Baring-Gould’s sources: Canonized by Clement V., in 1313. Authorities: — His early life was written by himself. A metrical life by his contemporary, James Cardinal of S. George, another metrical account of the election and coronation of Boniface VIII., a metrical account of the canonization of Peter Celestine, both by the same Cardinal of S. George. A prose life compiled from the above and other contemporary accounts by Peter de Alliaco (d. 1495). AlsoPtolemyde Lucca or de Fiadonibus(i327)in his Annals, and Historia Ecclesiastica. Ptolemy was a witness of several of the events in the brief reign of this pope.] “ The names of my parents were Angelerius and Maria/' says S. Peter, “ they were just before God, as I trust, and were praised among men; simple and upright, and fearing God; humble and peaceable, not rendering evil for evil; but giving alms and showing hospitality to the poor. After the similitude of the patriarch Jacob, they begat twelve Mayigo S. Peter Celestme. 289 sons, and ever they asked of God, that one of them might be his true servant.” The childhood of Peter, one of these sons, was full of visions and marvels, which all tended to foster his desire of leading a solitary and religious life. Yet he was retarded by fear. He thought that a hermit’s * life in a lone place must be fearful at night, and he shuddered at the prospect of dreams, and weird sights and sounds, far from the dwellings of men. He was twenty before he mastered this fear, and then he set out with a companion, somewhat older than himself. They had not gone far along a mountainous road, before his comrade changed his mind, and deserted him. Peter pursued his way till he came to a bridge; the night was falling, the wind moaned and filled the young man with alarm. But plucking up his courage, he ran across the bridge, and entering a chapel at the end of it, dedicated to S. Nicolas, implored courage to overcome his natural timidity. Near this chapel, in a solitary place among the rocks, he heard there was an ancient abandoned hermitage. It was then winter, and great snow-flakes fell and drifted and rushed in eddies about the mountain side. Two peasant women, compassionating the young man, endeavoured to dissuade him from seeking the hermitage, but he resisted their kindly intentions and persevered. He found the hermitage empty, save for the snow which had been swept in. He entered, and cast himself on the ground, hugging two loaves he had bought and brought with him. In the night he was solaced with visions of angels showering red roses about him. But after a few days he found a large rock, and he burrowed beneath it, and made himself a cell, in which he could not stand upright, and in this he spent three years, among toads, lizards, and scorpions. Sometimes when he slept toads would creep into his bosom, and when he awoke, he shook them out, by loosing his belt. “ And,” says the historian, “ when he saw them spitting at his feet, he knew they were toads/' After three years spent in this miserable hole, he went to Monte Moroni, and found a cave there in which he took up his abode, and at this time he was ordained priest, that he might minister to those who gathered around him as his disciples, or came on pilgrimages to consult him. But he soon wearied of this new retreat, and not liking his companions, he fled away and found a spacious cavern among the rocks of Monte Magella, in whose curved sides echoed the merry bells of a distant church, to his no small wonder. He was soon discovered and followed by his disciples, and they planted green bushes before the yawning mouth of the cave, and found it right pleasant there on a burning summer’s day to see the light come in green and cool through the leaves, and listen to the echo of the distant bells. And near to the cave they erected a little chapel, on a ledge where they noticed a dove loved to rest, and in the chapel they placed an altar, where the hermit priest said his mass daily. The chapel was of logs and rudely built, but it was the gate of heaven to many who worshipped there. And when Peter Moroni turned at the altar to give benediction, through the rude door he saw a pleasant sunny picture, a grassy foreground sprinkled with harebells quivering in the mountain air, bold precipices, their mossy ledges blue with gentian, and ancient pines clinging to the rock and balancing themselves above a gorge. But in winter the scene was changed. The rocks were glazed with frozen streams, the rents in the mountain sides choked with snow, and the wind heaped the white drifts about the cavern, and penetrated to the interior, freezing the brothers, so that some lost their fingers, and one lost both hands through frost-bite and subsequent mortification. But a change was to take place in the life of Peret May i9.] 5. j Peter Celestine. 291 Moroni for which he was quite unprepared, so unexpected was it.
