ABSTRACT
Throughout its long existence the Catholic Church has always shown a considerable capacity to purge itself. Long before the Reformation
frequent demands for reform had been heard. We must not confuse attempts at reformation with the desire for innovation. Church reform was always aimed at the restoration of old values and relationships, which, in the eyes of those in favour of reform, had been lost or were in danger of being lost. But the attempts at reformation that became apparent in the tenth and eleventh centuries differed in one essential respect from earlier offensives, such as those made under Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. They had always been aimed at improving the morals of individuals: of the monks and lay clergy, to begin with, and then of ordinary laypeople too. The reformers of the tenth and eleventh centuries still considered this an important aim, but in addition they proposed drastic alterations to ‘the mystical body of Christ’, the Church as an institute. The first step necessary to do this was to purge the Church of worldly pollution by curbing the profound secular influence in the Church on all fronts. One of the reformers’ constant objectives was to enhance the clergy’s observance of moral purity, and at the Second Lateran Council of 1139 it was decreed that all clergymen of the four higher orders (subdeacon, deacon, priest and bishop) should live in celibacy and ‘separate themselves from the women with whom they dared to copulate trespassing the holy commands’. Only that would provide them with the authority to prescribe moral restraint to lay society. The imposition of strict rules for marriage, now defined as a sacrament, provided the clergy with the means to control legitimate descent, i.e. the continuity of aristocratic property and power. As one can imagine, the reformers met fierce resistance, not least from higher clerics themselves, who would not give up the comfort of concubinage.
