The ideal of guidance by the Holy Spirit was best described in 1978 by an Italian bishop in the days leading up to the conclave that elected John Paul I: “The real protagonist [in the room] is the Other, whose presence and involvement transform the event completely and make it a community act of the Church.”6 In 1294, although there was less of this sort of idealism, in the minds of the people the answer was unequivocally yes: the Holy Spirit had guided the election of Peter Morrone. And after Peter several other popes were elected quasi ex inspiratione. Nearly four centuries after Celestine V there would be two successive examples. The first was Cardinal Emilio Altieri, who was elected Pope Clement X in 1670 as he was about to turn eighty. The people outside the conclave began to chant “Altieri Papa!” and the cardinals inside assented, having spent four months without coming to a decision by scrutiny or consensus. Six years later, upon Clement X’s death, his successor was also elected by inspired acclamation. It is said that every member of that conclave kissed Cardinal Benedetto Odescalchi’s hand, and he became Pope Innocent XI. He ruled for thirteen years fairly successfully.
Pope John Paul II put an end to this method in 1996, when he set out to define anew the exact election procedures or “lawful apostolic succession” for a future pope. He titled these rules Universi Dominici Gregis, a Latin phrase that means “Of the Lord’s Whole Flock.”7 He specifically cited the need to avoid any situation like the one that resulted in Celestine V’s election seven hundred years ago: “I have thus considered it fitting not to retain election by acclamation quasi ex inspiratione, judging that it is no longer an apt means of interpreting the thought of an electoral college so great in number and so diverse in origin.” He also did away with election per compromissum, the consensus method. There would be no more elections in which a sort of electoral college from among the Sacred College would be delegated the task of choosing a new pope:
I have therefore decided that the only form by which the electors can manifest their vote in the election of the Roman Pontiff is by secret ballot.… This form offers the greatest guarantee of clarity, straightforwardness, simplicity, openness and, above all, an effective and fruitful participation on the part of the Cardinals who, individually and as a group, are called to make up the assembly which elects the Successor of Peter.
John Paul II then stipulated that a true conclave would always entail the cardinal-electors remaining within Vatican City throughout the duration, ensuring their privacy and ability to concentrate. In contrast to the commotions of elections past, he went on to say: “I decree that the election will continue to take place in the Sistine Chapel, where everything is conducive to an awareness of the presence of God.”8 No more heading for the hills, from Rome to Rieti, from Rieti to Perugia.
Secrecy would be maintained. To ensure the integrity of the process and the election, the cardinal-electors would each take an oath to refrain from all written communication and from consulting any media whatsoever during the conclave. Knowing well the history of medieval papal elections, John Paul II even stipulates: “In a special way, careful and stringent checks must be made, with the help of trustworthy individuals of proven technical ability, in order to ensure that no audiovisual equipment has been secretly installed in these areas for recording and transmission to the outside.” This doesn’t mean that cardinals are unable or unwilling to leak tidbits to the media, immediately before and after conclaves. It happens regardless of the rules, as inevitably there are quotes, portions of diaries, and comments made to drivers and housekeepers from anonymous cardinals and their aides that then find their way into the Italian newspapers.9
The effect of all of the papal election reforms that have been instituted since the summer of 1294 has been to ensure that the circumstances that conspired to elect Peter Morrone would never happen again.
Nonetheless, John Paul II made one final change that surprised observers. To the delight of some, Universi Dominici Gregis left open one large door of opportunity—to elect a man who shares at least one quality with our hermit pope: “Having before their eyes solely the glory of God and the good of the Church, and having prayed for divine assistance, [the cardinal-electors] shall give their vote to the person, even outside the College of Cardinals, who in their judgment is most suited to govern the universal Church in a fruitful and beneficial way.”
