The Pope Who Quit by Jon M. Sweeney

Author:Jon M. Sweeney
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780385531887
Publisher: The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group
Published: 2012-02-14T05:00:00+00:00

12

RIDING ON AN ASS

After the papal election of 1294, when the Church authorities came for him, Peter, by then eighty-four years old, must have thought that he would never return, that he would never again be able to live quietly on his mountain. Every pope before him had died in office. That’s what popes do. They lead the world’s Church. They minister. They die. It’s all part of the job.

Yet Peter wasn’t the only one with a sense of foreboding. Many saw a negative omen when one month and five days after the election Cardinal Latino Malabranca died. The dean of the cardinals who had nominated the new pope was taken by God before the new era could even begin.

Peter probably dreaded the journey to as far away a place as Perugia. There the cardinals expected him to come so that he could be invested as pope. But Peter’s days of journeying were over. So instead Charles II told him that he should choose his own place of coronation, encouraging him of course to remain within the Kingdom of Naples. Insiders within the papal curia were already growing suspicious. Why were the Neapolitans surrounding the new holy father? Why did Peter seem to have no interest in consulting with the cardinals on important matters of transition? Signs seemed to be mounting that the Sacred College had made a mistake.

Whatever agreement was made between Peter and Charles II, the hermit would not be inaugurated as pope in Rome. He was to stay in Charles’s kingdom. By mid-August, after a month of waiting, the cardinals began giving up hope that Peter would come to them in Perugia, from where they all would have made a procession to St. John Lateran, the cathedral church in Rome where Saint Peter himself once celebrated Mass on the high altar. This was the sancta sanctorum of Christianity, where the most sacred objects, offerings, vessels, and sanctuary of Christ were kept, equivalent to the “holy of holies” of the ancient Temple in Judaism.1 Sitting adjacent to the Basilica of St. John Lateran on the Piazza San Giovanni is the Apostolic Palace of the Lateran, which had been the primary residence of popes since the fourth century. Instead of proceeding as they had expected, the cardinals began making their way one by one to L’Aquila, a place that some of them had never before visited.

Sitting close to the Apennine mountains, a town surrounded on all sides by peaks, L’Aquila is cool by comparison to other cities in central Italy. A reporter for the British Catholic weekly The Tablet recently characterized the place this way:

It’s a chilly place, L’Aquila, at the best of times. The historic city, its centre a maze of narrow medieval streets opening on to graceful piazzas, lies on a mountainside at an altitude of over 2,000 feet, wedged between no less than four snow covered peaks rising to more than 6,000 feet. Locals like to joke that L’Aquila enjoys 11 cold months, and one cool month, which is called summer.

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