Pope Celestine V

The man who became Pope Celestine V was born Pietro Angelerio in 1215 in Sant'Angelo Limosano, a small settlement in the Molise region of the central Italian Apennines, then part of the Kingdom of Sicily ^[1]. His parents were peasants, and later hagiographic accounts describe him as one of many children in the household. His father died while Pietro was young, and his mother, according to the traditions preserved by his early biographers, encouraged the boy's religious inclinations despite the family's poverty ^[2].

Around the age of twenty, Pietro entered the Benedictine monastery of Santa Maria in Faifoli, in the diocese of Benevento. Monastic life as commonly practiced did not satisfy him. Drawn to the harsher disciplines of the desert tradition, he left the community to live as a hermit, first on Monte Morrone near Sulmona in the Abruzzi, the mountain that gave him the name Pietro del Morrone by which contemporaries knew him ^[1]. He was ordained a priest in Rome, probably in the 1230s, before returning to his solitary life in the mountains ^[3].

His regimen was severe even by the standards of medieval asceticism. The sources closest to his circle report long fasts, hair shirts, chains worn against the skin, and vigils that consumed most of the night ^[2]. Far from isolating him, this reputation for holiness attracted followers, and the hermit found himself, somewhat against his own instincts, at the head of a growing religious movement.

During the 1240s Pietro moved deeper into the Maiella massif, settling at Santo Spirito a Maiella, where disciples gathered around him in scattered cells. To give this loose community a legal footing he organized it under the Rule of Saint Benedict, and in 1263 or 1264 Pope Urban IV recognized the congregation as a branch of the Benedictine family ^[3]. The group was at first called the Hermits of Saint Damian, and only after its founder's election to the papacy did it take the name by which history knows it, the Celestines ^[1].

A threat to the order's existence pushed the aging hermit onto a wider stage. The Second Council of Lyon in 1274 moved to suppress religious orders founded after 1215 without proper approval, and Pietro traveled to Lyon in person to plead his congregation's case before Pope Gregory X. He succeeded: the order received confirmation, and its founder returned to the Abruzzi with his communities secure ^[3]. By the end of his life the congregation counted dozens of houses across central and southern Italy.

Who was Pope Celestine V before the tiara? The answer visible in these decades is a capable, if reluctant, institution builder. He served as superior of the order, obtained privileges from a series of popes, and cultivated relations with the Angevin rulers of Naples, especially Charles II, whose patronage would later shape the most consequential months of his life ^[4]. In 1293 he resigned the government of the order and withdrew again to a mountain cell above Sulmona, apparently intending to end his days in solitude.

The papacy fell vacant on April 4, 1292, with the death of Nicholas IV, and stayed vacant for twenty seven months. The twelve cardinals, split between the rival Roman families of the Colonna and the Orsini, could not assemble the two thirds majority the rules required, and their deliberations dragged through plague, summer heat, and repeated adjournments between Rome and Perugia ^[5].

The deadlock broke in a way no one had planned. In the summer of 1294 the cardinal dean Latino Malabranca reported a message from the hermit Pietro del Morrone warning that divine punishment awaited the electors if they delayed further. Whether moved by the warning, by exhaustion, or by the political convenience of a candidate belonging to no faction, the cardinals elected the hermit on July 5, 1294 ^[5]. Pietro was about seventy nine years old, had never held any office in the papal administration, and by most accounts had little Latin learning beyond what his monastic life required.

A delegation climbed to his mountain hermitage to announce the result, and chroniclers recorded the extraordinary scene of prelates and royal envoys kneeling before a startled old man in a cell. Charles II of Naples quickly attached himself to the new pope. Rather than travel to Rome, Pietro rode a donkey into L'Aquila, escorted by the king, and was crowned there on August 29, 1294, taking the name Celestine V ^[4]. The choice of city, inside Angevin territory, signaled from the first day how heavily the crown of Naples would lean on the new pontificate.

Celestine's reign lasted from July 5 to December 13, 1294, and nearly everything recorded about it points to a man out of his depth. He settled not in Rome but in Naples, in the Castel Nuovo, effectively under the eye of Charles II. At the king's prompting he created twelve new cardinals in a single promotion, seven of them French and several of them Angevin clients, a move that altered the balance of the college and, in the view of many historians, prepared the ground for the later Avignon papacy ^[5].

