kingship to the papacy. When Henry IV proceeded to invest the new archbishop of Milan, Gregory reminded him that, as the successor of Saint Peter and the representative of Christ on earth, he himself had the power to save or damn all souls. To drive the point home, Gregory excommunicated a number of Henry's advisers, including several of the bishops who had participated in the investiture at Milan. Henry thereupon renounced his obedience to Gregory, calling on him to resign. Gregory responded by excommunicating Henry, along with his supporters and suspended him from kingship in 1076.

In January 1077, Henry was forced to make humiliating public submission to Pope Gregory at Canossa in the Italian Alps. So, the pope granted absolutism and readmitted the emperor to the Christian community. Henry's trip to Canossa is often regarded as the most dramatic incident in the high middle ages. Some historians claimed that it marked the peak of papal power because the most powerful ruler in Europe had bowed before the pope. 

 Henry regained the kingship and used his restored powers to crush his Saxon opponents and eventually to drive Gregory himself from Rome. In 1085, the aged pope died in exile in southern Italy. By then, however, he had established the principles on which papal governance would be based for the remainder of the Middle Ages.

With lay investiture, the ostensible issue, the conflict between the papacy and the successors of Henry IV continued into the  12th century. Finally in1122, during the reign of Henry V  the conflict over investiture was provisionally resolved at a conference held at Worms by compromise, which was different form what Gregory and Henry IV had imagined. Its terms declared that Bishops were to be chosen according to Canon law-that is by the clergy in the presence of the presence of the emperor or his delegates. The emperor surrendered to rights of investing the Bishops. In practice, then, the rulers of Europe retained a great deal of influence over ecclesiastical appointments. But they also had to acknowledge that bishops were now part of a clerical hierarchy headed by the pope, and that they were supposed to be loyal to the Church in Rome and not to the ruler of the region in which they lived.

The ultimate consequence of the investiture conflict was to create a long lasting conceptual distinction between religion and politics in Western Europe and to identify the Church with religious authority and the state with political authority. But the concordat of worms resolved papal-imperial conflict by distinguishing between the temporal power of kings and the spiritual power of the clergy. Papal power was enhanced and neither side won a clear victory. The Concordat of Worms was a compromise, but the investiture conflict as a whole was a victory for the papacy. It strengthened the papacy's claim to jurisdictional supremacy over the entire clerical hierarchy.

The Church reform movement involved the two phases, which sought to cleanse the church from malpractice and increase papal primacy within the secular world. These reforms impacted all clerical states, as the clergy in those countries were reformed and becoming more strict and subject to the pope and God.