Saint Celestine V (c. 1209-1215 – 1296)

The Hermit History Reduced to an Abdication

For most readers, Celestine V comes down to a line from Dante: "the one who made, through cowardice, the great refusal" ^[1]. The image is so tenacious that it has almost erased the real man. Yet the renunciation of 1294 lasted only an instant; the holiness of Peter of Morrone filled an entire lifetime. When he ascended the pontifical throne in 1294, he was nearly eighty years old, with behind him a reputation as a wonderworker and a man of God stretching from the Adriatic to Naples^[2].

To reduce him to his abdication is to judge a contemplative on the five months during which he was torn from his cell. The Church made no such mistake: it was not the pope she inscribed in the catalogue of saints, but the penitent hermit^[3].

Why Ignispedia Lists Him Among the Saints

The classification is not arbitrary. Canonized as a confessor — that is, a saint by the holiness of his life, not a martyr — Celestine V belongs to the great line of monks and hermits of the central Middle Ages: a century that saw the flowering of Saint Bruno and the Carthusians, Saint Bernard and Citeaux, Saint Francis of Assisi and the Friars Minor. Peter of Morrone is of that family: a man who believed, to the point of scandal, that seeking God alone was the most necessary thing in the world.

The Child of Molise Turned Toward God

Pietro Angelerio was born around 1209-1215 at Sant'Angelo Limosano, in Molise, the eleventh of twelve children of a peasant family^[4]. The exact date of his birth remains disputed, as is often the case for the humble of the thirteenth century; the very uncertainty says something about his obscure origins. Very early, the child showed an extraordinary predisposition to prayer and solitude. Benedict XVI, in his 2010 homily at Sulmona, summed up this native inclination in one striking phrase:

"Pietro Angelerio was, from his youth, a 'seeker of God' […]" — Benedict XVI, homily at Sulmona, July 4, 2010^[5]

At seventeen, he entered as a Benedictine monk at the abbey of Santa Maria di Faifoli, before the call of a more radical solitude drew him beyond the cloister walls^[6]. The monastery, already set apart from the world, was not enough for him: he wanted the desert.

The Call of Solitude: Morrone and Maiella

Around 1239, Pietro withdrew to an isolated cave on Mount Morrone, near Sulmona, then to the neighboring massif of the Maiella, one of the wildest in the Abruzzi^[7]. There, in the cold of the caverns and the silence of the peaks, he led for decades a life of prayer, fasting and manual labor. His reputation for holiness soon drew disciples who wished to share his way of life; the solitary hermit became, despite himself, a spiritual father.

Benedict XVI beautifully expressed what Peter sought in those deserted heights — not flight, but listening:

"To hear His voice, he decided to separate himself from the world and live as a hermit. […] And it is precisely in exterior silence, but above all in interior silence, that he succeeded in perceiving the voice of God, capable of orienting his life." — Benedict XVI, homily at Sulmona, July 4, 2010^[8]

An Iron Asceticism

The asceticism of Peter of Morrone remained proverbial. The ancient Lives report that he fasted every day of the year except Sunday, and that he observed four Lents a year on bread and water^[9]. To these mortifications were added the hairshirt, the iron chain worn against the skin, long nightly vigils and constant manual labor. This penance was for him neither a performance nor a contempt for the body: it was a path to freedom, the means of unburdening the soul of everything that is not God.

This is confirmed by Benedict XVI's reading: Peter's austerity drew its strength from elsewhere than human will.

"The Cross truly constituted the center of his life; it gave him the strength to face harsh penances […] Seeing the wide-open arms of his crucified God, he felt himself led into the infinite ocean of God's love." — Benedict XVI, homily at Sulmona, July 4, 2010^[10]

Silence as the Dwelling Place of God

What the modern sensibility struggles to understand, the monastic tradition has always known: silence is not a void, but a dwelling place. For Peter of Morrone, keeping silent and effacing himself was the condition for hearing another Word. His holiness was not made first of spectacular phenomena, but of an obstinate fidelity to that inhabited solitude. When he was later torn from his cell to be crowned pope, it was the deprivation of that silence that broke him most — and that made his return to the desert almost vital.