Rome was torn by factions. The Orsini and the Colonnas were at the head of two powerful opposed 'parties. Pope Nicolas IV. had closed his short pontificate in disaster, shame and unpopularity. The total loss of the last Christian possessions in the East, the fatal and ignominious close of the Crusades, the disgrace thereby which was supposed to have fallen on all Christendom, but with especial weight on its head, bowed Nicolas down in shame and sorrow. Italy was a prey to civil war, and the pope had become enslaved to the Colonnas and favoured their schemes of aggrandizement. There were acts in these terrible wars that raged in almost every part of Italy, which might have grieved the heart of a wise and humane pontiff more than the loss of the Holy Land. The mercy of. Christendom might seem at a lower ebb than its valour. Nicolas is said to have died in sorrow and humiliation; he died accused by the Guelphs of unpapal Ghibellinism, still more on account of his favour to the Colonnas, Ghibelline by descent and by tradition, and hereafter to become more obstinately, furiously, and fatally Ghibelline in their implacable feud with Boniface VIII.1 Nicolas IV. died on the 4th of April, 1292. Only twelve cardinals met to form the conclave for the election of his successor. Six of these cardinals were Romans, of these two were Orsini, and two were Colonnas; four Italians; two French. Each of the twelve might aspire to the supreme dignity. The Romans prevailed in numbers, ' but were separated by implacable hostility; on one side stood the Orsini, on the other the Colonnas. Three 1 Guelph and Ghibelline were names given to the papal and the imperial factions whose conflicts destroyed the peace of Italy from the rath to the end of the 15th century.
times they met without being able to come to an election. The heats of June, and a dangerous fever, drove them out of Rome; and Rome became such a scene of disorder, feud, and murder, that they dared not re-assemble within the walls. Two rival senators, an Orsini and a Colonna, were at the head of the two factions. Above a year had elapsed, when the conclave agreed to meet again at Perugia. The contest lasted eight months longer. Charles, king of Naples, came to Perugia to overawe the conclave by his personal presence. No one of the cardinals would yield his post to his adversary • yet all seemed resolute to confine the nomination to their own body. Matters had come to a dead lock, when a sudden and unexpected mode of solving the difficulty was proposed and readily accepted by all as a means of disappointing, the opposite faction, if not of satisfying their own. Latino Malebranca, cardinal of Ostia, designedly, or accidentally, spoke of the wonderful virtues of the hermit Peter Moroni; the weary conclave listened with interest. It was in that perplexed and exhausted state, when men seize desperately on any strange counsel to extricate themselves from their difficulty. Peter Moroni was unanimously elected to fill the chair of S. Peter. The fatal sentence was hardly uttered when the brief unanimity ceased. Some of the cardinals began to repent or be ashamed of their precipitate decree. No one of them would undertake the office of bearing the tidings of his elevation to the pope. The deputation consisted of the archbishop of Lyons, two bishops, and two notaries of the court.
The place of Moroni’s retreat was a cave in a wild mountain, above the pleasant valley of Snlmona. The ambassadors of the conclave with difficulty found guides to conduct them to the solitude. As they toiled up the rocks, they were overtaken by Cardinal Colonna, who had come to take advantage of any opportunity that might present itself of influencing the simple-minded pope to favour his interests and those of his family and faction. The ambassadors found an old man with long shaggy beard, sunken eyes, overhung with heavy brows, and lids swollen with perpetual weeping, pale, hollow cheeks, and limbs meagre with fasting. They fell on their knees before him, and Peter Moroni, the hermit, saw an archbishop, a cardinal, and two bishops, prostrate before him, hailing him as head of the Church. He stared through the bars that closed his den, blank and bewildered, and thought it was a dream. But when he knew that all this was sober earnest, his terror and reluctance knew no bounds, and he protested with tears his utter inability to cope with the affairs, and to administer the sacred trust, that had thus unexpectedly devolved upon him.
