Vita
In the rugged solitudes of the Abruzzi, where the Apennines lift their stony shoulders toward heaven, there was born in the year of Our Lord 1215, in the village of Isernia in the Molise, a child whom Divine Providence had marked from his mother’s womb for singular sanctity. His parents, Angelerio and Maria, were of humble station but rich in faith, the twelfth of twelve children, and they called him Pietro. The mother, a woman of robust piety, perceived early in her son the workings of grace, and when neighbors marveled at her care to educate so poor a child, she answered with prophetic simplicity: Pietro mio sarà un santo — “My Pietro shall be a saint.”
From his tenderest years the boy fled the vanities that ensnare other children. While his brothers labored in the fields, Pietro would withdraw into the wild places to pray, and it is recorded that wonders attended him even then: a white dove descending upon his head as he served at the altar, mysterious lights observed about his sleeping form, and that gravity of countenance which the ancients accounted a sure sign of a soul touched by the finger of God. At the age of twenty, having received some instruction in letters and being moved by the example of the desert Fathers, he forsook the world altogether and retired to a cavern upon Mount Morrone, near Sulmona, there to give himself wholly to prayer, fasting, and the mortification of the flesh.
His austerities surpass the ordinary measure of penance. He wore a hair shirt bound with an iron chain; he slept upon the bare rock with a stone for his pillow; he observed four Lents in the year, three of them upon bread and water alone; he chanted the entire Psalter daily, oftentimes upon his knees. Whilst other men sought rest by night, Pietro kept vigil before a rough crucifix, weeping for his sins and for the sins of the world. The Devil, as is his custom with the saints, assaulted him with horrid visions and bodily torments, but the hermit drove away these phantasms by the Sign of the Cross and by the invocation of the Most Holy Name.
His sanctity could not long remain hidden. Disciples gathered to him, drawn as iron is drawn to the lodestone, and from this nucleus arose the Congregation of the Hermits of St. Damian, afterwards called the Celestines, which received the approbation of Pope Urban IV in 1264 and was confirmed under the Rule of St. Benedict by Gregory X at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274. The new order spread through Italy and into France, planting houses of austere observance wherein the primitive monastic spirit was renewed in a degenerate age.
For more than threescore years Pietro dwelt in his mountain, knowing nothing of the affairs of princes, content to converse with God and with the angels. But after the death of Pope Nicholas IV in 1292, the See of Peter remained vacant for two years and three months, the cardinals being divided by faction and unable to agree upon a successor. Then, on the fifth of July, 1294, the conclave gathered at Perugia turned of one accord to the aged hermit of Morrone — moved, it was widely held, by a letter from Pietro himself warning the cardinals of God’s chastisement should they delay longer. He was elected Pope by acclamation, in his eightieth year.
When the deputation of cardinals climbed Morrone to bear the tidings, they found him in his cell, gaunt and trembling, his beard reaching to his waist. He wept bitterly at the news and sought to flee, but constrained by the will of the Church he submitted, saying: Fiat voluntas Dei — “The will of God be done.” He was crowned at Aquila on the twenty-ninth of August, riding upon an ass in imitation of his Master, and he took the name Cælestinus, that is, the heavenly one.
His pontificate endured but five months and eight days. Untutored in canon law, unfamiliar with the labyrinthine politics of the Curia, dominated by King Charles II of Naples who held him as a tame oracle, the holy old man perceived swiftly that the burden of the Triple Crown was crushing his soul. He longed for his cavern; he feared for his salvation amid the splendors of the papal court. After taking counsel with the learned Cardinal Benedetto Caetani — afterwards Boniface VIII — he issued the constitution Quoniam aliqui curiositate, by which he declared the lawfulness of papal abdication, and on the thirteenth of December, 1294, in consistory at Naples, he laid aside the tiara, the ring, and the mantle, and clothed himself once more in his coarse habit, weeping for joy.
But his peace was not to be. Boniface VIII, succeeding him within the fortnight, feared lest schismatics should rally about the abdicated Pope and proclaim him still the lawful pontiff. Pietro fled toward his beloved mountains, and thence sought to cross the Adriatic to a hermitage in Dalmatia, but contrary winds drove his ship back upon the coast. He was apprehended and brought to the fortress of Fumone, near Anagni, where Boniface placed him under honorable but strict custody. There, in a narrow cell of ten feet square, the holy old man passed the last ten months of his life, ministered to by two of his religious, undisturbed in his prayers and rejoicing in his confinement. Volebatis cellam, et habetis cellam, he is reported to have said with a smile when his keepers offered apology — “You wanted a cell, and you have a cell.” On the nineteenth of May, 1296, at the hour when the priest in the adjoining chapel sang the Te Deum of Lauds, he rendered his pure soul to God, being in his eighty-first year. A great light was seen above his cell, and a fragrance as of paradise filled the place of his repose.
