Pope Gregory VII

Pope Gregory VII, known before his election as Hildebrand (Ildebrando), was among the most consequential popes of the medieval Latin Church. Contemporary records do not preserve an exact year of birth. Later tradition locates his origin in Sovana (Soana) in Tuscany, in the early eleventh century, and describes his family as of modest standing. He was educated in Rome and entered the monastic life as a Benedictine. Time spent in the orbit of Cluny and of the Roman reform party formed his conviction that the Church must be independent of lay control and morally purified of simony and of clerical marriage.

From the pontificate of Leo IX onward, Hildebrand was a central figure in papal administration. He served as a legate, as a counsellor, and eventually as archdeacon of the Roman Church under Alexander II. When Alexander died in April 1073, clergy and people of Rome chose Hildebrand as his successor; he was consecrated later that year and took the name Gregory VII. He immediately pressed a program later called the Gregorian Reform: forbidding lay investiture of bishops, insisting on free canonical election, requiring clerical celibacy, and asserting that the Roman pontiff held unique authority over the whole Church and even over secular rulers.

These claims brought him into prolonged conflict with Henry IV, king of Germany and later Holy Roman Emperor. Gregory’s register and the so-called Dictatus Papae set out far-reaching papal prerogatives, including the right to depose emperors. After Henry continued to appoint bishops and to support prelates whom Gregory had condemned, the pope excommunicated and declared him deposed. In January 1077 Henry appeared as a penitent at the castle of Canossa in the Apennines, where Gregory was staying as a guest of Matilda of Tuscany; after days of waiting, Henry received absolution. The political struggle nonetheless resumed. Henry convened synods that declared Gregory deposed, promoted Wibert of Ravenna as antipope Clement III, and in the early 1080s occupied Rome. Gregory took refuge in the Castel Sant’Angelo and was later escorted south by the Norman duke Robert Guiscard, whose troops sacked Rome in 1084.

Gregory spent his last months in Salerno, in Norman southern Italy, and died there on 25 May 1085. A well-known saying later attributed to him on his deathbed runs that he had loved justice and hated iniquity and therefore died in exile. He was interred in the cathedral of Salerno. Although his immediate political position had collapsed, the principles of papal monarchy and of a reformed, celibate clergy that he championed continued to shape the high-medieval Church. His cult developed over subsequent centuries, and he was formally canonized by Pope Benedict XIII in 1728. The Roman Catholic Church keeps his feast on 25 May.