The hermit in vain tried to escape; he was brought back with respectful force, and guarded with reverential vigilance The king of Naples, accompanied by his son, hastened to do honour to his holy subject, and secure him as an useful ally. The hermit-pope was conducted from his lowly cave to the monastery of Santo Spirito, at the foot of the mountain. Over his shaggy sackcloth the hermit put on the gorgeous attire of the pontiff, and followed by a train of his brother hermits, he entered the city of Aquila riding on an ass, with a king on each side of him to hold his bridle.
If there ‘had been more splendid, never was there so popular an election. Two hundred thousand spectators, (of whom the historian, Ptolemy of Lucca, was one), crowded the streets. In the evening the pope was compelled again and again to come to the window to bestow his benediction on the enthusiastic crowd. But already the cardinals might gravely reflect on their [May ig.
strange election. Peter refused to go to Perugia, and even to Rome, and they declined to accompany him to Naples, whither King Charles for state policy was bent on drawing him. Two only, Hugh of Auvergne, and Napoleon Orsini, accompanied him to Aquila. But the way in which the pope began to use his vast powers still more appalled and offended them. He bestowed the offices in his court and about his person on rude Abruzzese hermits, whose virtues he knew, but who were unknown to political intrigue and party faction. High at once in his favour rose the French prelate, Hugh de Billiome, cardinal of S. Sabina, who had been the first to follow Malebranca in the acclamation of Pope Moroni. On the death of Malebranca, Hugh was raised to the bishopric of Ostia and Velletri, and became dean of the College of Cardinals. Large pensions, charged on great abbeys in France, gilded his elevation, and the Frenchman seemed destined to rule with undivided sway over the feeble and simple old man. The Italians looked with undisguised jealousy and aversion on the foreign prelate, whose influence they dreaded. Cardinal Napoleon Orsini assisted at the inauguration, gave to the pope the scarlet mantle, the mitre set with gold and jewels • and it was he who announced to the people that Peter had taken the name of Ccelestine V. The foot of the lowly hermit was kissed by kings, cardinals, bishops, nobles. The number of Ihe clergy present caused singular astonishment. The cardinals, though reluctant, would not allow the coronation to proceed without them. They came slowly and in unwilling haste.
A few months showed that meekness, humility, holiness, unworldliness might make a saint, but they were not the virtues best calculated to adorn a pope at that period, when intrigue, party-strife, and political entanglements, needed a clear head, a firm will, and a resolute hand, to May i9 guide ^the vessel of S. Peter. Coelestine V. was one swayed by his advisers rather than one capable of directing events. To Naples he had been led, as it were, in submissive triumph, by King Charles; he took up his abode in the royal palace, an unsuspecting prisoner, treated with the most ostentatious veneration. So totally did the harmless Coelestine surrender himself to his royal protector, that he stubbornly refused to leave Naples. His utter incapacity for business soon appeared; he lavished offices, dignities, bishoprics, with profuse hand; he granted and revoked grants, bestowed benefices vacant, or about to be vacant. He was duped by the officers of his court, and gave the same benefices over and over again: but still the greater share fell to his brethren from the Abruzzi, and in this he acted wisely and well, for he knew these men to be faithful and pious. His officers issued orders of all kinds in his name. He shrank from publicity, loving retirement, and when he was required for the ceremonial duties of his office, the old man was found weary and weeping before the altar of his oratory. His weakness made him as prodigal of his power as of his gifts. At the dictation of King Charles he created at once thirteen new cardinals, thus outnumbering the actual conclave, all in the French and Neapolitan interest, thus disturbing or overthrowing the balance of parties in that assembly. Unsuspicious of the designs of the king, he re-enacted the conclave law of Gregory X., which required the papal election to take place immediately on the death of a pope, and the complete seclusion of the cardinals till a successor was chosen. This King Charles was eager to see carried into effect, that on the death of Coelestine V., whom he was resolved to retain in Naples, the nomination of his successor might be under Neapolitan influence.
