La chronique de Morigny, 1095-1152 (2ª éd.)

Description

Contains vivid descriptions of Innocent II's depositions of Antipope Anacletus II et al. at Lateran II, from Pope Innocent II (1130-43): The World vs. The City p. 311:

Shortly after the Second Lateran Council (1139), the chronicle of the French abbey of Morigny recorded a vivid account of the assembly.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.

2. ‘[A] Romani pontificis licencia ecclesiastici honoris celsitudo quasi feodalis juris consuetudine suscipitur, et sine ejus permissione legaliter non tenetur’, Chronique de Morigny , 72.

3. ‘[Q]uia inordinate persone inordinata sunt decreta, quodcumque ille statuerat destruimus, quoscumque exaltaverat degradamus, et quotquot consecraverat exordinamus et deponimus’, Chronique de Morigny , 74.

4. ‘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.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux spent the entire 8 years of the anti-papacy denouncing Anacletus! Anacletus was a student of heretic Abelard (who taught, D 368 ff., "the Holy Spirit is the soul of the world", "Christ did not assume flesh to free us from the yoke of the devil", "we have not contracted sin from Adam, but only punishment", "God neither ought nor is He able to prevent evil", etc.)!