|
The conclave of 1362 that followed the death of Innocent VI [ ] was one
that produced many surprises. There were twenty cardinals to take part
in it and the strongest group was that of the Limousins, compatriots of
the last two popes. They were not indeed a majority, but the remainder
had nothing to unite them except their determination that there should
not be a third Limousin pope. The first vote was taken before there had
been time for any prearrangement; and, in the hope of delaying the
election until some profitable combination had been devised, each
cardinal followed his own instinct to vote for the least likely man.
But these chance-inspired votes happened to fall, in the required
two-thirds majority, on the same cardinal; he was a Limousin; and the
brother of the last pope but one, Clement VI. The disappointment of the
cardinals was general, and unconcealed. But the pope-elect, the
cardinal Hugues Roger, preferred to decline the high office, and thence
onwards, in the ballots that followed, the cardinals were so careful
about their votes that it soon became evident that no one of them stood
any chance of gaining the votes of as many as two-thirds of his
colleagues.
It was, then, upon the name of an outsider that agreement was at last
reached (September 28, 1362), and the cardinals elected the Benedictine
monk Guillaume de Grimoard, Abbot of St. Victor at Marseilles; a man
fifty-two years of age, and at the moment papal nuncio in the kingdom
of Naples. He was a man of very holy life, whose monastic spirit high
offices, and years of external employment as nuncio, had never in any
way diminished. He reached Avignon a month after his election, chose
the name Urban V, and was crowned on November 6, privately, in a purely
religious ceremony, within the walls of his palace, resolutely putting
aside all the apparatus of secular magnificence that was now the rule.
As pope he contrived to lead the life of a monk, never wearing any
dress but his religious habit, and keeping faithfully all the monastic
fasts and austerities.
Urban V was a most industrious worker, and scholarship owes him many
acknowledgments. Like all these Avignon popes, he was a very real
patron of learning. He founded new universities at Orange, at Cracow
and at Vienna, and a school of music at the existing university of
Toulouse. He restored his own university of Montpellier, and he found
the means to support as many as fourteen hundred students in different
universities. It was made a reproach to him at the time, and it has
been held against him since, that his liberality and charities were a
serious burden on the papal resources. For, as has been said, [ ] the
finances had now settled down into something like chronic bankruptcy.
But, it will be admitted, there have been less deserving reasons for
financial embarrassment, and it was ever Urban V's own justification to
his critics that to promote true learning -- whether the student
persevered in his clerical calling or returned to secular life -- was
the best investment any pope could make who regarded the Church's
future. [ ]
It has also been laid against Urban V that he had little skill in the
arts of ruling, and was too easily the victim of political roguery, and
that he failed as a religious reformer. But all these defects -- very
real, of course -- shrink beside the double glory that he continued to
live his own holy life in surroundings of which St. Catherine of Siena
could say that they stank like hell, [ ] and that, at the first
opportunity, he left Avignon, and, despite all the opposition, took the
papacy back to Rome.
It was in September 1366 that Urban V made known his intention.
Immediately, and from all sides, good reasons to the contrary rained
upon the pope. The King of France sent special embassies to explain
that nothing but the presence of the pope could heal the feuds that
were destroying his kingdom. Was the pope to show himself a hireling,
by flight? The cardinals, all but unanimously, opposed him. Albornoz,
of course -- still in Italy -- welcomed the decision. He considered
that the return of the pope, at this moment, when in Rome and the
Patrimony his authority was secure and order re- established, would
consolidate the work of restoration.
Urban held firmly to his resolution. He disregarded a last threat from
his cardinals that they would leave him to make the voyage alone, and
on April 30, 1367, left Avignon. By May 6 he had reached Marseilles;
there was a long wait for favourable weather, and then the great fleet,
the papal galleys and an escort provided by all the maritime states of
Italy, made its leisurely way along the coasts of Provence and Liguria.
Toulon, Genoa, Pisa and Piombino in succession saw the convoy that bore
such precious auguries. On June 3 the pope landed, in his own states,
at Corneto. Albornoz was there to meet him. Thence he passed to
Viterbo, where he remained for four months, and here he had the great
misfortune to lose Albornoz, for the great cardinal died on August 22.
