The Gregorian Reforms were a series of reforms initiated by Pope Gregory VII and the circle he formed in the papal curia, c. 1050–80, which dealt with the moral integrity and independence of the clergy. The reforms are considered to be named after Pope Gregory VII (1073–85), though he personally denied it and claimed his reforms, like his regnal name, honoured Pope Gregory I.
Overview
During Gregory's pontificate, a conciliar approach to implementing papal reform took on an added momentum. Conciliarism properly refers to a later system of power between the Pope, the Roman curia, and secular authorities. During this early period, the scope of Papal authority in the wake of the Investiture Controversy entered into dialogue with developing notions of Papal supremacy. The authority of the emphatically "Roman" council as the universal legislative assembly was theorised according to the principles of papal primacy contained in Dictatus papae.
Gregory also had to avoid the Church slipping back into the abuses that had occurred in Rome, during the Rule of the Harlots, between 904 and 964. Pope Benedict IX had been elected Pope three times and had sold the Papacy. In 1054 the "Great Schism" had divided Western European Christians from the Eastern Orthodox Church. Given these events, the Church had to reassert its importance and authority to its followers. Within the Church, important new laws were pronounced on simony, on clerical marriage and from 1059 on extending the prohibited degrees of affinity. Although at each new turn the reforms were presented to contemporaries as a return to the old ways, they are often seen by modern historians as novel. The much later Gregorian calendar of Pope Gregory XIII has no connection to those Gregorian reforms.
Documents
The reforms are encoded in two major documents: Dictatus papae and the bull Libertas ecclesiae. The Gregorian reform depended in new ways and to a new degree on the collections of canon law that were being assembled, in order to buttress the papal position, during the same period. Part of the legacy of the Gregorian Reform was the new figure of the papal legist, exemplified a century later by Pope Innocent III. There is no explicit mention of Gregory's reforms against simony (the selling of church offices and sacred things) or nicolaism (which included ritual fornication) at his Lenten Councils of 1075 or 1076. Rather, the gravity of these reforms has to be inferred from his general correspondence. By contrast, Gregory's Register entry for the Roman Council of November 1078 extensively records Gregory's legislation against 'abuses' such as simony as well as the first ‘full’ prohibition of lay investiture. This record has been interpreted as the essence of the Gregorian 'reform programme'.
The powers that the Gregorian papacy gathered to itself are summed up in a list called Dictatus papae around 1075 or shortly after. The major headings of Gregorian reform can be seen as embodied in the Papal electoral decree (1059), and the temporary resolution of the Investiture Controversy (1075–1122) was an overwhelming papal victory. The resolution of this controversy acknowledged papal superiority over secular rulers by implication.
Central status of the Church
Before the Gregorian Reforms the Church was a heavily decentralized institution, in which the pope held little power outside his position as Bishop of Rome. With that in mind, the papacy up until the twelfth century held little to no authority over the bishops, who were invested with land by lay rulers. Gregory VII's ban on lay investiture was a key element of the reform, ultimately contributing to the centralized papacy of the later Middle Ages.