My Problem with Medieval Church Reform

In the eleventh century, Europe was blessed with a warm climate, high agricultural productivity, and population growth. It was also blessed with what is widely described as church reform, led by Pope Gregory VII. [1] Unfortunately, the century ended with the manifold tragedies of the Crusades and, as Crusaders set out for Jerusalem, massacres of Jews in the Rhineland. Was there a connection?

I am continually surprised that the struggle between the Church and secular monarchs is called “the Gregorian Reform movement.” [1] True, the pope framed it as a conflict between the spiritual and the material, but it seems patently to be a power struggle.

Beginning about 1075, Pope Gregory went on a campaign against two weaknesses of the Church. The first  was the unchastity and poor education of the clergy. (Until I took a course in the High Middle Ages, I had been unaware that clerical celibacy was an uncertain and controversial matter for the first 1000 years of Church history.) The Church  did not affirm clergy celibacy as canon law until 1139. Thus, in the eleventh century some parish priests were married (some even had concubines—or perhaps a concubine). Clergy were also often uneducated to the point where they could barely read the Mass, and some were corrupt. Gregory attempted to change those conditions, too.

Clergy reform may justify the name of reform, but the other problem was simony, the appointment of bishops and archbishops by secular rulers who received payments in return. Gregory wanted the Church to appoint the bishops. Perhaps he had a right to do so—but the struggle was mostly about power.

An iconic image of the  struggle was Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor, who had been  excommunicated  for trying to depose Gregory as pope, pleading  for reinstatement by going three times to the pope’s palace in a hair shirt and barefoot in the snow.  The pope relented but that didn’t keep Henry from re-taking the reins. “The issues of power, wealth and control had not changed just because Henry had been reconciled with Gregory,” says Joseph H. Lynch, who, in spite of the power issues, calls Gregory’s efforts “papal reform.”[2]

Norman Housley says that “the reformers were led by a pope who did not hesitate to authorize the use of violence against his Christian opponents with he thought peaceful means ineffective.” Furthermore, “On several occasions Gregory granted spiritual rewards to those who took up arms for his cause.”[3]

This does not seem spiritual to me. It does not seem like “reform.” And the power struggles may have set the stage for excessive religious activism. As Lynch states, the so-called reforms “stimulated a religious ferment that could not be bottled up when the kings and popes had compromised and signed treaties.”[4] That ferment fueled the Crusades and hostility toward Jews, who were viewed as “God’s enemies.” [5]

Some reform that was.

[1] C. H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in the Middle Ages, 4th edn. (London: Routledge, 2015), 121.

[2] Joseph H. Lynch, The Medieval Church: A Brief History (London: Longman, 1992), 144-145.

[3] Norman Housley, “Crusades against Christians,” in The Crusades, ed. Thomas F. Madden (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 74.

[4] Lynch, 148.

[5] Lynch, 150