[ ] And at Viterbo the old rioting now broke out again. For three days
the city was in the hands of the mob, and there were cries of "Death to
the Church, long live the people. " But the pope remained unmoved, and
on October 16 he at last entered Rome.
For a time all went well. The return of the papal court was a beginning
of new prosperity for the city. There were visits from reigning princes
-- the Queen of Naples and the Emperor Charles IV -- that brought
crowds of visitors, and once again new trade and wealth. The ruined
churches began to be restored, and the old permanent traffic between
Christendom and its natural centre took up its wonted course. For the
hot Roman summer the pope went to live at Montefiascone, forty miles to
the north, on the shores of Lake Bolsena. It was during his stay there,
in 1370, that the papal city of Perugia rose in rebellion, and the
Romans came to its aid. Urban took refuge at Viterbo and there he was
presently besieged by the rebels, who had now hired one of the most
notorious of the "free companies" led by the Englishman Sir John
Hawkwood. The pope had no choice but to surrender the town. And now the
forces of the Visconti crossed into Tuscany, making for the Patrimony.
Urban appealed for help to the emperor, and to the King of Hungary. But
they were deaf to his needs, and, finally, he decided to return to
Avignon. Though the Romans outdid all former shows of loyalty, and
though St. Bridget of Sweden prophesied to the pope's face that his
return would be followed by a speedy death, Urban was now as resolute
to depart from Italy as he had previously been resolute to leave
Avignon. On September 5, 1370, he sailed for France. He arrived at
Avignon on the 27th and there, three months later, as had been foretold
to him, he died (December 19, 1370). [ ]
But the unfortunate ending of the great venture attempted by Urban V
did not -- as might have been expected -- sterilise, for yet another
generation or so, the ideal which inspired it. His successor, Gregory
XI, made it clear, from the beginning of his reign, that it was his
intention also to take the papacy back to Rome.
Gregory XI was one of those rare popes elected unanimously by a
conclave that lasted only a matter of hours (December 30, 1370). This
last Frenchman among the popes -- Pierre Roger de Beaufort -- was a
Limousin, the nephew of Hugues Roger, who had been elected eight years
before but had declined, and of Clement VI, elected in 1342. It was
this papal uncle who had made Pierre Roger a cardinal, at the age of
nineteen. The young prelate had shown immediately the manner of man he
was, when he deserted the splendid opportunity of worldly fortune and
enjoyment thus opened to him, and returned to his study of law at
Perugia, then the centre of a real transformation of legal learning,
with the great Bartolo teaching Roman law as the development of
principles and thereby founding a new science, and with his pupil Baldo
de Ubaldis infusing a like new life into the understanding of the canon
law. Under such masters the youthful cardinal became an accomplished
canonist, with a really deep knowledge of law and with great gifts of
judgment. And he grew up to be a man of prayer. Gregory XI was not yet
forty-two when he was elected pope, but his health was frail, and he
was already tending to be a permanent invalid.
From the first winter of his reign the new pope had determined that,
with him, the papacy would return to Rome. And from Rome itself there
now came, to urge this upon him as his first duty, the voice of that
veteran admonitrix of the popes, St. Bridget. Through her, so she now
declared to the pope, Our Lady sent him a message that was at once a
command, a promise and a warning. Gregory was to go to Rome by April
1372, and if he obeyed, his soul would be filled with spiritual joy.
