The Church and the Empire: Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304Medley, D. J. (Dudley Julius)
Religion
The Church and the Empire: Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304
Medley, D. J. (Dudley Julius)
Church history -- Middle Ages, 600-1500
Meanwhile a crisis at Rome quite overshadowed the German disputes.
Honorius II died in February, 1130. Immediately the party of the
Frangipani, who had stood around him, met and proclaimed a successor
as Innocent II. This was irregular, and in any case the act was that
of a minority of the Cardinals. It must have been, therefore, with
some confidence in the justice of their cause that the opposition
party met at a later hour, and by the votes of a majority of the
College of Cardinals elected the Cardinal Peter Leonis, the grandson
of a converted Jew and formerly a monk of Cluny, as Anacletus II.
There was no question of principle at stake; it was a mere struggle of
factions. The partisans of Innocent charged Anacletus with the most
heinous crimes. Clearly he was ambitious and able, wealthy and
unscrupulous. Moreover, for the moment he was successful. By whatever
means, he gradually won the whole of Rome; and Innocent, deserted,
made his way by Pisa and Genoa to Burgundy, and so to France. His
reception by the Abbey of Cluny was a great strength to his cause, and
he there consecrated the new church, which had been forty years in
building and was larger than any church yet erected in France. In
order that the schism in the Papacy should not be reproduced in every
bishopric and abbey of his kingdom, Louis VI of France summoned a
Council at Etampes, near Paris, which should decide between the
respective merits of the rival Popes.
[Sidenote: Bernard of Clairvaux.]
To this Council a special invitation was sent to the great monk who
for the next twenty years dominates the Western Church and completely
over-shadows the contemporary Popes. We have of seen that it was the
advent of Bernard and his large party at the monastery of Citeaux in
1113 that saved the newly founded Order from premature collapse.
Although only twenty-four years of age, Bernard was entrusted with the
third of the parties sent forth in succession to seek new homes for
the Order, and he and his twelve companions settled in a gloomy valley
in the northernmost corner of Burgundy, which was henceforth to be
known as Clairvaux. Here the hardships suffered by the monks in their
maintenance of the strict Benedictine rule and the entire mastery over
his bodily senses obtained by their young abbot built up a reputation
which reacted on the whole body of the Cistercians, and soon made them
the most revered and widespread of all the monastic Orders. Bernard
himself became the unconscious worker of many miracles: he was the
friend and adviser of great potentates in Church and State, and
without the least effort on his own part he was gradually acquiring a
position as the arbiter of Christendom.
[Sidenote: Acceptance of Innocent II.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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