A Crucified Man Before the Crucified One

The spirituality of Saint Celestine V is wholly Christ-centered and cross-shaped. Far from sentimental devotions, it is rooted in the contemplation of Christ on the Cross, the sole source of his penitential energy. The saint did not mortify himself for his own sake: he conformed himself to a God who first gave Himself. Penance then ceases to be a morality of effort and becomes a love story — man's answer to the open arms of the Crucified.

This reversal is decisive for understanding the man. Celestine has often been seen as a terrible ascetic; the truth is that he was first a lover of God, and all his rigor flowed from that love, not the reverse.

Penance as a Path of Joy

The Christianity of the thirteenth-century Abruzzi is a Christianity of compunction: tears, repentance, a keen consciousness of sin. But among true spiritual masters, this austerity issues in peace. Peter of Morrone did not preach a terrible God; he lived, and made his disciples live, the experience of a God whose mercy infinitely exceeds the fault. We shall see further on that his most famous act as pope — the Bull of Pardon — is nothing but the public translation of this intuition: God wills to forgive even more than man wills to be forgiven.

A Seeker of God to the End

Benedict XVI's phrase — a "seeker of God" — is undoubtedly the best key to his whole existence. Solitary for sixty years, briefly sovereign pontiff, finally a prisoner, Peter remained the same man: someone for whom nothing counted but God. That is why, when the pontifical burden threatened to stifle that search in him, he preferred to renounce the tiara rather than God — not from weakness, but from a higher fidelity.

From Hermit to Founder Despite Himself

Peter of Morrone never wanted to found an order: it was the disciples who flocked to him that forced him to organize their common life^[11]. Around 1244, he gathered these hermits into a congregation living under the Rule of Saint Benedict, first called the brothers of the Holy Spirit, then Celestines after the name of their founder turned pope^[12].

The Benedictine Rule, Hardened by the Desert

The spirit of the new family is that of its founder: Benedictine by its rule, but marked by an eremitical austerity harsher than that of the great abbeys. Prayer, silence, strict poverty, prolonged fasts: the Celestines carried into community life the radicality Peter had first lived alone in his cave.

Approvals and Expansion

The work received the Church's approval in several stages: recognized as a Benedictine branch by Pope Urban IV in 1264, it escaped the suppression of new foundations decided at the Second Council of Lyon in 1274 — which the generalist Britannica notice (tertiary source) sums up as a "confirmation" at Lyon II^[13], while the Italian notice recounts a personal approach by Peter, who came to Lyon as early as winter 1273 to shield his order from suppression^[14]. At the founder's death in 1296, the congregation already counted some thirty-six monasteries and nearly six hundred monks^[15] — proof that a hermit who sought only God had, without willing it, drawn a multitude.

Posterity and Decline of the Order

The Celestines prospered for several centuries, in Italy as in France, before declining in the modern era and disappearing almost entirely following the Napoleonic suppressions of the early nineteenth century. But the founder's spirit did not die out with his monasteries: it survives in popular veneration and in the spiritual memory of the Abruzzi, where Peter of Morrone remains, seven centuries later, the "pope of the holy rocks" ^[16].

The Bull of Pardon

On September 29, 1294, one month after his coronation at L'Aquila, the new pope promulgated at Collemaggio the bull Inter sanctorum solemnia, famous under the name of the Bull of Pardon (Bolla del Perdono)^[17]. It grants a plenary indulgence — the total remission of the penalty due to sin — to every faithful who, sincerely confessed and repentant, crosses the threshold of the basilica between the vespers of August 28 and sunset on August 29. The Latin text uses the strongest formula of medieval penitential theology: absolution "a culpa et pena" — from fault and from penalty (with a single a and pena without o, according to the transmitted text).

