Sacred Mysteries: Dante put him in hell, but Pope Celestine impressed Henry V, Christopher Howse discovers
A year before Agincourt, Henry V sent a couple of bishops over to Paris to fetch three monks back, in order to found a monastery at Sheen, near what is now called Richmond Palace. The monks belonged to an order founded by the most famous pope to have resigned – Celestine V.
He has been mentioned often this week, since the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI. “No Pope took the name Celestine again,” the Sun told its readers this week, “and he remained hated.” In fact he was soon canonised, in 1313, only 17 years after his death. Admittedly this might have surprised Dante, who had consigned him to Hell.
When the narrator of the Inferno reaches the vestibule of Hell he sees a crowd racing around after a flag. “I had not thought death had undone so many,” he remarks, in a line appropriated by T S Eliot for the crowd on London Bridge in The Wasteland.
Among them he recognises “him who made, through cowardice, the great refusal”. For these are the cowards, despised by both justice and mercy, and denied a place in Heaven or in Hell proper.
Dante blamed Celestine, because his resignation in 1294 let in the next pope, Boniface VIII, an enemy to the poet. Boniface repealed many of Celestine’s acts from his five-month reign, but corroborated his decree declaring that popes may resign. Only if Celestine was no longer pope could Boniface reign.
Poor old Celestine couldn’t win. If Dante called him a coward for abdicating, another poet, Jacopone da Todi (to whom is attributed the Stabat Mater), had satirised him for accepting the papacy in the first place.
Celestine was in his 80th year when a crowd of people sought out his hermitage to tell him that he’s been elected Pope. He was living on Mount Morrone, now in a national park, near Sulmona in the Abruzzo, under the calf of Italy’s boot. He was known as Pietro da Morrone, though his family name was Angelerio.
He’d been a hermit for six decades. To his regret, hundreds of people had been drawn to the neighbourhood by his reputed holiness, but he agreed to establish a religious order for them. There was a moratorium on founding new orders at the time, but the pope (Urban IV) agreed to Pietro’s foundation coming under the umbrella of the Benedictines.
Religious radicalism was in the air. So-called Spiritual Franciscans were attempting to live in utter poverty, like Francis of Assisi (who died in 1226, when Pietro was 11). The posthumous followers of Joachim of Fiore expected a new Age of the Holy Spirit. The papacy was wedged between ambitious kings and feuding Italian princes.
Pietro did not want to be pope. He had sought a quiet, life, if not exactly a holiday. He fasted for weeks on end and got up in the middle of the night to pray.
He was elected not by the 117 or so cardinals eligible today, but by the only 12 cardinals in office. Their vote broke a two-year stalemate.
Charles II, King of Naples, and his son, the titular King of Hungary, held the reins of a donkey upon which the perplexed hermit was led to Aquila, and crowned (as shown in the 16th-century painting, above). He spent the next months drowning in paper and curial intrigue. Though Bishop of Rome (as Pope) he had to live in Naples. Chaotic as his reign was, I can’t see that it was worse than the ruthless calculation of his successor Boniface.
Having successfully promulgated a decree confirming that popes could resign, he did so, and fled into the mountains. He was said to be heading for Greece when Boniface’s men caught him after a few months. He spent the rest of his life locked up, dying in the castle of Fumone on May 19, 1296.
After he was declared a saint, his relics were honoured at Aquila, where Pope Benedict went to pray, after the earthquake of 2009. He left a pallium, the scarf of office, at his tomb, and visited again the next year. Now he is seeking his own hermitage.
This article originally appeared in : Surrey monastery of a retired pope : telegraph
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