The weary man became anxious to lay down the heavy burden his shoulders had never been fitted to bear. Two of his new cardinals were old Abruzzi companions, members of his congregation, and he appointed them that they might be his constant associates in the cell he had constructed in the palace, where they might fast and pray together. He issued a bull organizing the congregation of solitaries who had gathered around him in the mountains, into a religious Order, called after him Celestines, and he made them independent of episcopal authority, depending solely on the Apostolic see. He even attempted to reduce the whole Order of S. Benedict [father of Western monks (d. c. 547), author of the Rule] to his rule, and passing through Monte Cassino, he persuaded the abbot to abandon the black habit for that of his Order, which was grey. He sent fifty of his monks to Monte Cassino, appointed a superior from among them, and exiled those Benedictines [monks following the Rule of St. Benedict] who refused to submit to the change. The majority waited with submission till the end of his pontificate, when they reverted to their ancient rule. But a more serious mistake was his giving the Archbishopric of Leon, with the right to administer both the spiritualities and the temporalities [the lands and income attached to a bishopric], to Louis, second son of Charles, king of Naples, a youth aged twenty-one, who was not even in minor orders [the lower ranks below deacon, such as reader and acolyte, abolished in 1972].
On all sides rose murmurs, and none were more sensible of his incapacity to govern the Church than the humble old man who had been so suddenly elevated to this place of responsibility. Advent approached, and he could not endure the thought of that holy season being interrupted by the din of politics and the excitement of business. He drew out a bull empowering three cardinals to administer the affairs of the Church during Advent, intending to retire into his cell, shut the door, and be alone with God and his own heart. But Cardinal Rossi Orsini, hearing of this, fortunately arrested the Pope’s hand before the bull was signed and sealed, and warned him on no account to run S. Peter Celestine.
such a risk as to constitute three popes at a time. The old man submitted with a sad sigh. But now all his mind was bent on resignation of his office. To this he was urged by several of the cardinals, who assured him that his unfitness was ruining the Church and imperilling his own soul. “ Oh wretched man that I am ! ” cried the aged man, weeping. “ They tell me that I have all power on earth over souls, and yet I cannot be sure of the salvation of my own. Why may I not cast off this burden, too heavy for me to bear? God asks of no man to perform impossibilities, and for this I am unfit. I see the cardinals divided; I hear complaints made against me on all sides. O that I might go back and rest in my solitude.”
So he made up his mind to abdicate. But such a proceeding little accorded with the schemes of King Charles; and he resolved to frustrate it by appealing to the conscience of the Pope. A solemn procession was appointed from the great church of Naples to the royal palace where the Pope resided; in it were many bishops and a great multitude of people. On their arrival before the windows of the Pope, the whole procession cried out for his benediction. Coelestine came to the window, then one of the bishops in, the procession besought an audience on behalf of this great multitude. It was granted; then falling on his knees he supplicated the Pope in the name of the king, the clergy, and all the people of Naples not to abandon them, but to remain their pastor, exercising the office wherewith he was entrusted by God. The Pope faltered, and gave his reluctant consent. Then all broke into a joyful Te Deum, and the procession returned to the cathedral.
This was at the beginning of December, 1294. The king thought that the danger was overpassed. But on a sudden, on S. Lucy’s day, the conclave was summoned. The Pope sat in his scarlet mantle, and with the tiara on % jgi bis head. Suddenly he drew forth a written abdication, and presented it to the cardinals. He alleged his age, his rude manners and ruder speech, his incapacity, his inexperience, as causes of his abdication. He confessed humbly his manifold errors, and entreated the conclave to bestow upon Christendom a pastor not liable to so many infirmities. The conclave urged the Pope first, while his authority was yet full and above appeal, to issue a constitution declaring that a pope might at any time lay down his dignity, and that the cardinals were at liberty to receive that voluntary demission of the popedom. No sooner was this done than Coelestine retired; he stripped off at once the cumbrous magnificence of his papal robes, and with it seemed to lay aside the care that had weighed him down, Joyously the old man returned to the conclave in his coarse and ragged habit of brown serge; and the cardinals were melted to tears at the sight.