Should he fail, he would assuredly feel the rod of chastisement; and
his young life would be cut short. The pope, who had stood at his
predecessor's side when, only twelve months before this, St. Bridget
had prophesied to Urban V that his return to Avignon would be followed
by a speedy death, was sufficiently moved to order his legate in Italy
to ask further explanations of her. What the saint told the legate is
not recorded, but we do know the message she sent for the pope's own
ear. "Unless the pope comes to Italy at the time and in the year
appointed, the lands of the Church, which are now united under his sway
and obedience, will be divided in the hands of his enemies. To augment
the tribulations of the pope, he will not only hear, but will also see
with his own eyes that what I say is true, nor will he be able with all
the might of his power to reduce the said lands of the Church to their
former state of obedience and peace. " [ ]
This message was apparently sent to the pope in the first months of his
reign. Nearly two years later, on January 26, 1373, the saint had a
second vision that she was bidden transmit to him. This time it was Our
Lord who appeared to her, and told her that the pope was held back by
excessive attachment to his own kinsfolk, and coldness of mind towards
Himself. Our Lady's prayers for the pope would, in the end, the saint
was told, overcome these obstacles and Gregory would, one day, return
to Rome.
Then, in February of that same year (1373), came a new vision, in which
St. Bridget beheld the pope standing before Christ in judgment, and
heard the Lord's terrifying speech to his vicar. "Gregory, why dost
thou hate me?. . . Thy worldly court is plundering My heavenly court.
Thou, in thy pride, dost take My sheep from Me. . . . Thou dost rob My
poor for the sake of thy rich. . . . What have I done to thee, Gregory?
I, in my patience, allowed thee to ascend to the supreme pontificate,
and foretold to thee My will, and promised thee a great reward. How
dost thou repay Me?. . . Thou dost rob Me of innumerable souls; for
almost all who come to thy court dost thou cast into the hell of fire,
in that thou dost not attend to the things that pertain to My court,
albeit thou art prelate and pastor of My sheep. . . . I still admonish
thee, for the salvation of thy soul, that thou come to Rome, to thy
see, as quickly as thou canst. . . . Rise up manfully, [ ] put on thy
strength, and begin to renovate My Church which I acquired with My own
blood. . . . If thou dost not obey My will, I will cast thee down from
the Court of Heaven, and all the devils of hell shall divide thy soul,
and for benediction thou shalt be filled with malediction -- eternally.
. . . If thou dost obey me in this way, I will be merciful to thee, and
will bless thee, and will clothe thee with Myself, so that thou wilt be
in Me and I in thee, and thou shalt possess eternal glory. [ ]
Gregory was sufficiently shaken to send his legate yet once again to
ask the saint for some definite sign. In July 1373, a few days only
before her death, [ ] St. Bridget sent her last word to him, and it was
a word of practical counsel about the latest difficulty that had arisen
to hinder Gregory's departure -- the new war with the Visconti. The
pope is bidden to make peace at all costs "rather than so many souls
perish in eternal damnation. " He is to place his trust in God alone
and, heedless of the opposition, to come to Rome for the establishment
of peace and the reformation of the Church; and he is to come by the
following autumn. [ ]
And now, soon after the death of the Swedish saint, Gregory XI made his
first contact with a still more wonderful woman, Catherine Benincasa,
the child of a dyer of Siena, sister of penance in the third order of
St. Dominic. St. Catherine of Siena -- for it was she -- was at this
time in her twenty-seventh year, and since her very babyhood not only
had she been, manifestly, a child of special graces and divine
attentions, but one around whom the marvellous and the miraculous
flowered as though part of her natural course through life. Prayer; a
life of charitable activity; corporal austerity; solitude without
churlishness in the midst of a busy family life -- a family where she
was the twenty-fourth child; a refusal of marriage, but no desire for
the life of a nun; the direction of the friars of the neighbouring
Dominican church; visions; colloquies with the saints, the Blessed
Virgin and Our Lord; the great wonder of her mystical marriage in sign
of which He set on her finger the ring she thenceforward never ceased
to see there; the stigmata; and the great vision in which -- so she
always believed she had really died, and been sent back to life for the
purpose then divinely made known to her; such was the saint's life
through all these years, in which she had never left her native town
and hardly even her father's house, or her own little room in it. But
never was any saint to fulfil more exactly in the Catholic Church the
role assigned to the prophets of old, to appear suddenly in the public
life of the time, to correct rulers -- the highest ruler of all, the
very pope -- and, divinely commissioned, to offer them guidance back to
God; and never did any saint offer better illustration of the doctrine
traditional in her order since St. Thomas Aquinas, that in the highest
form of contemplation the activity flows over into a charitable
apostolate and care for all mankind. Already, in Siena, Catherine was a
power, and the radiance of her unearthly personality had gathered
around her a most extraordinary band of followers, men and women,
friars, tertiaries, poets, artists, noble and plebeian, married and
single, the most of whom she had converted, all of whom she instructed,
and who were one great means of the apostolate of peace that was now
her life.
