Saint Leo IX

His name was Bruno, and he was born on June 21, 1002, in Egisheim, in Alsace, the son of Count Hugh and a relative of the emperor Conrad II. He studied at the cathedral school of Toul and became bishop of that city at twenty-four, in 1027. He stayed there twenty years. In December 1048 the emperor Henry III designated him pope at the Diet of Worms. Bruno set one condition, and it was the first act of his pontificate: he would go to Rome as a pilgrim, and accept only if the clergy and people of Rome freely elected him. He arrived on foot, dressed as a pilgrim, in February 1049. He was elected, and took the name Leo IX. He governed on the move, something no pope did. He held synods in Rome, Pavia, Reims and Mainz, and in each one he took on the two things he cared about most: simony, meaning Church offices bought with money, and priests who lived as if they were married. At Reims, in October 1049, he had the relics of Saint Remigius brought before the assembly and asked the bishops, one by one, whether they had paid for their posts. He brought to Rome the men who would carry on his work: Humbert of Silva Candida, Frederick of Lorraine, and a monk named Hildebrand who would become Gregory VII. In southern Italy the Normans were advancing, and Leo raised an army and marched south to fight them. He was defeated at Civitate, in the Capitanata, on June 18, 1053, and the victors kept him in Benevento for nine months — a prisoner, but treated with every courtesy. He returned to Rome in the spring of 1054 and died shortly after, on April 19, in Saint Peter’s Basilica, where he had asked to be carried to die. Three months later his legates — sent by him, and by then without a mandate, because the pope who had sent them was dead — laid the excommunication of the patriarch on the altar of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. It’s the date used to mark the split between the Church of the East and the Church of the West, July 16, 1054: Leo was already gone, and never knew. If your name is Leo, today is your name day.