As soon as he could, the discrowned pope withdrew to his old mountain hermitage. He had occupied the Holy See five months and a few days since his election, and since his consecration three months and a half. His abdication, in his own time, was viewed in a different light by different minds. None could question his sanctity, his holy simplicity and angelic purity of aim, but men differed in their opinions as to the propriety of his resignation. The monastic writers held it up as the most perfect example of Christian perfection • but the scorn of men has been expressed in the undying verse of Dante, who condemned him who was guilty of the baseness of the “ great refusal ” to that circle of hell where are those disdained alike by mercy and justice, on whom the poet would not condescend to look. But Petrarch, in his declamation on the duty of a solitary life, has counteracted this adverse sentence by his poetic praise. Assuredly the act of Coelestine was no contemptuous rejection of a great May ig.
S, Peter Celestine. place offered him by God, but was the natural result of the weariness, the regret of an old man suddenly wrenched from all his habits and pursuits and plunged in the turmoil of a life for which he was unfitted by nature and by training. The old man had returned to his mountain cave, and hoped there to lay his bones in peace. But it was not so to be. He was succeeded on the papal throne by Benedetto Gaetani, who assumed the name of Boniface VIII. At once a hostile party manifested itself, and the new pope feared lest the name of Coelestine should be used as an excuse for revolt against his supremacy. Boniface was not the man to allow any advantage to his adversaries, and adversaries he knew well that he had, and would have more, and these more formidable, if they could gain possession of the person of Coelestine. Coelestine had abandoned the pomp and anthority, he could not shake off the dangers and troubles, which belonged to his former state. The solitude, in which he hoped to live and die in peace, was closely watched. Once he escaped, and hid himself among some other hermits in a wood. But he could not elude the emissaries of Boniface. He received an alarming warning of danger, and fled to the sea coast, in order to take refuge in the untrodden mountain fastnesses of Dalmatia. His little vessel was cast back by contrary winds; he was taken and sent, by order of Boniface, to Anagni. All alone the road, for above one hundred and fifty miles, the people, deeply impressed with the sanctity of Coelestine, crowded around him with perilous homage. Some of the more zealous implored him to resume the pontificate. The humility of Coelestine did not forsake him for an instant; everywhere he professed that his resignation was voluntary, rendered necessary by his incapacity. He was brought into the presence of Boniface. Like the meanest son of the Church, he fell down at the feet of the pope; his only prayer, a prayer urged with tears, was that he might be permitted to return and rest unmolested in his mountain hermitage. Boniface addressed him in harsh terms. He was committed to safe custody in the castle of Fumone, watched day and night by soldiers, like a prisoner of state. His treatment is described as more or less severe, according as the writer is more or less favourable to Boniface. By one account his cell was so narrow that he had not room to move; where his feet stood when he celebrated mass by day, there his head reposed at night. He obtained with difficulty permission for two of his brethren to be with him; but so unwholesome and noisome was the place, that they were obliged to resign their charitable office. According to another statement the narrowness of his cell was his own choice \ his brethren were allowed free access to him; he suffered no insult, but was treated with the utmost humanity and respect. Death released him before long from his spontaneous or enforced wretchedness. He was seized with a fever, generated perhaps by the unhealthy confinement, accustomed as he had been to the pure mountain air. He died May 19th, 1296, and was buried with ostentatious pomp in the church of Ferentino, that the world might know that Boniface now reigned without a rival. Immediately on the death of Boniface, the canonization of Ccelestine was urgently demanded. It was granted by Clement V. in 1313.
