I should like now to turn to a particular example and a particular pontificate, that of Gregory VIII. Gregory is, of course, the triumphalist’s hero: what history text-book is there that hasn’t its section on the Gregorian reforms? It seems to be scarcely noticed that these ‘reforms’—the division of the Church into two castes, a clerical caste with a duty to rule the laity, whose function it was to fight in causes the clergy considered worthy—are very largely what has come under attack at Vatican II and since. Nothing is more striking, I think, than the present Pope’s repudiation of one of the more notorious of Gregory’s friends, Cardinal Humbert, and his Constantinople ex-communications in 1054. Now the fact that certain policies could be reforms in the late eleventh century, yet be abuses nine hundred years later, is not in itself surprising. But in the case of Gregory there are important lessons to be learnt and important questions to be asked.

But there is the question of means too, and there is a limit to the degree to which valuable consequences can excuse bad thinking and evil actions. Gregory, it seems to me, was guilty of both. The sickening frequency with which in his correspondence the quotation ‘cursed be the hand that abstains from blood’ is found cannot be excused with a reference to troubled times. Plenty of men of goodwill were just as shocked at the time. Again Gregory’s attempts to make the Sardinians and Corsicans acknowledge that they belonged to the patrimony of Peter and must pay the pope a tax are not in themselves very important.