"…we absolve from fault and from penalty." — Bull Inter sanctorum solemnia, L'Aquila, September 29, 1294^[18]

The First Plenary Indulgence in History

What is unheard of in this bull is its gratuitousness and its universality. Whereas the indulgences of the time were tied to crusades, distant pilgrimages or almsgiving, Celestine offers plenary pardon to every sinner, with no condition of money or travel: it suffices to go to confession and enter a church in the Abruzzi. Historians see in it the first example of a plenary indulgence in the full sense, and the direct anticipation of the great Jubilee his successor Boniface VIII would proclaim at Rome in 1300^[19]. The hermit-pope's gesture thus opened, unknowingly, the history of the Church's jubilee years.

A Jubilee of Pardon Still Alive

Seven centuries later, the Perdonanza Celestiniana is still celebrated every year at L'Aquila on August 28 and 29, around the opening of the Holy Door of Collemaggio. The authenticity of the bull was solemnly confirmed by Paul VI in 1967, and the feast was inscribed in 2019 on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity^[20]. Few saints can claim so concrete and so living a spiritual heritage: a river of penitents who, generation after generation, come to draw from the pardon the hermit wanted to make accessible to all.

Dante and the Black Legend

The renunciation of December 13, 1294 fed a veritable black legend. Dante, placing the souls of cowards at the gates of Hell, believes he recognizes Celestine there:

"I saw and recognized the shade of him who made, through cowardice, the great refusal." — Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, canto III^[21]

The identification, traditional since the fourteenth century, remains nonetheless disputed by critics: other candidates have been proposed for that anonymous shade^[22]. Above all, Dante's judgment rests on an error of perspective: he mistakes for cowardice what was in reality a heroic detachment.

Petrarch: The Greatness of a Renunciation

Another giant of Italian letters took the opposite view from Dante. In his De vita solitaria (book II), Petrarch ranks Peter of Morrone among the great solitaries and presents his renunciation not as cowardice, but as an act of greatness of soul, the love of contemplative freedom preferred to the honors of the world^[23]. Where Dante sees a deserter, Petrarch sees a man free enough to return a crown that others would have killed to keep.

Humility Rather Than Cowardice

The Church's tradition has decided in Petrarch's favor, and the canonization sealed it: no coward is declared a saint. Celestine's gesture manifests on the contrary two virtues rare at the summit of power: the humility to recognize that one is not made for an office, and the courage to draw the consequences. Seven centuries later, commentators would see in this precedent a light for the renunciation of Benedict XVI — but that parallel, and the canonical question of pontifical abdication, are examined in detail in the article Pope Saint Celestine V (1294).

Death at Fumone

Become a simple monk again, Peter dreams of regaining his hermitages. His successor, fearing lest he be made an antipope, instead has him arrested and locked up in the castle of Fumone, in Latium. There, in a narrow cell, the hermit died on May 19, 1296, at about eighty-one years of age^[24]. According to tradition, he welcomed death serenely, ending as a prisoner the life of stripping he had freely chosen in the desert.

The Canonization Process

The canonization cause was carried notably by the King of France, Philip IV the Fair, the fierce adversary of Boniface VIII, who saw in Celestine's holiness a posthumous weapon against his successor^[25]. But the Church, in raising him to the altars, rose above these political calculations. Clement V signed a decree of inquiry in 1306, and the canonization was proclaimed at Avignon on May 5, 1313^[26].

Saint Peter Celestine, Confessor

One capital detail illuminates the Church's prudence: Celestine was canonized as a confessor, that is, for the holiness of his hermit life — and not as pope nor as martyr^[27]. By avoiding the title of martyr, which would have implicitly accused Boniface VIII of killing him, Rome canonized the man of God without reopening the political quarrel. The holiness recognized is therefore indeed that of the penitent of Morrone, not that of the overwhelmed sovereign. That is the whole meaning of the liturgical name under which he is venerated: Saint Peter Celestine.