It was, of course, in the midst of war that St. Catherine of Siena's
life was passed; of the bitterest wars of all, the bloody feuds that
were the life of all the fourteenth-century city states in Italy. In
Siena, as in Florence and in a host of lesser towns, there was blood
everywhere, as the never-ceasing cycle turned of revolution and
counter-revolution; oppression, conspiracy, arrests, torture,
executions, revolts, a new regime and then oppression and the rest yet
once again; an age of horrible cruelties, of which the terrible
savagery that accompanied our own Wars of the Roses is only a pale
reflection. And in St. Catherine's many letters, and in her great
mystical book of Christian teaching, the Dialogue, -- it is not
surprising -- the thought of the Blood, and the word is rarely absent
from a single page, of the Blood of Christ shed in love to save sinful
man.
St. Catherine had already, early in 1372, written to Gregory's legate
at Bologna, Cardinal d'Estaing, bidding him make charity the foundation
of all his acts, "Peace, peace, peace! Dearest father, make the Holy
Father consider the loss of souls more than that of cities; for God
demands souls more than cities. " [ ] This was to be the keynote of her
apostolate to the popes. When Gregory himself sent to ask her advice,
the saint had no other message but that he should turn from his
nepotism, his tolerance of bishops who were "wolves and sellers of the
divine grace, " and reform the Church: "Alas, that what Christ won upon
the hard wood of the Cross is spent upon harlots. " [ ]
The pope, however, continued in his own way, pressing the Visconti
hardly in the field, diplomatically waiting for the opportune moment to
do the will of God as he saw it, and especially waiting for the
Visconti to be conquered before finally defying the universal
opposition at Avignon and setting his course towards Italy and Rome. It
is a nice question -- hardly a historian's question -- what ought
Gregory XI to have done, or, better, what did he think God wanted him
to do? The messages from St. Bridget had clearly left him uneasy. But,
so far, his neglect of them and his use of the natural means, of arms
and diplomacy, and his preoccupation with the affairs of France and
England, had not brought upon him the judgments which St. Bridge. had
seemed to foretell. On the contrary, the pope's good offices, for which
the two kings had begged, and for the sake of which they had both
besought him to delay his journey to Rome, had resulted in the Truce of
Bmges (June 27, 1375) and a year's truce with the Visconti, made in
that same month, seemed about to bring peace to Italy too. All was now
ready for the voyage to Rome, but the pope's innumerable relatives won
new delays from him. Twice within a month the decision to sail was
countermanded, and then, on July 28, the expedition was put off until
the spring of the next year (1376).
But, in the autumn of 1375, the storm broke in central Italy. and all
that St. Bridget had foretold was speedily fulfilled to the letter. At
the heart of the storm was Florence's fear of what a papal-Visconti
alliance, with a French pope again at Rome, French legates and
governors through all the papal cities along her frontiers, might hold
in store for her. The summer was busy with efforts to knit together an
anti-papal league. A general rebellion was successfully engineered in
the pope's own territory. By the end of the year (1375) eighty of his
cities had gone over to the league. In March 1376 Bologna, too, joined
it. This was about the time that Gregory had finally hit upon for his
journey to Rome. Instead, he was once more caught up in the full
business of war, and on March 31, putting aside all Catherine's counsel
to rely on love, to work for peace alone, and her pleas for leniency,
the pope put Florence to the ban. Interdict, excommunication, and a
general command to Catholics everywhere to join in the war against her
-- if only by confiscating Florentine property wherever found. So began
the most bitter struggle of the pontificate.