4
SPREADING THE NEWS
As news of Peter Morrone’s election spread across Italy, the responses were shock and surprise. Peter didn’t at all fit the profile of a holy pontiff. For one, he was an almost complete outsider. He wasn’t the son or nephew of a previous pope, or a member of the Roman curia. He was not known as a man of intellect or scholarship—or one of Plato’s “philosopher kings.” He was no Gregory the Great, known for his erudition and the Commentary on Job he wrote while he was a monk, long before he was elected (in 590 C.E.). Peter also wasn’t known for drama or, particularly, passion.
Peter Morrone was an adept organizer and leader, but one whom few other men of importance had heard from in years. Among the hierarchy of the Church he had a reputation for being simpleminded. Few of his contemporaries would have ever imagined he would become pope. Every man of religious influence knew, or was soon to learn, that Peter had recently retired to a hermitage high in the mountains, dissociating himself from the daily routine of running a religious order that had preoccupied the middle part of his life.
By the time he came to write the letter to Cardinal Latino Malabranca, Peter had founded or come to control dozens of monasteries throughout the Abruzzi and Molise. He had made the Santo Spirito of Morrone, near Sulmona, the motherhouse and then had retreated once again to live as an eremite in the highest mountains overlooking the monastery. This was the setting in which he had expected to end his days.
If there had been odds-makers in thirteenth-century Europe, the chances of Peter’s filling Nicholas IV’s seat would have stood at about 125 to 1. Simply in terms of name recognition, the philosopher and theologian Roger Bacon would have stood at better odds of being elected, even though he too was eighty years old in the spring of 1294, was English, and had been accused of heresy two decades earlier. Raymond of Gaufredi and Etienne of Besancon, minister-general and master of the Franciscans and Dominicans, respectively, would have been clear options as well. Cardinals Matthew Orsini and James Colonna, the most powerful men of the two competing families, would have been the likely favorites.
In 490 B.C.E., according to a legend repeated by Herodotus, an Athenian man ran the 150 miles from Athens to Sparta in less than a day and a half to spread the word of the Greek victory at the battle of Marathon. But news traveled more slowly in thirteenth-century Italy than it had more than 1,500 years earlier at the height of Greek civilization. The Greeks and Romans had built a system of roads that were unrivaled until after the Renaissance. State messengers did the work of spreading news, but these roads vanished when the empire broke apart.
In thirteenth-century Italy the average man never traveled more than twenty miles from the place where he was born. A man might never visit a town five miles from his own if a mountain stood between them. News traveled as fast as a man or a horse could walk. Rarely were there roads that led directly from one city to the next, unless the distance was short. More commonly, one might journey for days around mountains before meeting up with a road that then led toward one’s destination. Religious news of this sort—the election of a supreme pontiff—was more highly regarded than most news, but it never traveled fast. Word was passed along by friars walking from one city or region to another, by soldiers coming and going to and from campaigns, and by merchants making trips to sell their goods.
News would have traveled to Rome first of all the cities of Italy, for there were always travelers going to and from the Holy City. The people of Venice would have learned quickly, too, for it was the wealthiest city in all of Europe by this time, and in 1288 the city had established a coordinated plan for formal ambassadors and envoys to give and
receive news from abroad.1 But it would be weeks or months before the news reached farther-flung communes, friaries, monasteries, dignitaries, governments, and towns. It is no surprise, then, that there were no dignitaries present when Peter learned the news of his election. Few people knew of it. But it is surprising that none of the members of the Sacred College seem to have made plans for a quick trip to see their new leader, to bring news of God’s will for the Church. Not a single cardinal joined the mission to tell Peter Morrone the news, yet at least one world leader did.
Some have suggested that Charles II visited Peter in the mountains before Peter ever wrote his fateful letter to Cardinal Malabranca. The idea was that Charles prodded the hermit to use his spiritual authority to wake the sleeping cardinal-electors into action.2 We know that immediately upon his ideas being rejected by the cardinals at the March meeting in Perugia, Charles then spent April 6–7 in Sulmona, below the monastery of Santo Spirito, donating fifty gold florins to support the monks’ work.3 Regardless of whether it is fact or fiction that Charles and Peter communicated before Peter wrote his letter to the Sacred College, there is no doubt that Charles was delighted by Peter’s election from the moment he received the news at the palace in Melfi, which his father had taken from the German Hohenstaufen kings.
