Pope Innocent II (1130-43): The World vs. The City
Description
Innocent II's depositions at Lateran II, from p. 311:
Shortly after the Second Lateran Council (1139), the chronicle of the French abbey of Morigny recorded a vivid account of the assembly [at the council].¹ When Pope Innocent II rose to address the fathers, he bemoaned the evil effects of schism and the problems created in the Church if the head itself was corrupt. Innocent made the point that ‘the height of ecclesiastical honour is received by the permission of the Roman pontiff, as if by the custom of feudal law, and without his permission it is not legally held’.² He further and rather ominously declared that canon law ought to be taken up as a weapon in time of ecclesiastical war. Then, after demonstrating that Anacletus had taken the papacy by usurpation, Innocent announced: ‘Because the decrees of an irregularly appointed person are irregular, whatever he had established we destroy, whomever he had exalted we degrade, and however many he had consecrated we unordain and depose’.³ In a dramatic ceremony, the pope called the creatures of the antipope forward by name and upbraided them ‘with indignation and reproach’. Next he ‘violently seized the pastoral staves from their hands, and shamefully pulled off the pontifical pallia, on which the highest dignity is based, from their shoulders, and also removed those rings by which betrothal to the church belonging to them is expressed, without regard for mercy’.
1 La chronique de Morigny (1095–1152), ed. L. Mirot, 2nd edn (Paris, 1912), 71–75.
‘[A] Romani pontificis licencia ecclesiastici honoris celsitudo quasi feodalis juris consuetudine susci- pitur, et sine ejus permissione legaliter non tenetur’, Chronique de Morigny , 72.
‘[Q]uia inordinate persone inordinata sunt decreta, quodcumque ille statuerat destruimus, quoscumque exaltaverat degradamus, et quotquot consecraverat exordinamus et deponimus’, Chronique de Morigny , 74.
‘His dictis, singulos quos reos cognoverat, propriis nominibus exprimens, eisque cum indignacione et jurgio exprobrans, pastorales baculos de manibus violenter arripuit, et pontificalia pallia, in quibus summa dignitas consistit, de humeris verecondose abstraxit, ipsos quoque anulos, in quibus ad ipsos pertinens ecclesie desponsacio exprimitur, sine respectu misericordie abstulit’, Chronique de Morigny , 74.
Also, this book questions the authenticity of the Second Lateran Council's canon against usury.
The pontificate of Innocent II (1130-1143) has long been recognized as a watershed in the history of the papacy, marking the transition from the age of reform to the so-called papal monarchy, when an earlier generation of idealistic reformers gave way to hard-headed pragmatists intent on securing worldly power for the Church. Whilst such a conception may be a cliché its effect has been to concentrate scholarship more on the schism of 1130 and its effects than on Innocent II himself. This volume puts Innocent at the centre, bringing together the authorities in the field to give an overarching view of his pontificate, which was very important in terms of the internationalization of the papacy, the internal development of the Roman Curia, the integrity of the papal state and the governance of the local church, as well as vital to the development of the Kingdom of Sicily and the Empire.
The case of Antipope Anacletus II vs. Pope Innocent II seems analogous to what's happening in the Church today. Pope Innocent was elected a mere 3 hours before Anacletus, and they both received episcopal consecration the same day. Anacletus, who had great clout from making his fortune off usury, drove Pope Innocent away from Rome; thus, Anacletus was considered the valid pope by nearly everyone. When Anacletus died eight years later, Pope Innocent II convened the Second Lateran Council, which annulled Anacletus's anti-papacy, reversed all the laws he enacted, and deposed the bishops and priests that Anacletus invalidly ordained.