Page:Orthodox Eastern Church (Fortescue).djvu/212

174 to the Roman clergy that they were to hold a free election, and that if he were not lawfully chosen he would go back to Toul, his diocese. Then, when he had been canonically made Pope, he set about his task of a reform in root and branch. He sternly put down Simony, and all his life he fought against the incontinence of the clergy. These were the two radical vices spread throughout his patriarchate. Every year at Easter he held high session at Rome, and tried cases of these crimes. And on all sides pitilessly he deposed simoniacal clerks, no matter how high their place or great their influence. Metropolitans and archbishops, even the Emperor's own chaplain, one after another they had to go if they had bought their places with money. In this reform he had very great men to help him—Hildebrand, Hugo Abbot of Cluny, and St. Peter Damian, whose burning language about the horrible state of things that had gone before (Liber Gommorhianus—the Book of Gomorrha) is as indignant and also as candid as should be that of a Saint. No Pope ever had a higher or a more uncompromising idea of the dignity and rights of his see than Leo IX. We shall see this from his correspondence with the Greeks. The views of Leo are already those of Gregory VII, and the foundation of all his polity is that, by the promise made by our Lord to St. Peter, the Roman See "must hold the primacy over the four sees, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Constantinople" (notice how he will not give Constantinople the second place; he is still true to the principle of Leo the Great, p. 42), "as well as over all the Churches of God throughout the whole world." Leo IX was also concerned about the peace of Italy, and was always a determined enemy of the Norman pirates. These Normans were also the enemies of the Emperor in the East, who still had a precarious tenure over Southern Italy (Magna Græcia), a tenure that chiefly showed itself in attempts to assert the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople in those parts. So the Pope seeks for an