He lived during the Ptolemaic era when the earth was believed to be at the center of the universe, with the moon, sun, stars, and other planets revolving around it. Hell was located in the deepest recesses of the earth, and heaven, high above our heads beyond the sky. That is why mountains were so important—divine proximity was taken very seriously.
In the fifth century, Saint Ambrose of Milan claimed that Jesus Christ was crucified on the same hill where the first man, Adam, had long ago been buried. Throughout the Middle Ages Christians sought out places made sacred by association. The height of Peter’s mountains was not accidental. He sought the highest mountaintop he could climb because he desired to be near his Creator. He wanted his prayers to be spoken and whispered closely into the ear of God.
People in the thirteenth century had no understanding whatsoever of the composition of the atmosphere. It wasn’t until the early sixteenth century that Leonardo da Vinci began to experiment with how air is consumed during combustion, and not until the late eighteenth century that oxygen was identified. In Peter’s time, the atmosphere of earth was a place for winds and spirits, not a layer of gases retained by the planet’s gravity.
Hearing voices in the wind and woods was a common experience among Christian mystics according to medieval chronicles and tales. We read of ordinary men and women having divine experiences causing them to fall upon the ground, become frozen in fear; sometimes they meet inexplicable strangers in lonely places or feel ravished in ecstasy. As his Autobiography makes clear again and again, Peter experienced these things. God surely speaks to all men and women, but to some, divine stimuli are more readily received.
One of the most common diagnoses of that era (continuing up until the nineteenth century) was “brain fever,” a pseudo-medical explanation for a rise in body temperature brought on, it was believed, by an overexcitement of the senses. This was a kind of ailment that assailed a sensitive soul who took in more than he could handle. Since ancient Mesopotamian times, human beings have acknowledged fevers, occasions when the body’s internal temperature rises beyond what is normal, but it wasn’t until very recently that we knew why body temperature rises and that this process is actually good for us. Medieval people feared the fever, and the remedy for “brain fever” was to cut back on stimuli.
There is a type of overstimulation that can occur in men and women like Peter who spend long periods of time alone with God. Figures dance and voices speak to a live imagination in quiet places. He also practiced extreme fasting and other ascetic behaviors, which brought on mystical experiences.
From his grotto, Peter Morrone prayed the Psalms with punctual regularity, structuring his day with set times of prayer as he moved through the Psalter, genuflecting as well, at least five hundred times a day to his God.4 He prayed the liturgical hours of Compline, Vigils, Matins, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, and Vespers. He would have known the entire Psalter from memory, and the words of the Psalms would have sprung to his mind and his lips with ease, and whether he was experiencing moments of pain or joy, boredom or dread, he would be able to express his feelings with a psalmist’s intensity.
When he was composing his letter to Cardinal Latino Malabranca in June 1294 he could have easily heard these words from Psalm 12 in his ears: “Help, Lord; for there is no longer any one who is godly; for the faithful have vanished from among the sons of men. Everyone utters lies to his neighbor; with flattering lips and a double heart they speak.” As he stood on the mountain mourning the sorry state of his blessed Holy and Catholic Church he might have prayed: “Consider and answer me, O Lord my God; lighten my eyes, lest I will sleep the sleep of death” (Ps. 13:3). And he might have remembered the words of the prophet Isaiah to whom he had been compared: “They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Is. 11:9).
Along Came the World to Peter’s Doorstep
Peter did not exactly live alone. He was not entirely solitary or reclusive. He had retreated to his remote location but there were other men nearby, all living as hermits. Mostly they spent their days alone, eating, praying, working, or sleeping, but they would still see one another from time to time and gather as a community to pray at least once each day. They formed a loosely organized cluster of individual hermitages on the eastern edge of Mount Morrone, along the Sulmona basin.
