Monastic revival
We have seen that when urban life was weak, the influence of the Bishop, an urban figure, was similarly reduced, in favour of a rural, feudal, lord, and it was the monasteries which predominated. These were centres of education, though when urban life revived, the schools established by cathedrals began to overtake them, and indeed were the origin of the first universities.
Before this happened, there was one final, but enormous, expansion of monastic life, based on the monastery of Cluny in Burgundy (where liturgy was celebrated more or less round the clock). This community was so powerful and rich, indeed, that it provoked a reaction: the Cistercian and Carthusian reforms.
Such monastic power gave rise to the great statement of the Church’s determination to be independent of the State which we know as the “Gregorian Reform”, after Pope St. Gregory VII (+1085), alias the Italian Benedictine monk Hildebrand, himself a one-time inmate of Cluny. The Reform not only attacked clerical abuses (notably sexual and financial) but produced the most lofty claims yet encountered for the supremacy of the Papacy over and above every other authority on earth. Its high water mark was when the excommunicated Emperor, Henry IV, had to grovel barefoot in the snow at Canossa in Italy to receive absolution (1077) – the State repaid the compliment some 240 years later when Pope Boniface VIII was nearly killed by agents of the French King Philip IV at Anagni, and died of the shock.
In all this ding-dong battle, where was the humble parish priest? And indeed, where were the laity? Answer: at the very bottom of the pile.
The theology of St. Anselm, another Italian Benedictine who became Abbot of Bec in Normandy and Archbishop of Canterbury (+1109) greatly stressed how Christ, in becoming human, had atoned for the sins of the world. In turn, humans were duly bound to atone for their sins. The people best suited to lead this process were, it was believed, the religious, monks and nuns. These became seen as the ‘shock troops’ of the Church. Gradually the laity became demoted to the point that they were not seen as being the Church at all! They were ‘the world’ – ‘secular’. Meanwhile the rural clergy, often poorly educated, languished forgotten beneath this mound of presumed holiness. That, coupled with a tendency to over-stress in the Eucharist the “what is it?” to the extent of making the action seem almost magical, began to set up waves of reaction which spilled over long before the time of the Reformation.