An older man is often elected pope during a time of conflict and trouble in the Church, when it is perceived that what is most needed is a man of solid reputation, one who also won’t be around for very long. This thinking certainly played a part in the cardinal-electors’ agreeing on Peter. Choosing Peter was also a way of steering clear of the factions that existed within the Sacred College. He was believed to have no distinct loyalties to either the Orsinis or the Colonnas.
Could he inspire the world by his moral authority? He would have to be bold. A pope could not rule with only a staff. He would need a stick. He would need to be able to wield power and influence and play a serious role in the politics of the day.
The Holy See had been a player on the world stage for centuries before the thirteenth century—since the emperor Constantine (306–12 C.E.) made Christianity the religion of the empire. Before Constantine’s time, the Christian faith was outlawed and owning property or having any secular authority at all was unthinkable for Christians. According to legend, Constantine granted Pope Sylvester I (314–35) and his successors control over the city of Rome and the western half of the Roman Empire.
The supposed Roman imperial decree known as Constantine’s Donation, written sometime in the eighth century, went undetected as a fake until the early fifteenth century. Today we know that this fictional “Donation of Constantine” never actually happened. The fourth-century emperor never donated anything more than the Lateran Palace to the papacy. Yet this myth was upheld for centuries, and in 751 Saint Boniface crowned the German ruler Pepin the Short, and Pepin returned the honor by donating the lands around Ravenna to the growing papal territories. Then twenty years later Pope Adrian I (772–95) asked the emperor Charlemagne to be as virtuous as Constantine and Pepin had been and donate additional land. This included Tuscany, Lombardy, and the island of Corsica. By 1054, Pope Leo IX was using the Constantine Donation to bolster his claims for controlling vast swaths of land. “[I]n a letter of 1054 to Michael Cærularius, Patriarch of Constantinople, he cites the ‘Donatio’ to show that the Holy See possessed both an earthly and a heavenly imperium, the royal priesthood.”4 By the time of Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) the papacy had begun to define itself by the territory of the Papal States, calling these lands its divine inheritance, terra sancti Petri, or “the sacred land of Peter.”
The Habsburg monarch Rudolf I would donate all of Romagna to the Holy See in 1278, by which time the Donation was widely acknowledged and became the basis for Church authorities to add future landholdings. Henceforth the largest landholder in all of Italy would be whoever was pope, and he could presume all manner of power, including taxation and commanding armies. For most of three-quarters of a millennium the lands of the Papal States encompassed much of what is present-day Italy. Today Vatican City is all that is left of this medieval theocracy.
The modern notion of a pope who is only, or even primarily, a spiritual leader would have been completely foreign to the understanding of people of Peter Morrone’s day. The pope was the chief spiritual authority of the Church, but since a few centuries before Peter Morrone the bishop of Rome had also been the world’s most powerful Christian—if not, also, the world’s most powerful man.
Did the cardinals who elected Peter believe that the hermit pope would understand these distinctions? Did they believe that he would be able to rule with the strong and certain hand that would be required? How would he relate to world leaders?
Much of the surprise at Peter’s election centered on the fact that no one knew him to be even an observer of world events. He was certainly no Leo the Great, the early pope who not only met Attila face-to-face in 452, but then somehow convinced the Hun not to invade Italy. Peter was shut away in his hermitage. One of our great novelists, Cormac McCarthy, wrote in Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West: “The man who believes that the secrets of this world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear.” This would seem to characterize Peter. What he desired to know, and knew most deeply, with the greatest certainty, was what he learned in prayer. The affairs of the world had never much concerned him.
