Digital Continent Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul 2016 | Page 58

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The Council of Bourges, 1031, had specified that laymen should not place priests in
office. This was the responsibility of the bishop. That same century, Humber of Silva-Candida
demanded an end to the practice of lay investiture based upon the tendency of the practice to
tempt clergy involved in both moral and financial abuses. Gregory VII considered lay
investiture as the meddling of laymen in the ecclesiastic matters of the Church. Its practice
would rally the reformers, particularly after the death of Gregory VII as the Investiture
Controversy fully emerged.108 While alive, the decrees against lay investiture, as well as simony
and other reform topics, were progressively promulgated despite resistance from the Holy
Roman Empire. Abuses became matters of “right belief” and as such, the pope was duty-bound
to stand firm.109
Gregory VII had a very clear
perception of the role that both the
papacy and the monarchy were to
exercise and the responsibilities that
each entailed. The issues of reform
and how to go about the process of
correction started at the top, with the
pope at the apex of a strict hierarchical
arrangement of society. In such an
arrangement the defects of lay
investiture, simony, and the like could be addressed The Gregorian papacy, as well as its
108

Cushing, 106-7.

109

Ibid., 79.