The community was accustomed to pilgrims visiting their holy mountains. It was nearly a daily occurrence for Peter and his brothers to see strangers on the hillsides, seeking out the huts and caves where hermits made their rough homes among the trees. For the medieval man and woman, a walking pilgrimage was like a dream holiday vacation is to us. People undertook them as a form of therapy, or to escape their debts and debtors, or to enjoy life by getting away from domestic responsibilities, and occasionally even for spiritual reasons. One pilgrimage to Compostela or Jerusalem, or receiving a face-to-face blessing from a holy hermit, could save a person several years in purgatory. But Peter never could have imagined encountering the visitors that hiked up the mountain to see him in the summer of 1294.
Artists have given us an idea, however. A sixteenth-century fresco depicting the scene hangs on the walls of the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican (on the vault corresponding to the frescoed map of Abruzzo). It is entitled The Hermit St. Peter of Morrone Receiving the News of His Election to the Papacy. Noblemen are shown atop noble steeds, led by native guides on foot, pointing the way around turns and through underbrush, steeply climbing up the mountain, ascending the psalmist’s hill of the Lord to find the holy one. And there kneels Peter on the ledge beyond their immediate vision, pleading with God, oblivious to their coming.
Meanwhile, the king of Naples was on his way to Mount Morrone as well. We don’t know from whom he received the news about the new pope at the palace at Melfi, and so rapidly, but together with his son, Charles Martel of Anjou, Charles II quickly traveled to Sulmona. There, to the foot of Mount Morrone, was as far as Charles II would go. His lameness made mountain climbing an impossibility; but he sent his royal son up the peak to try to reach the hermit before the ecclesiastical entourage could arrive.
Toward the top of these mountains, the quiet of beech trees and mountain pine recedes as you climb beyond 3,000 feet, where the dwarf junipers and wildflowers grow. At 5,000 feet, just under the clouds, songbirds become fewer and ravens and hawks more common, their calls starting to sound plaintively human as they move in their slow, winding circles. It was under such a canopy that delegates of the Sacred College made their way upward to inform Peter of what the cardinals had done.
A group of men—priests, soldiers, and their attendants—had assembled in Perugia on July 11 to make the trip to carry the news. The troop was led by the French archbishop of Lyon, Bérard of Got (brother of Raymond of Got, who later became Pope Clement V), wearing the full regalia of his priestly office, and neither the archbishop nor those who accompanied him were accustomed to mountain climbing, especially in the heat of a July afternoon. The journey took them at least ten days.
When they reached the top of the mountain, they found a simple hermitage with two small chambers. A small opening served as a window. One of the most important witnesses to these events, James Stefaneschi (ca. 1270–1343), who was the son of a Roman senator, and who would later become a cardinal, peered inside Peter’s hermitage and saw an “unkempt, blear-eyed recluse, peering in bewilderment at such unwonted company on his little plateau.”5
According to legend, a friend and fellow friar by the name of Roberto had hurried ahead of the entourage, to tell Peter who was coming to fetch him. As a result, Peter was prepared to turn the party of visitors away before they ever arrived at the top. Surely they must be joking, he thought. Peter wasn’t very trusting by nature, and when the group of clergy reassured him it was no joke he did the one thing any normal, solitary hermit would have done. He refused the job.
As one scholar has put it, “To characterize the c
hoice [of Peter as pope] as eccentric is probably an understatement.”6 Peter wasn’t the first man to want to avoid the chair of St. Peter, to realize immediately that what it demanded was not for him. He also wouldn’t be the first pope to pine for the life he had left behind, to spend his time wallowing in self-pity over what he was missing. But he was the first to attempt to run from the honor. He resisted the call of the cardinals at first. Resisted may even be too simple a word. Peter seems to have actually hid himself from his approaching visitors. The Roman poet Petrarch says that Peter tried taking to his heels. The old Catholic Encyclopedia talks about how “Pietro heard of his elevation with tears”—but even this traditionalist source didn’t mean tears of joy. They continue, “but, after a brief prayer, obeyed what seemed the clear voice of God”!
The entourage would have dragged Peter to Rome and strapped the crozier into his right hand if necessary. But Peter happened to be residing within the territory of the House of Anjou, ruled by Charles II. Kings traveled well, and the two Charleses made better time than the archbishop and the others. Before Peter could refuse the will of the election, Charles Martel was the one who brought the hermit assurances from his father that his monks, his hermitage, and the future of his order would be safe.
