Cluniac Reforms

And it just caught on?

The practice was so deeply resonant with basic human need that it organically spread from the Cluniac monasteries throughout the entire Western Church.

So we are sitting at the end of an unbroken chain of memory and theology that stretches back thousands of years.

We really are.

And people don't really get it.

I was reading about the Cluniac revival yesterday.

Yeah.

And it taught me that what we see in modern day, not just the education, but even the leadership systems that they were built on.

Around 1090 AD, Robert de Lacy founded the Priory of St. John the Evangelist at Pontefract.

The men who lived there belonged to the Cluniac Order.

The Cluniacs were part of the Benedictine tradition, originating with the Great Abbey of Cluny in France.

Now, Cluniac monasteries were known for elaborate religious services, strict devotion, and lives built around prayer.

In the north, Beatrice, widow of the Marquis Boniface of Tuscany, had married Duke Godfrey of Lotharingia, and thus the most formidable rebel in the empire became one of the most powerful territorial lords south of the Alps.

His brother Frederick was a distinguished leader of the reforming Cluniac party, and Hildebrand might easily have secured his election to the papal chair or have ascended it himself.

But he was too wise and wary to venture on such a course.

The reformation of the church thus far had been the joint work of emperor and pope, and the hearty support of the emperor was essential to its progress.

The result of Peter Damiani's mission in Milan was a great triumph for the Paterines, who gained a firmer footing throughout the whole of Lombardy.

And the decrees passed in the Lateran Council commanding all cathedral bodies to observe the rule of Chrodegang of Metz, which nearly assimilated the life of canons to that of monks, forbidding laymen to receive the Eucharist from the hands of a married priest, forbidding the clergy to receive any sacred office from lay hands, and the laity to exercise any jurisdiction over clerics, were hailed with delight by the severe reforming party, alike in Italy and Gaul.

In Gaul, indeed, the policy of Hildebrand was supported not only by the whole weight of the Cluniacs, but by two of the most distinguished men in rank and influence, William, Duke of Aquitaine, and Fulk, Count of Anjou, and in Flanders by Baldwin, who was the friend of Duke Godfrey, and after the death of Henry I of France, the guardian of the king's infant son.

But if the papacy was backed by the moral force of public opinion in France, Aquitaine, Burgundy, Flanders, and northern Italy, it was to the Normans in the south of the peninsula that it looked for the material strength which only valor and skill in arms could supply.

For centuries, one of the town's main landmarks was a Catholic monastery called the Pontefract Priory that was built sometime around 1090 CE.

The monastery was once home to a group of Benedictine reformers known as the Cluniac monks.

They attracted a lot of monks from other parts of the world to come work and study there.

And over the decades that followed, the monastery's main structure was expanded to support the large number of visitors.

At first, the incidents went back to the ghost just moving objects around and making loud noises, and by the late 1970s, the paranormal activity pretty much stopped altogether.

By the 1980s, the Pritchards were still living in the house, although they said they had not experienced anything supernatural in years.

Also during the 1980s, a historian named Tom Cunniff came to Pontefract to research the old priory and the Cluniac monks.

Cunniff was surprised, though, when he began talking to the locals and they were much more interested in telling him about the ghost haunting 30 East Drive that everyone referred to as the Black Monk of Pontefract.