Innocent II, Pope

INNOCENT II, Pope. - Gregory, of the Roman family — indeed Trastevere family — of the Papareschi, was perhaps a monk in his youth, then for many years cardinal deacon of the title of St. Angelo, elected by Paschal II around 1116 (though there are sources that say he was elected as early as the time of Urban II).

He accompanied Gelasius II to France and was present, it seems, at the election of Callistus II at Cluny. But the episode to which he owed his emergence, from then on, in the College of Cardinals, was his presence, together with Lambert, bishop of Ostia and his predecessor in the pontificate, at the agreements of Worms, in September 1122, as representative of Callistus II, to whom, in Rome, he later reported on the Concordat that had been reached. Already, moreover, in 1119, as soon as Callistus was elected, under the influence of the moderating ideas of the Burgundian Church — a natural intermediary between the two powers, just as from its bosom had come the highest affirmation of the internal reform of the Church — the same negotiators had met, at Verdun and at Metz, with Henry V, though without any result. As legate in France, together with Peter Pierleoni, later his competitor for the papacy, Gregory of St. Angelo carried out active work of governing the local churches, between 1120 and 1124, also gathering several synods (at Chartres, at Beauvais, at Clermont and at Vienne). Perhaps preceding his colleague of the legation, having returned to Rome, he could have been present at the election of Honorius II, and at the renewed episode of violence, caused by the Frangipane, resolved to have a candidate of their own on the papal throne. That conclave was thus the immediate preparation of the schism that, upon the death of Honorius, was to break out in Rome and in the very bosom of the Church. A friend of the new Pontiff, and much esteemed in his circle, where the chancellor, card. Aimeric, predominated, Gregory remained in the foreground during the not-long pontificate. What was not the case with Pierleoni: he, his family and his faction had — according to the author of the Vita Honorii, Pandulf — much to complain of the open aversion of the Pontiff. This explains how, as his end drew near, the Pierleoni, and their friends in the College of Cardinals, did not cease to stir up minds so that the case of December 1124 might no longer be repeated. But likewise — only with greater secrecy and cunning — card. Aimeric was agitating against them.

Preceded by truly unavowable negotiations, aimed more at misleading one party or the other, the death of Honorius II, which had occurred a few days earlier in the fortified convent of S. Andrea in Citta. Scouri, was immediately followed, in the night between 12 and 13 February, in the absence of most of the cardinals, by the election (in angulo, in abscondito, in tenebris, Peter, cardinal bishop of Porto and dean of the College, would say) of Gregory of St. Angelo, enthroned in the early morning in the Lateran with the name of I. II.

Trusting in its undisputed majority, the other party gathered (whether the meeting had already been prepared or was hurriedly convened at the first news, brought by the other Peter, the Pisan cardinal of St. Susanna) in the late morning of the 13th at St. Mark's. To one election another was opposed: and the word fell to violence. Soon, while from the two chanceries the polemic was fed (based also on an error of interpretation of the Statutum de electione Pontificis of Nicholas II), the Pierleoni, with their Anacletus II, prevailed in Rome and I. was forced, having left the fortified monastery of the Palladium, to flee, toward the middle of May, from the Tiber port for Pisa and Genoa, toward France. This was to be his fortune: even before he arrived, the fame of the exiled and fugitive Pontiff had made its mark on the still recent tradition of misfortune and exile that, from the first reforming Popes to Gelasius II, had always given new vigor to the Church and aroused new enthusiasms around it, and the receptions of the rival maritime cities were a presage that, in losing Rome, I. II was gaining the world. A Council having been convened at Etampes by Louis VI the Fat, king of France, the opinion of St. Bernard of Cîteaux prevailed in it, openly favorable to I. He learned of it while, having slowly gone back up the Rhone, he had reached Cluny. Even if Aquitaine — with its legate, bishop Gerard — was to remain hostile, the rest of France was to follow I. and, through Norbert of Magdeburg, imperial chaplain, Lothair III and Germany were to be won to the cause; while, from a meeting of Henry I of England with St. Bernard, the adherence of the English Church would also come. Extremely intense was the chancery activity of I. from France, also directed to the Churches (especially those he had visited) of Italy, where, not only in Rome, the situation remained unfavorable: indeed the Milanese and Aquileian Churches had declared for Anacletus, and the great Roger, the builder of the Norman monarchy of southern Italy, consecrated precisely by Anacletus, had also skillfully been bound to the Pope of Rome.

Only an imperial expedition could resolve the Italian situation in favor of I. But, prepared throughout 1132, and decided as early as the meeting of Liège the previous year, one expedition was not enough. Lothair was able to bring his Pope back to the Lateran, but not to keep him there: whether or not Anacletus's attempt was sincere, to arrive, through a judgment of the imperial tribunal, at the annulment of both elections, as soon as Lothair was forced to return northward, abandoning the proclaimed anti-Norman crusade, I. too could no longer sustain himself in Rome. He did not, however, leave Italy this time: from Pisa, with greater hope in a not-distant extinction of the schism, he would for three years date the documents of his chancery. In August 1136 Lothair was able to renew, with greater forces, the expedition into Italy. The objective of the march is the Mezzogiorno: only the defeat of Roger II would have led to the elimination of Anacletus. And, after a harsh course of events, the imperial plan seemed to succeed: but it was only an apparent victory. As soon as I. and Lothair had taken the road to Rome (and grave, especially with regard to Montecassino, was the need for I. once again to defend the Church from the demands of Lothair, desirous of restoring to the crown at least some of the concessions of Worms), Roger, landing at Salerno, took the situation back in hand. Yet this situation rapidly deteriorated (despite the death of Lothair, while crossing the Alps, in the autumn of 1137, and after a meeting at Salerno and the conversion there wrought by St. Bernard of Peter of Pisa) with the sudden end of Anacletus, which occurred on 25 January 1138. I., having reinstalled himself in Rome the year before, had nonetheless still to wait for the last flames of the schism to be extinguished (the surviving Anacletians gave the dead man a successor with Victor IV).

The Lateran Council of 1139, intended as a solemn closure, and condemnation, of the troubles of the schism, with a harshness that appeared excessive to contemporaries, and to St. Bernard himself, ended with the excommunication of Roger II. To bend him, I., with the support of the princes of Capua, moved toward the Neapolitan territory: but, like Leo IX at Civitate, he too, at S. Germano, imprisoned by his enemy, had to recognize the dignity he had contested and return to Rome under his escort.

From that moment, the drama of the pontificate of I. — troubled by an eight-year schism, pregnant with consequences in the Church in ferment — resumes, after the brief affirmation, and turns sadly toward its decline: before the spectacle of the rise of the communitates around, and of a far more powerful one, with the uprising of Rome itself, following the war of Tivoli and its failure to be destroyed. Amid the troubles of the violent insurrection of the Roman people — while the Senate is restored and there is a tendency to distinguish ecclesiastical power from civil power, according to what would be the warning of the great agitator, Arnold of Brescia — I. II died, on 24 September 1143.

Pier Fausto Palumbo