Finally, Peter told those gathered, “I accept.”
The distinguished retinue began to chant, “Viva il papa!” “Long live the pope!” For those votaries, nobles, and churchmen who had made the journey, there was enthusiasm for the future. The official decision of the Sacred College was read aloud to Peter and all of his brothers who gathered around. Petrarch later tells us: “The ragged, haggard, trembling hermit, fleeing in terror from the proffered honor, then bowing to what he held to be a celestial command, then descended from Mount Morrone.”
All the while, thousands of people had gathered around the bottom of Mount Morrone. Many had watched the finely clothed churchmen awkwardly making their way through the oaks and maples, so they were surprised to see the twenty-two-year-old Charles Martel, a young layman, descending at the hermit’s side. Others were there as well. It has been suggested that Giovanni Pipino, a resident of nearby Barletta, was present. He would later become famous for building the great church of San Pietro of Maiella in Naples.7 Once the entourage arrived in Sulmona, Charles Martel and Charles II arranged to have Peter consecrated within their realm.
All that Peter had done to deserve this honor was to write to the cardinal-electors, offering them an apocalyptic vision of what God might allow to happen if they didn’t elect a holy pontiff, and soon. He was never expecting that he would be asked to do what he was now charged with doing. This is not to say that he wasn’t a man of ambition. The early chroniclers might have us believe that Peter was guileless and simple, but the events of a life spanning more than eight decades tell a different story.
Peter Morrone … we will see, perhaps, at last achieved
What in the cell of your heart you truly believed.
And if all the world was being deceived,
Many a curse will follow after you.
—JACOPONE OF TODI,
“Epistle to Pope Celestine V”
6
NOW I WILL TELL YOU OF MY LIFE
As with many of the saints, we know very little about the early years of Peter Morrone. What we do know comes from a number of texts that, for better or worse, are considered by modern readers as hagiography. In other words, these sources have devotional value, offering insight into the contemporary or near-contemporary perspective of Peter’s personality and influence, but they add little to what we know for certain about the man’s life. One of these is an Autobiography, supposedly written by Peter himself, though strangely it fluctuates back and forth from third-person narrative (“He often saw these and other good things in visions”) to first-person (“I will first say something about my parents”). This suggests that it was written by many people, and not necessarily even by Peter. Still, tradition holds that this is Peter’s story of his life. Intriguingly, the earliest extant manuscript of the Autobiography resides in the Vatican Archives and dates to about a generation after Peter’s death. An anonymous archivist long ago marked on the outside of the text that it was written in Peter’s own hand.1
There is also the Opus Metricum of James Stefaneschi, one of the men who visited Peter on Mount Morrone. The Opus is a biographical poem written in dactylic hexameter (an homage to Homer and Virgil), the first part of which was composed in 1296, the year of Peter’s death, and the third and final part was finished in 1319. Stefaneschi, who was held in high regard by Peter while he was pope, and who was made a cardinal-deacon by the next pope, sent the work to the monks of Santo Spirito near Sulmona, the motherhouse of Peter’s religious order. The work describes the coronation of Celestine V, his abdication, his canonization, and the miracles that occurred on the way to his canonization. One of Peter’s monastic disciples, Thomas of Sulmona, also wrote a short Life of him relatively soon after his death, sometime between 1300 and 1305. Both the 1319 version of Stefaneschi’s poem and the Life penned by Thomas make reference to some autobiographical writings of Peter that as of today have never been found.
All of these texts fit the definition of medieval hagiography in almost every way. They consist of narrative or verse without reference to historical evidence. But there’s an old Italian saying that goes, Una bugia ben detta val più di un fatto stupido, or “A lie well told is worth more than a stupid fact.”2 In the Middle Ages these narratives were the essence of good storytelling, and the approximation to fact was rarely of much concern to those who either told the tales or listened to them. Still, these spiritual portraits serve an important purpose even today, because they etch into history the lives of great men and women and honor their earthly existence, proclaiming their role as agents in salvation history. While the facts may sometimes be in question, hagiography serves to create a truth that transcends specific day-to-day actions and occurrences—that truth being that all Christians are called to sainthood, even reluctant ones like Peter Morrone.