He was canonized by Pope Clement V at Avignon in the year 1313, not as Pope but as Confessor, though the Church has ever venerated in him the dignity of both states. His sacred relics, after various translations, repose to this day in the Basilica of Santa Maria di Collemaggio at Aquila, which he himself caused to be built and wherein he received his coronation.
Virtutes et Doctrina
In the person of St. Peter Celestine the Church beholds a paradox luminous with the wisdom of the Gospel: that a man may renounce the highest dignity upon earth precisely because he loves God more than any dignity, and that the truest grandeur lies not in the wearing of crowns but in the casting of them down before the throne of the Lamb. St. Augustine teaches in his treatise De Sancta Virginitate that humility is the foundation of all the other virtues, and in Cælestine this foundation was laid so deep that no edifice of worldly honor could shake it. He fled the papal throne not from cowardice nor from contempt of the office, but from that holy fear which is the beginning of wisdom (Initium sapientiæ timor Domini, Ps. cx. 10), knowing his own weakness and unwilling to imperil his soul in pastures unsuited to a solitary.
St. Thomas, in the Secunda Secundæ, q. 185, art. 4, discussing whether a bishop may resign his episcopate, answers in the affirmative when the cause is grave and the good of the Church not harmed thereby; and Cælestine, by his very abdication, furnished the canonists with the surest historical witness to this principle, vindicated again in our own days by the renunciation of Pope Benedict XVI, whose first papal visit was to the tomb of this same saint at Aquila, where he laid his own pallium upon the relics in a gesture pregnant with prophetic meaning.
Yet some have ventured to censure the holy hermit, as did Dante, who placed in the vestibule of his Inferno colui che fece per viltade il gran rifiuto — “him who through cowardice made the great refusal” (Inf. iii. 60). The traditional gloss of Catholic commentators, however, is firm: the gran rifiuto of Cælestine was no act of pusillanimity but of magnanimity rightly ordered, the rejection not of duty but of a state to which he was not called. St. Bonaventure, treating in the De Perfectione Vitæ ad Sorores of the discernment of vocations, observes that non omnes ad omnia vocantur — not all are called to all things — and that to remain in a state contrary to one’s calling is itself a sin against Providence.
His penances, severe as they appear to modern softness, were the very ordinary discipline of the desert Fathers whom he sought to imitate. St. Jerome, in his Vita Pauli Eremitæ, recounts marvels of Antony and Paul of Thebes which surpass even these, and the Spirit who blew where He willed in the deserts of Egypt blew likewise upon Morrone. In this Pietro stands as a rebuke to our tepidity and a witness that the eremitical life, lawfully undertaken and faithfully pursued, remains one of the highest paths of Christian perfection — the vita angelica praised by Cassian in the Collationes.
Finally, his cheerful endurance of imprisonment under his successor reveals the perfection of his charity. He spoke no word against Boniface, accepted his confinement as a gift, and made of his narrow cell a paradise. Here is fulfilled the saying of the Apostle: Mihi vivere Christus est, et mori lucrum (Phil. i. 21) — “To me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” He died as he had lived: hidden, silent, singing the praises of God.
Ad Imitationem
From this most venerable Confessor the Christian soul may draw these lessons:
That solitude with God is to be preferred above all the honors of this passing world; that no man should covet ecclesiastical dignity, nor refuse it through cowardice when laid upon him, but accept all things from the hand of Providence with the prudence of the serpent and the simplicity of the dove; that bodily mortification, far from being a relic of ruder ages, remains the very sinew of the spiritual combat; and that holy obedience, even unto imprisonment, conforms the soul to the pattern of Him who, being in the form of God, emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant.
Let the faithful, then, when burdened by the weight of office or by the tumult of the world, fly in spirit to the cavern of Morrone, and learn from Pietro that the kingdom of God is within, and that he who has God needs nothing else.
Oratio (ex Missali Romano)
Deus, qui beátum Petrum Cælestínum ad summi pontificátus ápicem sublimásti, quique illum humilitátis exémplo eúndem postpónere docuísti: concéde propítius; ut, ejus exémplo, cuncta mundi despícere, et ad promíssa humílibus præmia perveníre felíciter mereámur. Per Dóminum nostrum Jesum Christum, Fílium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitáte Spíritus Sancti Deus, per ómnia sǽcula sæculórum. Amen.
O God, who didst raise up blessed Peter Celestine to the height of the supreme pontificate, and didst teach him by the example of humility to set the same aside: mercifully grant; that after his example, we may despise all the things of this world, and happily attain to the rewards promised to the humble. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.
Sancte Petre Cælestíne, ora pro nobis.