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Biography

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Hildebrand, later Pope Gregory VII, was born in Tuscany in the early eleventh century. Traditional accounts associate his birth with the town of Sovana, though the precise place and year are not established with certainty in contemporary sources. Of relatively obscure family origins, he was sent as a boy to Rome and educated there, in connection with the Lateran or with the Benedictine house of Santa Maria on the Aventine. He embraced the monastic life and became closely identified with the eleventh-century movement for ecclesiastical reform. After accompanying the deposed Pope Gregory VI into exile north of the Alps in 1046, Hildebrand spent a period associated with Cluny, the Burgundian abbey that was then a leading center of monastic observance and Church renewal.

From the late 1040s he was a central figure in the Roman curia. He served as a trusted counsellor and administrator to a series of reforming popes—Leo IX, Victor II, Stephen IX, Nicholas II, and Alexander II—and rose to the office of archdeacon of the Roman church. In that capacity he helped shape the papal election decree of 1059, which sought to free the choice of the pope from imperial and aristocratic control, and he worked to enforce clerical celibacy and to suppress simony. His reputation for personal austerity, administrative energy, and unyielding principle made him the dominant personality in the reform party well before his own elevation.

In April 1073, upon the death of Alexander II, the clergy and people of Rome acclaimed Hildebrand as pope; he took the name Gregory VII. His pontificate was marked by an ambitious program of asserting the liberty and supremacy of the Apostolic See. The so-called Dictatus Papae, a collection of propositions recorded in his register, claimed for the pope unique authority including the right to depose emperors. Gregory’s determination to end lay investiture of bishops brought him into prolonged conflict with Henry IV of Germany. After Gregory excommunicated the king and released his subjects from their oaths of allegiance, Henry submitted at Canossa in January 1077. The reconciliation did not last. Renewed hostilities led to a second excommunication, the installation of an antipope (Clement III), and Gregory’s loss of Rome.

In 1084 Gregory was compelled to leave the city. He found protection among the Normans of southern Italy and died at Salerno on 25 May 1085. He was interred in the cathedral there. Later tradition records his dying words as a summary of his life’s struggle: he had loved justice and hated iniquity, and therefore died in exile. Although polarizing in his lifetime, Gregory VII was eventually honored as a saint of the Catholic Church. His cult was approved in the sixteenth century and he was canonized by Pope Paul V in 1606. His feast is kept on 25 May.

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