Peter begins the story of his life in his Autobiography, as any good son would, by mentioning his parents: “My father was named Angelerio, a God-fearing, humble man. My mother was Maria, a saint in my life. Together they had twelve sons, but mother raised me almost entirely on her own, since my father died when I was just a boy.”3
Peter was born in Molise in 1209, the same year that Francis of Assisi was gathering his first followers in nearby Umbria. It was on April 16 of that year that Saint Francis, Bernard of Quintavalle, and Peter Catani opened the Scriptures together at the home of their local bishop and found the words in the Gospels that would inspire the creation of the Franciscan order. Less than a year later, the first twelve Franciscans would walk to Rome to visit Pope Innocent III. Also in the spring of 1209, that same pope recruited more than 10,000 men to raid the mountainous regions of southern France to root out the Cathar heretics in what became known as the Albigensian Crusade. That October, he crowned the Bavarian Otto IV as Holy Roman Emperor (“Roman Catholic King”) in Rome. Halfway around the world, 1209 was also the year in which Beijing was being marauded by the Mongol leader Genghis Khan. This was the year when Peter was born.
There was little guarantee that Peter, one of twelve children—all of them boys—would survive past infancy. At this time throughout Europe only half of all children survived to the age of five. Only one in four people saw the age of forty. There were no vaccines or antibiotics, let alone an understanding of how to kill ordinary contagions. In the minds of medieval people, death was determined wholly by God, not by disease.
Peter’s father’s name, Angelerio, or “little angel,” was once a common name in Italy but is no longer. “When my father died of old age, I was but five or six. My mother still had seven sons,” Peter tells us. Five of the twelve had died. His mother was named Maria, in honor of the Blessed Virgin. Yet the hagiographers don’t draw direct comparisons to Christ, the Lord of angels, in the
earliest biographies of Peter. Instead, they turn to the Old Testament story of Joseph, the son of Jacob, and establish parallels that might help explain how an ordinary boy could grow up to become pope.
Peter was the favorite of his parents (or at least of his mother) and was looked on with suspicion by his brothers. Although his siblings rejected the idea of dedicating one’s life to God, Peter from a very early age embraced it. When his mother sent Peter off to study—presumably, as was the custom, promising him to the monastery while he was still a boy—the Autobiography says that the other brothers were tempted by the devil to do what they could to prevent Peter from focusing on his studies. Later Maria sold some of the family property in order to pay a teacher for Peter’s instruction, and it’s said that this was done contrary to the desires of his brothers, as well. When Peter begins to see visions, he tells only his mother about them. She instructs him to keep the information to himself, but the devil tempts Peter and he blurts out his experiences while playing with his siblings. The other children threaten to hit him, but, the text says, angels protect him.
Mother and child are described as having much in common, including vivid nighttime dreams, which they share with each other in the mornings. One evening Maria dreamed that Peter was a shepherd of sheep, and according to the Autobiography, this saddens her. Presumably, the vision of her son engaged in an ordinary occupation is dissatisfying to her. The next day, while standing with Peter, who is twelve, Maria says to him, “Last night I dreamed about a man of God,” and Peter quickly responds as if to interpret her vision, “He will be a shepherd of souls.” “It is you!” she tells him, with joy.
San Angelo Limosano
Peter grew up in the small village of San Angelo Limosano in the most remote part of Italy, a region Peter knew as Abruzzi e Molise, home to the highest peaks of the Apennines and populated by some of the most fiercely independent Italians.4 His village, located in the diocese of Sulmona, is about 115 miles east of Rome. To the immediate east of San Angelo Limosano, the Abruzzi town of Isernia is the site of what is perhaps the oldest-known human settlement on the European continent. Scientists date it to sometime around 700,000 B.C.E. Around 295 B.C.E., Isernia and all of Molise fell into the hands of the Romans. All of what we call “Italy” today came under nominal Roman control at about that time.
The Pope Who Quit Page 6