" Sweet Christ on earth," St. Catherine now wrote to Gregory, "let us
think no more of friends and kinsmen, nor of temporal needs, but only
of virtue and of the exaltation of spiritual things." And in June the
saint made her appearance at the pope's court, envoy of the
Florentines, driven near to desperation by the losses to their commerce
and the ruin that seemed at hand. But a change of government in
Florence destroyed the saint's usefulness as an intercessor. "Believe
me, Catherine," the pope said to her, "the Florentines have deceived
and will deceive thee. . . if they send a mission it will be such that
it will amount to nothing." [ ] In part he was right; but it was also
true that the pope's own excessively harsh terms held up the
negotiations. It was hard for the saint to ask mercy for the
Florentines, now, as repentant children, when they had disowned her in
order the better to prepare a new campaign.
Catherine turned to the greater matter of the pope's return to Rome. In
one of her first audiences she spoke openly of the wickedness in the
curia, and of Gregory's tolerance of it, and when the pope asked for
her advice about the matter of Rome the saint finally convinced him
that she spoke in God's name, for she told him what none but himself
knew, how, in the conclave of 1370, he had secretly vowed to God that,
if elected, he would return to Rome.
From about this time (July 17, 1376) preparations really began to be
made for the voyage, and then for two months the saint fought the
cardinals for the soul of the pope, one only of them all -- d'Estaing
-- supporting her. They used all weapons against her, among them the
very subtle one of a "revelation" through a holy man that contradicted
Catherine's own message. But this time there were no further delays,
and on September 13,
1376, the last of the French popes left the great palace by the Rhone,
stepping manfully over the last obstacle of all, his old father, who
threw himself down at the threshold in a last desperate argument.
The voyage was stormy and disastrous. At Genoa there was even a
consistory to discuss whether it was not now obviously God's will that
Gregory should stay at Avignon. But Catherine also was at Genoa; and
the pope, too fearful of his cardinals to receive her publicly, went to
her by night, in disguise, to be strengthened in his purpose. On
October 29 he sailed from Genoa and, at long last, on January 17, 1377,
the pope landed from his galley in the Tiber before the great basilica
where lies the body of St. Paul.
"Come like a virile man, and without any fear. But take heed, as you
value your life," the saint had once written to Gregory XI, " not to
come with armed men, but with the Cross in your hand, like a meek lamb.
If you do so, you will fulfil the will of God; but if you come in
another wise, you would not fulfil but transgress it." [ ] Side by side
with the preparations for the great return, however, preparations had
also gone forward for the renewal of the war against Florence. A papal
army -- mercenaries from Brittany and England in part -- was raised,
and set under the command of the cardinal Robert of Geneva. As part of
the campaign against the great key city of Bologna they ravaged and
burnt right up to the city walls. Then (July 1376) they were defeated
at Panaro. Bologna still held firm. Next -- a fortnight only after
Gregory's arrival in Rome, and a week after his refusal to lower his
terms to Florence -- there took place the horrible massacre of the
civilian population at Faenza, for which Robert of Geneva must bear the
blame. All through the summer of 1377 the negotiations for peace
dragged on, and the war of skirmishes continued. The pope rejected St.
Catherine's plans "useful for the Church if they had been understood,"
[ ] -- but, at his wits' end for money to pay his troops, he again sent
the saint to Florence in the hope of inducing a surrender. Florence too
was desperate, and presently a congress had been assembled at Sarzana
to discuss a settlement. It had hardly begun its work when the news
came of Gregory's death, March 27, 1378. He was still two years short
of fifty.
Twelve days later the cardinals chose to succeed him an Italian,
Bartolomeo Prignani, Archbishop of Bari, who took the name of Urban VI
(April 8, 1378). Six months later these same cardinals, who had been
steadily drifting away from Urban since a fortnight or so after his
election, declared him no pope, and in a new conclave, at Fondi,
elected Robert of Geneva. He took the name of Clement VII. The division
of Christendom into two allegiances, to the popes of rival lines at
Rome and at Avignon, which then began, lasted for close on forty years.
|
|
