Ildefonso Schuster e Gregorio VII, laicità e ierocrazia

This study analyses the relationship between tradition and the twentieth-century interpretation of the figure and work of Pope Gregory VII, through an episode in the biography of Ildefonso Schuster, abbot of St Paul Outside-the-Walls and, starting in 1929, Cardinal Archbishop of Milan. Schuster’s long familiarity with Pope Gregory was reactivated at the beginning of the 1950s, when the Cardinal of Milan was called to Rome by Pope Pius XII, for the Jubilee of 1950, and carried out an investigation of the remains of Benedetto in Montecassino. In 1954, not long before his death, Ildefonso Schuster carried out a second investigation, this time in Salerno and of the body of Gregory VII. During the investigation, the ‘Pacellian’ Church and the Gregorian Church seemed for an instant to overlap and blend.