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Gregorian
Reform
extending the prohibited degrees of Affinity.[4] The
reforms are encoded in two major documents: Dictatus
papae and the bull Libertas ecclesiae. The Gregorian
The Gregorian Reforms were a series of reforms reform depended in new ways and to a new degree on
initiated by Pope Gregory VII and the circle he formed the collections of Canon law that were being assembled,
in the papal curia, circa 1050–80, which dealt with the in order to buttress the papal position, during the same
moral integrity and independence of the clergy. These period. Part of the legacy of the Gregorian Reform was
reforms are considered to be named after Pope Gregory the new figure of the Papal Legist, exemplified a
VII (1073– 85), though he personally denied this and century later by Pope Innocent III.
Should not be confused with the Gregorian
calendar.
claimed his reforms, like his regnal name, honored
Gregory the Great.
1 Overview
Main articles: History of the Papacy (1048–1257) and
Papal selection before 1059
Gregory also had to avoid the Church ever slipping
back into the seriously embarrassing abuses that had
occurred in Rome, during the The Rule of the Harlots,
between 904 and 964.[5] Pope Benedict IX had been
elected Pope three times and had sold the Papacy. In
1054 the “Great Schism” had divided western
European Christians from the eastern Greek Orthodox
church. Given these events, the Church had to reassert
its importance and authority to its followers.
The conciliar approach to implementing papal reform
took on an added momentum during Gregory’s
Central status of the Church
pontificate. The authority of the emphatically ‘Roman’ 2
council as the universal legislative assembly was
theorised according to the principles of papal primacy The reform of the Church, both within it, and in
relation to the Holy Roman Emperor and the other lay
contained in Dictatus papae.
rulers of Europe, was Gregory VII’s life work. It was
There is no explicit mention of Gregory’s reforms based on his conviction that the Church was founded
against simony or nicolaitism at his Lenten councils of by God and entrusted with the task of embracing all
1075 or 1076; rather, the gravity of these reforms has to mankind in a single society in which divine will is the
be inferred from his general correspondence. By only law; that, in his capacity as a divine institution, he
contrast, Gregory’s Register[1] entry for the Roman
is supreme over all human structures, especially the
council of November 1078 extensively records secular state; and that the pope, in his role as head of
Gregory’s legislation against ‘abuses’ such as simony[2] the Church under the petrine commission, is the viceas well as the first ‘full’ prohibition of lay investiture. regent of God on earth, so that disobedience to him
This record has been interpreted as the essence of the implies disobedience to God: or, in other words, a
Gregorian ‘reform programme’.[3]
defection from Christianity. But any attempt to
Although at each new turn the reforms were presented to interpret this in terms of action would have bound the
contemporaries as a return to the old ways, they are often Church to annihilate not merely a single state, but all
seen by modern historians as the first European states. Thus Gregory, as a politician wanting to
achieve some result, was driven in practice to adopt a
Revolution.
different standpoint. He acknowledged the existence
The powers that the Gregorian papacy gathered to itself
of the state as a dispensation of Providence, described
were summed up in a list called Dictatus papae about
the coexistence of church and state as a divine
1075 or somewhat later. The major headings of
ordinance, and emphasized the necessity of union
Gregorian reform can be seen as embodied in the Papal
between the sacerdotium and the imperium. But at no
electoral decree (1059), and the resolution of the
period would he have dreamed of putting the two
Investiture Controversy (1075–1122) was an
powers on an equal footing; the superiority of church
overwhelming papal victory that by implication
to state was to him a fact which admitted of no
acknowledged papal superiority over secular rulers.
discussion and which he had never doubted.
Within the Church important new laws were pronounced
on simony (the purchasing of positions relating to the He wished to see all important matters of dispute
church), on clerical marriage and from 1059 laws referred to Rome; appeals were to be addressed to
himself; the centralization of ecclesiastical
government in Rome naturally involved a curtailment
of the powers of bishops. Since these refused to submit
voluntarily and tried to assert their traditional
independence, his papacy was full of struggles against
the higher ranks of the clergy.
3 Clerical celibacy
confirmed
policy
• Donation of Constantine
• Donation of Pippin
• First Council of the Lateran
• Liber Gomorrhianus
• Pope Gelasius I and the “Gelasian doctrine”
This battle for the foundation of papal supremacy is •
connected with his championship of compulsory
celibacy among the clergy and his attack on simony.
Gregory VII did not introduce the celibacy of the
priesthood into the Church, but he took up the struggle
5
with greater energy than his predecessors. In 1074 he
published an encyclical, absolving the people from their [1]
obedience to bishops who allowed married priests. The
next year he enjoined them to take action against married
priests, and deprived these clerics of their revenues. Both
the campaign against priestly marriage and that against [2]
simony provoked widespread resistance. The Pope was
to be the absolute head of the church, and the Dictatus
papae also declared the Pope’s authority to depose
emperors.
[3]
Walk to Canossa
Notes
Cowdrey, H.E.J. (2002). The Register of Pope Gregory
VII 1073-1085: An English Translation. USA: Oxford
University Press. p. 600. ISBN 0199249806.
Gilchrist, John (1965). ""Simoniaca haeresis” and the
problem of orders from Leo IX to Gratian”. Proceedings
of the Second International Congress of Medieval Canon
Law. C. Monumenta Iuris Canonici (1): 209–235.
Gilchrist, John (1970). “Was there a Gregorian reform
movement in the eleventh century?". The Canadian
Catholic Historical Association: Study Sessions 37: 1–10.
The Gregorian calendar, decreed on 24 February 1582 by
Pope Gregory XIII, has no connection to these Gregorian
reforms.
[4] Gilchrist, John (1993). ‘Pope Gregory VII and the juristic
4
See also
• Cluniac Reforms
sources of his ideology’, in Canon Law in the Age of
Reform, 11th-12th Centuries. UL: Ashgate Publishing. p.
5. ISBN 0860783685.
[5] Brook, Lindsay (2003). “Popes and Pornocrats: Rome in
the early Middle Ages” (PDF). Foundations (Foundation
For Medieval Genealogy) 1 (1): 5–21.
• Concordat of Worms
• Diploma Ottonianum
6 External links
• Gregorian Reform and the First Crusade