St. Gregory VII

St. Gregory VII was born Hildebrand around 1015 at Sovana in southern Tuscany, Italy, reportedly the son of humble parents. Educated in Rome at a monastery on the Aventine Hill, he embraced monastic life and was formed in the spirit of the great reform movement associated with Cluny. His gifts marked him out early: for a quarter of a century before his own election he served successive popes as chaplain, treasurer, legate, and archdeacon of Rome, becoming the driving intelligence of the reform party in the Church. When Pope Alexander II died in 1073, the Roman clergy and people acclaimed Hildebrand pope by popular demand; he took the name Gregory VII. His pontificate became synonymous with what history calls the Gregorian Reform: a determined campaign against simony (the buying of church offices), against the violation of clerical celibacy, and above all against lay investiture, the practice by which kings and emperors appointed bishops and invested them with the symbols of spiritual office. For Gregory, the freedom of the Church, 'libertas Ecclesiae,' was the condition of her holiness. This conviction brought him into epic conflict with King Henry IV of Germany. When Henry defied papal decrees and declared Gregory deposed, the pope excommunicated the king, and in the winter of 1077 Henry famously stood as a penitent in the snow before the castle of Canossa until Gregory absolved him. The reconciliation did not last: Henry later marched on Rome, installed an antipope, and forced Gregory to withdraw under Norman protection to Salerno. There the exiled pope died on May 25, 1085, with words that became his epitaph: 'I have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile.' Gregory's tomb is in the cathedral of Salerno, Italy, where it may still be visited. Veneration of the uncompromising reformer grew slowly amid the politics of church and empire; he was beatified in 1584 and canonized in 1606 by Pope Paul V. His feast is kept on May 25. He is remembered as one of the greatest of the reforming popes, a monk who spent his life, at whatever cost, to free the Church from worldly control.