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Updated: June 24, 2025
It was he who moulded the church into the form of an absolute monarchy, and fought against all local privileges and national freedom of the churches in each land; it was he who claimed rule over all kings and princes, and treated them as vassals of the Roman see; it was he who, in 1074, calling a council at Rome, caused it to decree the celibacy of the clergy, so that priests having no home, and no family ties, might feel their only home in the Church, and their only tie to Rome; it was he who struggled against Germany, and who kept the excommunicated emperor standing barefoot and almost naked in the snow for three days, in the courtyard of his castle.
Gregory pardons him; and, in 1074, holds his first council at Rome against simony and the incontinence of the clergy. It was in this year that Henry, already pressed by the Saxons and Thuringians, found himself threatened by Salomon, King of Hungary. In this emergency, he has recourse to Gregory, who, by an eloquent letter, calms the indignant Hungarian.
Pope Gregory VII. tried again to do something for the cause of public morality, in 1074, when he issued edicts against both concubinage and simony or the then prevalent custom of buying or selling ecclesiastical preferment; but the edict was too harsh and unreasonable with regard to the first, inasmuch as it provided that no priest should marry in the future, and that those who already possessed wives or concubines were to give them up or relinquish their sacred offices.
The tyranny of Odo of Bayeux and William Fitzosbern, which provoked attempts at rebellion in 1067; the stand made by the house of Godwin in Devonshire in 1068; the attempts of Mercia and Northumbria to shake off the Normans in 1069 and 1070; the last struggle for independence in 1071, in which Edwin and Morcar finally fell; the conspiracy of the Norman earls in 1074, in consequence of which Waltheof perished all tended to the same result.
The Germans had not forgotten the riotous proceedings and the cruel heartaches that were caused by the enforcement of the decrees of the Lenten Synod of 1074 under the theocratic Gregory VII, who wanted to set up a universal monarchy over the whole world and required an unmarried priesthood as his consecrated army.
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