Gregorian Reform is the reform of the papacy in the eleventh century after its most notable Pope, Gregory VII (1073-85). This reform was necessary because of the very difficult situation in which the papacy found itself in the 9th and 10th centuries. Some forty-four Popes are counted during this time. There were many anti-Popes and disputed elections. A few powerful families in Rome dominated the papacy which they regarded almost as their personal property. Lay control of the church was almost total through “lay investiture” and it was necessary to liberate the church from it. So at the centre of the Gregorian Reform was the desire to wrest the church from lay control; especially, to make sure that suitable men were appointed as bishops and parish priests rather than kings and local lords selecting their relatives and friends, or their loyal officers, for these posts. There was quite a widespread conviction, especially in Rome, that only the papacy had sufficient authority to confront powerful secular rulers and to carry out the necessary reforms. The strengthening of papal authority thus became central to the reform movement. The most determined of these reform minded Popes was Gregory VII, indeed the whole movement is usually called after him alone.

There is very little personal information available about Gregory, whose name before his election to the papacy was Hildebrand. He seems to have been a monk before he was catapulted into the ecclesiastical world of the time and became a significant figure of the century. With his name are associated not only the Gregorian Reform but also the “Investiture Dispute” which was about far more than the appointment to office of clergy by laymen but about the nature, place and role of the church in the world. Already knowledgeable about ecclesiastical affairs because he had served under previous Popes, he was elected Pope by popular acclaim after the death of his predecessor Alexander II in 1073. Immediately he set out to reform the church and the most important reform the church needed was to free it from the control of the laity. He redefined the relationship between clergy and laity, spiritual and worldly power. The contentious issue was the practice of lay investiture, the bestowal by a layman of ecclesiastical offices on a cleric, which was widely practised at that time. This brought Pope Gregory into conflict with the German king, Henry IV. At the Lenten Synod of 1075 Gregory forbade lay investiture and threatened everyone who practised it with excommunication. He also wrote his famous Dictatus Papae” a document of 27 propositions on papal power, which remained the cornerstone of papal power till 1870, when at the first Vatican Council the dogmas on the Pope were defined. Henry IV responded by deposing the Pope, calling him a ‘false monk’. The Pope reacted in the Lenten Synod of 1076 by excommunicating and deposing the king and released Henry’s subjects from their oath of loyalty. The king had to submit and he travelled with his young wife, his two-year-old son and his court over the Alps, in the midst of winter, to Canossa in Italy, where the Pope was staying and there, bare-footed, and in traditional penitential garb, the king appeared before the Pope, asking for pardon. The Pope, having forced Henry to prostrate himself on the ground in the form of a cross, released him from the ban and his royal status was restored. Of course the king neither forgave nor forgot the humiliation and in 1084 marched on Rome and deposed and exiled Gregory and installed an anti-Pope, Clement II. Gregory died in exile the next year, uttering the words, “I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity, so I die in exile.” The Gregorian Reform which also had other internal reform efforts had an epoch making effect on the church and it was the beginning of the rise of the power of the papacy and the establishment of the Christian society of the Middle Ages. The conflict ended in 1122 at the Concordat of Worms, when Henry V and Pope Calixtus II agreed to abolish lay investiture. The outcome seemed mostly a victory for the Pope and his claim that he was God’s chief representative in the world.