Digital Continent Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul 2016 | Page 57

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By the time Hildebrand was elected pope, he had amassed decades of valuable experience in
papal ministry and had firmly grasped the concept of the mission of the Church in the world and
what was necessary in order to carry out such a mission. For both King Henry IV and Pope
Gregory VII the practice of investiture of the bishops held great importance. Henry believed that
to invest was his God-given right. It had been a practice of those kings who ruled before him
and it was absolutely critical to his control of order within the realm. He needed trustworthy
men that he knew in those offices and Gregory VII’s reform interfered with royal authority.
Pope Gregory VII, however, knew that when Henry invested his supporters that it worked
against reform.106
Although the papacy had developed alongside of the medieval states, the various
ecclesiastical offices were on the precipice of becoming secular appointments in fact. Bishops
that had been both nominated and then invested by the king contributed to the misconception that
episcopal authority was a gift granted by the monarch. Even the practice of the landowner
appointing a priest for the church that he had built on his property contributed toward this view.
Exercising any sort of canonical control over churches that were purchased or sold was difficult,
if not next to impossible.107 The prohibitions against simony and lay investiture were not new
but rarely enforced, rendering the practices difficult to eradicate.

106

107

Miller, 17-18.

J.P. Whitney, “Gregory VII,” The English Historical Review 34, no. 134 (April 1919), 134, accessed
March 26, 2015, http://www.jstor.org/stable/551196.