The administrative record of the pontificate is one of confusion. Contemporary accounts describe favors granted twice over, blank privileges signed without review, and offices distributed at the request of whoever reached the pope first ^[1]. Celestine did act on his own convictions in some matters: he showed marked favor to his own order and to the rigorist Franciscans known as the Spirituals, whom he allowed to live under his protection as a separate body, an arrangement his successor promptly dissolved ^[6].

As Advent approached, Celestine had a wooden cell built inside the palace so that he could keep the season as a hermit, and he floated the idea of handing the government of the Church to three cardinals while he prayed. The college refused. Increasingly convinced that he could not save his soul while wearing the tiara, he consulted the canonist cardinal Benedetto Caetani, among others, on whether a pope could lawfully abdicate ^[5]. The question had no clear precedent, and its answer would define his place in history.

On December 10, 1294, Celestine issued a decree affirming that a pope could freely resign the office. Three days later, on December 13, he appeared before the assembled cardinals in Naples, read a formal statement of abdication citing his age, his lack of learning, the burdens of the office, and his longing for the tranquility of his former life, then stripped off the papal insignia and put on his old grey habit ^[1]. Eleven days later the cardinals elected Benedetto Caetani, who took the name Boniface VIII.

Among Pope Celestine V facts, the resignation is the one that has echoed longest. It was not, strictly speaking, without any precedent in papal history, since a handful of early popes had left office in obscure circumstances, but no pope had ever renounced the office so publicly, so deliberately, and with a legal instrument justifying the act ^[7]. Boniface VIII incorporated the principle into canon law, and it remained available, though unused for centuries, until Gregory XII resigned in 1415 to end the Western Schism and Benedict XVI invoked it in 2013 ^[7].

Judgment on the act divided opinion from the start. Admirers saw humility of a rare order, the choice of a man who valued his conscience above the highest office in Christendom. Critics saw desertion. A long tradition has read the unnamed shade in Canto III of Dante's Inferno, the one 'who made through cowardice the great refusal,' as Celestine, though Dante never names him and scholars continue to debate the identification ^[8].

The abdication created a problem the new pope could not ignore. A living former pope, revered as a saint by much of the population and useful to any faction opposed to Boniface VIII, was a standing threat of schism. Celestine, now once again Pietro del Morrone, tried to return to his mountains, and when Boniface ordered him brought to Rome he fled, at one point attempting to cross the Adriatic toward Greece before storms forced his ship back to the Apulian coast ^[1].

Captured in 1295, he was delivered to Boniface and confined in the fortress of Fumone, in the hills of Lazio south of Rome. Accounts of his treatment vary: sympathizers described a narrow cell and harsh custody, while the guarded old man reportedly remarked that he had wanted nothing more than a cell. He was permitted two of his monks as companions ^[2]. He died there on May 19, 1296, aged about eighty one. Rumors that Boniface had him murdered circulated within decades and were revived when a hole was later observed in his skull, but modern examinations of the remains have not substantiated the claim, and most historians treat the death as natural ^[9].

His body was eventually translated to the basilica of Santa Maria di Collemaggio in L'Aquila, the church he had founded and where he had been crowned. It rests there still, and the tomb survived the severe earthquake that damaged the basilica in 2009 ^[9].

Rehabilitation came quickly. Philip IV of France, locked in his own struggle with the memory of Boniface VIII, pressed for the hermit pope's canonization, and Pope Clement V declared him a saint at Avignon on May 5, 1313, under his baptismal name, as Saint Peter Celestine ^[3]. His feast is kept on May 19. The Celestine order he founded spread into France and Germany and endured into the early nineteenth century before dissolving under the pressures of revolution and suppression ^[3].

Any Pope Celestine V biography must weigh a paradox: his chief achievement in office was the legal act by which he left it. The decree on abdication proved the most durable product of the five month reign, and among Pope Celestine V achievements historians also count the founding and defense of his order and the protection, however brief, that he extended to the Franciscan Spirituals ^[6]. In L'Aquila his memory carries a further gift: the Pardon of Celestine, a plenary indulgence he granted in 1294 to all who enter Collemaggio on the feast of the Beheading of John the Baptist. The annual celebration, the Perdonanza Celestiniana, was inscribed by UNESCO on its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2019 ^[10].

The resignation of Benedict XVI in February 2013 returned Celestine to public attention. Commentators noted that Benedict had visited the hermit pope's remains twice, in 2009 and 2010, leaving his own pallium on the tomb at Collemaggio during the first visit, gestures widely read afterward as quiet signals of what was to come ^[9]. Seven centuries on, the peasant hermit from Molise remains the standard against which every question about a pope's freedom to walk away is measured.