There have been many who believed that the election of Peter Morrone was nothing less than a miracle. It had the stuff of divine inspiration. Even the name that Peter took for himself as pope, Celestine, suggests that he believed celestial powers had guided the cardinal-electors. As a star led wise men to the Son of God in Bethlehem 1,300 years earlier, divine intelligence could have led the College of Cardinals to choose him. Like a divining rod, the Holy Spirit pointed them toward the man destined to lead the Church out of its corruption and compromises, and into a new era. Hope was discovered as one might find treasure buried in a field.
Did the cardinals believe that this hermit wouldn’t be a nuisance as so many of his predecessors were? It would be easy to pull the strings of an octogenarian pope, and his reign wouldn’t last very long anyway. Inspiration may have guided the Sacred College, but so did the idea among some of them that they were buying time until they could each gather the wherewithal to get their own man in.
But he would puzzle them. Devout and introverted, Peter Morrone was also strident and charismatic. Known to be short-tempered, he came with all of the trappings of a man who was meek. The man who would be crowned Pope Celestine V was one of the greatest bundles of contradictions that the world has ever seen.
5
THEY CAME TO TAKE HIM AWAY
Each hermit believed he was solus cum solo, or alone with the alone. The only relationship that truly mattered was that between a hermit and his God. Everything else was expendable in a life designed to expend.
Before Peter Morrone became pope, he lived as a contemplative, engaging in the most passionate life available to a man: a solitary life in the mountains. From Plato to Plotinus to Jerome to Peter Damian to Thomas Aquinas to Dante, nearly every significant spiritual and philosophical thinker of the Christian era had written or preached the value of the contemplative life over the active life.
Then (as now) it seemed to be universally agreed that the more a man was able to live every moment of earthly existence as a gift from the Creator, the higher spiritual state he would achieve. Fishermen may make good disciples, but they don’t make good contemplatives. The active life gets in the way. Just as one can’t truly appreciate the paintings of a museum by sprinting through its corridors, one cannot know God and truth in wage earning and domestic business. That’s why Christ asked his fishermen apostles to leave their nets and follow him. He wanted a higher life for them. Despite the fact that it was a fisherman, Saint Peter, who was given the keys to the kingdom by Christ, the values of stillness, silence, and contemplation took hold of the Christian imagination during
the Middle Ages. As one of the most popular poets of the late Middle Ages would summarize it, “Every anchorite or hermit, monk or friar, if he follows the way of perfection is on a level with the twelve apostles.”1
Many great thinkers have written that the heart seeks after that which it loves, and the most proper love of all is love of God, but the heart needs time, space, and quiet in order to nurture such love. Since the true purpose of life is to prepare for life after death, serious Christians saw the earthly trappings—domestic duties, family, houses, wage earning—as obstacles, whereas the monastic life, and especially the eremitic life, was the school of heaven. “O taste and see that the Lord is good,” the psalmist sang in Psalm 34:8. A man needs time in order to love God properly and fully. For the one who is able to devote time to contemplation, the reward is great. He can be truly happy, for contemplation “is more enjoyable than any other human pleasure. Spiritual enjoyment surpasses bodily enjoyment, … and the love with which we love God in charity surpasses every love,” said Thomas Aquinas.2 “In addition, how many greater gifts will come to you in the truly blessed life that lies before us, is, I must admit, beyond my capacity to discuss.… Therefore, hide this treasure, namely Christ … in the receptacle of your heart. With it in your possession cast away all concern for anything else in this world,” wrote Peter Damian.3 Contemplation is the best of all ways of living.
The contemplative life also opens a person up to seeing God in ways that are usually hidden from others. The contemplative’s experience of God is direct and it’s as if he’s already living in heaven.
Hearing Voices
Peter Morrone was “betrothed” to God, and it was his aim to spend every waking hour of every day in the presence of Christ; he spoke with him, and often heard Christ’s voice in response.
The Pope Who Quit Page 5