The Relics of Collemaggio

The saint's body was transferred to L'Aquila on January 27, 1327, to the basilica of Santa Maria di Collemaggio which he himself had built and where he had been crowned^[28]. In 1517, the goldsmith Girolamo da Vicenza raised there a splendid marble mausoleum, which remains today the heart of the sanctuary. The mortal remains have since been the object of uninterrupted veneration by the people of L'Aquila, who see in Celestine their protector.

Thefts, Desecrations and the Fidelity of a People

The history of the relics is eventful, as is often the case with great sanctuaries. The original silver urn was stolen as early as 1528; its replacements met the same fate in 1799^[29]. More troubling, in the night of April 18, 1988, the saint's body was quite simply stolen from its mausoleum, before being found two days later in a cemetery at Roccapassa, near Amatrice; the culprits were never identified^[30]. Since then, the urn has been protected by bulletproof glass and an alarm system. With each desecration, the people of the Abruzzi answered with a renewal of fervor, bringing their saint home in procession as one brings a father home.

The 2009 Earthquake and the Intact Body

The terrible earthquake of L'Aquila on April 6, 2009 gravely damaged the basilica and the mausoleum — but the saint's mortal remains were found intact^[31]. During the long restoration, the shrine was moved in 2013 to other churches of the city, then solemnly reinstalled in its sepulchre on December 20, 2017, when Collemaggio reopened. For the stricken inhabitants, the survival of the relics amid the ruins took on the value of a sign: their saint shared the city's trial, and outlived it.

Benedict XVI and the Pallium

A few weeks after the earthquake, on April 28, 2009, Benedict XVI came to Collemaggio to venerate the relics of his distant predecessor. In a gesture that remained famous, he laid upon Celestine's urn the pallium he had received on the day of his inauguration in 2005^[32]. He further proclaimed a Celestinian Year (2009-2010) for the eighth centenary of the saint's birth, and crowned that pilgrimage with a homily at Sulmona in 2010 which remains the finest spiritual commentary ever devoted to Peter of Morrone^[33]. The pope recalled why a hermit who died a prisoner seven centuries earlier still drew crowds:

"Holiness never loses its power of attraction; it never falls into oblivion […]" — Benedict XVI, homily at Sulmona, July 4, 2010^[34]

Liturgical Feast and Patronages

Saint Celestine V is inscribed in the Roman Martyrology on May 19, the day of his death^[35]. He is honored as patron of Isernia, which claims his birthplace, and as co-patron of L'Aquila, Molise, Ferentino and Urbino^[36][37][38]. Throughout central Italy, his figure as a crowned then stripped hermit continues to embody a counter-current holiness: that of a man who held power as nothing and God as everything.

In an age fascinated by success, visibility and power, Saint Celestine V disturbs and fascinates. He teaches first that holiness is not measured by rank: the humblest of hermits can be greater than the mightiest of popes, and the Church recognized it by canonizing the monk, not the pontiff. He teaches next that silence and solitude are not flights, but the ground on which the essential is played out — the encounter with God. He teaches finally that interior freedom is worth more than all crowns: knowing how to renounce, at the right moment, what is beyond us can be an act of courage rather than weakness.

His Perdonanza remains his finest message: God wills to forgive, freely, whoever returns to Him. That is the whole Gospel summed up in a bull of a few lines by a pope who scarcely knew how to govern — but who knew, better than anyone, how to seek God.

• Pope Saint Celestine V (1294) — the pontificate, the abdication of December 13, 1294 and the canonical question of pontifical renunciation.
• Pope Boniface VIII — Celestine's successor, institutor of the first Roman Jubilee of 1300.
• Pope Benedict XVI — the 2013 renunciation, reread in the light of the Celestinian precedent.
• Saint Bruno the Carthusian and Saint Francis of Assisi — the monastic and mendicant holiness of the central Middle Ages.