Gregorian Reform: Overview

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The eleventh- and twelfth-century papacy's attack on the clerical abuses of simony, clerical marriage, and lay investiture is sometimes called the Gregorian Reform (after Pope Gregory VII, 1073-1085), even though this reform movement had begun earlier with Pope Leo IX (1049-1054). "Simony" (named after Simon Magus from the Acts of the Apostles) was the practice of purchasing spiritual offices/church positions. Clerical marriage was the practice of priests marrying. By 1050 both were regarded by monastic reformers as serious abuses among the secular clergy (i.e. the priesthood). Reformers, influenced by the rise of a commercial economy, interpreted as simony the traditional practice of bishops thanking with gifts the kings and princes who had appointed them to their sees. The older view was that it was simply good manners (the reciprocity of gift-giving). The Gregorian Reform gave rise to the “Investiture Controversy” (1075-1122). Lay investiture was the practice of laypeople (non-clergy) “investing” ecclesiastical (Church) officers with the symbols of their spiritual offices and powers and, by implication, with the offices themselves. ("Invest" in this sense means to give someone the symbols of office; "investiture" is similar to the military practice of “frocking,” in which an officer selected for promotion pins on the symbols of his or her new rank.) The accepted practice in the early middle ages was for a powerful layperson, usually a king or emperor, to confer upon a newly “elected” bishop the symbols of his episcopal office: a crozier (shepherd’s crook), symbolizing his pastoral duties, and a ring, symbolizing his marriage to the Church. According to canon law, bishops were supposed to be elected by the clergy of the diocese and approved by the laity in their diocese. In practice, anointed kings, claiming to be God’s vicars, appointed bishops and“invested”
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