Gregorian Reform - Overview

Overview

Although at each new turn the reforms were presented to contemporaries as a return to the old ways, they are often seen by modern historians as the first European Revolution.

The powers that the Gregorian papacy gathered to itself were summed up in a list called Dictatus papae about 1075 or somewhat later. The major headings of Gregorian reform can be seen as embodied in the Papal electoral decree (1059), and the resolution of the Investiture Controversy (1075–1122) was an overwhelming papal victory that by implication acknowledged papal superiority over secular rulers. Within the Church important new laws were pronounced on simony — the purchasing of positions relating to the church – and on clerical marriage.

The reforms are encoded in two major documents: Dictatus papae and the bull Libertas ecclesiae. The Gregorian reform depended in new ways and to a new degree on the collections of Canon law that were being assembled, in order to buttress the papal position, during the same period. Part of the legacy of the Gregorian Reform was the new figure of the Papal Legist, exemplified a century later by Pope Innocent III.

Gregory also had to avoid the Church ever slipping back into the seriously embarrassing abuses that had occurred in Rome, during the The Rule of the Harlots, between 900 and 1050. Pope Benedict IX had been elected Pope three times and had sold the Papacy. In 1054 the "Great Schism" had divided western European Christians from the eastern Greek Orthodox church. Given these events, the Church had to reassert its importance and authority to its followers.