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Antonio PAOLUCCI
The emperor is at the door? Make him wait
from: from L’Osservatore Romano, June 12, 2008.
The historical incident in which Matilda was involved is referred to in the reference books as the "investiture controversy." The Holy Roman Emperor, the highest political authority at the time, wanted to appoint bishops by himself. Imitating the autocracy of the Caesars, he wanted a Church that would defer to the crown, little more than an honored state office. This is just what was happening at the time in Constantinople and in the Eastern empire, and how it would be in the Russia of the Orthodox tsars until the beginning of the twentieth century.
The Church of Rome, on the contrary, was fighting tenaciously for the autonomy of the ecclesial order from political power. Amid excommunications, canonical protests, imperial diets, and synods of bishops hostile to the pope, the dispute became an open conflict in 1073, when Pietro Ildebrando di Sovana, a monk of modest family origins from southern Tuscany, became pope. He took the name Gregory VII, possibly in memory of the unfortunate Gregory VI, who a few years before had been forced to resign and go into exile by the emperor. Ildebrando was a man of an entirely different character. He accepted the challenge against the young and impulsive emperor Henry IV – and he won.
Here's what happened in Canossa. As a guest in the Countess Matilda's castle in the Apennine Mountains in Reggio, in the presence of the abbot of Cluny, the pope accepted the emperor's repentance, forgave him, and granted him the kiss of peace. It was January 28, 1077. But before he was admitted into the pope's presence, Henry had to wait for a long time outside the castle gate, in penance, dressed in a hairshirt and barefoot in the snow of that frigid winter, which had frozen the Po river.
That episode of ten centuries ago has become proverbial. Still today, the expression "go to Canossa" is used to signify a painful but necessary retraction. Thanks to the extraordinary efficacy of this symbol – the emperor humbling himself before the pope – the incident has had and continues to have a significant meaning in politics and propaganda. For Catholics, it is an affirmation of an historical success, and of a primacy, but the same is true, with equal intensity, for the opposite side. "We will not go to Canossa," thundered German chancellor Bismarck in front of the Reichstag in 1872, at the height of the Kulturkampf, the tenacious anticlerical battle that saw a head-on clash between the Catholic Church and the government.
Canossa was simply one episode in a centuries-long journey strewn with victories and defeats. Gregory VII himself soon experienced the emperor's vengeance. Stripped of power, replaced by an antipope, and forced to flee, he died in exile in Salerno in 1085. But by this time, the principle for which Pope Gregory and Matilda fought had entered into history. The Church's autonomy from political power was asserted gradually and painstakingly, but irreversibly, despite the recurring waves of caesaropapism, fundamentalism, and anticlericalism, becoming one of the main pillars of modern Western civilization.
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