Celestine II, Pope

CELESTINO II, PAPA. - Guido di Città di Castello was appointed by Onorio II cardinal deacon of S. Maria in via Lata and was transferred by Innocenzo II to the presbyteral title of S. Marco. After carrying out intense activity as legate, accompanying his Pontiff and acting against Anacleto II and in the Curia, he was called to succeed Innocenzo himself on 26 September 1143, for the few months of life that remained to him. In his youth he had been a pupil of Pietro Abelardo in Paris; as pontiff, he summoned to Rome his former fellow pupil Roberto Pulleyn, who had become a master of Sacred Scripture and Aristotelian philosophy, and raised him to the cardinalate. He governed the Church amid the disturbances of the popular revolution led by Arnaldo da Brescia and died (3 March 1144) in the fortified cloister of the Palladio (S. Maria in Pallara), on the Palatine, where, some years earlier, the atrocious scene of violence that had inaugurated the pontificate of Gelasio II had taken place.