The good feeling between the two, however, was short-lived. Henry, smarting from the indignity he had to endure, struck back at the pope when he had the chance, invading Rome and forcing Gregory into bitter exile seven years later.
“How many divisions does the Pope have?” Joseph Stalin once asked. The question, though sardonic, got to the heart of papal authority. Nowhere, I would argue, was the issue joined more momentously than in the snows of Canossa. Indeed, I would rank it among the half-dozen most dramatic moments in the history of the popes. (The other moments, in case you were wondering, are the upside-down crucifixion of St. Peter; Pope Leo the Great’s visit to Attila the Hun outside Rome to persuade the barbarian ruler to leave the Imperial City alone; Pope Julius’s assumption of an army to quell unrest; and the unsuccessful attempt on the life of John Paul II).
The issues that Gregory confronted during his papacy bedeviled the church for the next few centuries as well, even down to the present day: simony, lay investiture, and clerical celibacy. In the evolving understanding of the relationship between Church and state, the battle between the pope and the emperor didn’t settle matters, but it made matters impossible to ignore.
For a quarter-century, Hildebrand had been the power behind the throne for six different popes, all of whom came to respect his administrative ability and integrity. The former quality might have endeared him to the successors of St. Peter, but the latter asset made him something more astounding: the clear favorite as pope for the populace.
The legend of his selection as pope was completely out of character with the way affairs were already being conducted in the highest reaches of the Church in this age, as political horsetrading took place to secure this office. Instead, right during the funeral of Pope Alexander II, the crowd began to chant, “Hildebrand shall be pope!” His earnest protestations that he wasn’t worthy of the position proved unavailing with the College of Cardinals, who immediately fell behind the crowd’s lead and elected Hildebrand by acclamation.
Less than two years later, Gregory was confiding to his friend Abbot Hugh of Cluny, France, that he felt overwhelmed by the challenges facing him: "The Eastern Church has fallen away from the Faith and is now assailed on every side by infidels. Wherever I turn my eyes--to the west, to the north, or to the south--I find everywhere bishops who have obtained their office in an irregular way, whose lives and conversation are strangely at variance with their sacred calling; who go through their duties not for the love of Christ but from motives of worldly gain. There are no longer princes who set God's honour before their own selfish ends, or who allow justice to stand in the way of their ambition.”
As archdeacon of Rome for the past 14 years, Gregory knew as well as anyone how much turmoil the Church was enduring. The fall of the Roman Empire had left a vacuum of order that only the Church had been able to fill. Later, as new European rulers struggled to unite the fragmented realms that dotted the continent, they sought papal blessing on their power.
At the same time, for all the need these rulers felt for the Church, they also saw Church officials as elements to be used as part of their own power structure. They would couple rights to temporal property and duties with their own conferring of the bishop’s pastoral staff and ring. Frequently, they appointed friends as bishops. This made eminent sense to them, for in the loyalty-based feudal system they could have greater certainty of allegiance to their rule. Henry IV of Germany, a twentysomething royal, was one of these believers in what came to be called lay investiture.
The principle did not, however, make sense to many Church reformers, particularly Gregory. At this point, the hereditary nature of feudal lordships and vassals made particularly thorny the issue of married priests and bishops. In particular, during the 10th century “Rule of the Harlots,” several popes became strongly associated with the corrupt aristocratic family the Theophylacti, and especially wife Theodora and her two daughters, who exerted undue influence over papal elections through marriages, affairs and conspiracies. With simony, the buying and selling of church offices, also rampant, both within the Church itself and among rulers making ecclesiastical appointments, scandal loomed.
At his first synod a year after becoming pontiff, Gregory threw down the gauntlet to the German bishops, denouncing the simony and clerical marriage so widespread among them. They resisted and, when Henry refused to remove one bishop who owed his office to simony, Gregory sought to counteract him.
Gregory’s moves were uncommonly bold. He not only excommunicated Henry—declaring his relationship with the Church and its community gravely impaired—but also that the emperor’s subjects were, in these circumstances, not bound by any loyalty to him. While rulers had removed popes before, no pontiff had ever dared to depose a monarch.
The excommunication by Gregory gave leave for German bishops to rebel openly against Henry. He could not retain power without making peace with the pope. Yet, though he had invited Gregory north into Germany, the pope, suspicious of his intentions, stopped in northern Italy, at the nearly impregnable castle at Canossa possessed by his friend and protectress Matilda.
In his 1983 history of the Papacy, Keepers of the Keys, Nicholas Cheetham disputes the commonly held notion that Henry stood barefoot out in the snow. The monarch was, however, dressed as a penitent before the castle gate, and stayed there for three days running.
At last, convinced of Henry’s sincerity, Gregory met with him, held a mass of forgiveness and lifted the excommunication. Henry, however, annoyed at subjecting himself to the pope, went back on his word as soon as he got back to Germany.
Three years later, Gregory renewed Henry’s excommunication. For the next four years, Henry sought to enter Rome and replace Gregory with his own anti-pope. Gregory’s own position had become more precarious, as the Italian populace had wearied of war. The last straw came at the moment of what should have been the pope’s triumph, when Gregory’s Norman ally, Robert Guiscard, returned to Rome with such overwhelming forces that Henry and his anti-Pope, Clement, were obliged to withdraw. But Guiscard’s troops, excited by the prospect of the ancient city’s riches, looted Rome and massacred many of its inhabitants--who, at this very moment, also watched in horror as their homes were consumed by fire.
The Romans blamed Gregory for their plight, and now he was forced to leave himself. He died a year later, in 1085, a dozen years into his pontificate, with his last words sounding like the prophet Jeremiah, wearied and beaten down because of his love of God: “I have loved justice and hated iniquity; that is why I am dying in exile.”
Gregory did indeed hate iniquity, but he did not see that his attempt to protect the autonomy of the Church provided a justification for papal supremacy that later pontiffs would exploit. The attempt to root out simony foundered under his successors, and the practice became a key charge in Martin Luther’s furious indictment of the Church in the 16th century.
The most enduring fruits of Gregory’s actions were bans on lay investiture and married clergy. In the centuries since Canossa, the Church continued to be hard-pressed by temporal powers, but it is difficult to think how much worse its plight might have been if it had left to kings the ability to appoint bishops. Moreover, for all the clear difficulties that a lack of married clergy present to the Church, it is also the case that it would have been far more difficult to send married ministers instead of single men with no family ties around the world to evangelize.
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