Christ's Faithful People

    

HADRIAN V

1276 AD

Ottoboni Fieschi, of a noble Genoese family, was a nephew of Pope Innocent IV. He became Innocent's chaplain, a canon twice over, archdeacon of Rheims and of Parma, and a cardinal. His uncle allowed him to hold many benefices, and he in turn worked busily to provide his own nephews with good pickings among the loaves and fishes.

Dante placed Hadrian in the fifth circle of purgatory because he had become converted from attachment to worldly goods only after he became Pope. But Cardinal Ottoboni was a faithful worker in the vineyard during the reigns of Pope Alexander IV, Urban IV, Clement IV, and Gregory X. He proved his sterling worth when Clement IV sent him on a difficult and delicate mission to England that of making peace between Henry III and his rebel barons. Ottoboni was sent with such full legatine powers that under the Pope he ruled the Church in England during his mission. His staff, it is interesting to observe, included two future Popes, Gregory X and Boniface VIII. So earnestly and skillfully did he work to bring about peace and to strengthen the Church that F. M. Powicke calls Ottoboni's mission, "the noblest expression in English history in the later Middle Ages of the unity of the two powers, the lay and the spiritual, in a joint recognition of the underlying unity of Christendom" (King Henry III and the Lord Edward Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1947, Vol. II, p. 528).

When Blessed Innocent V died in Rome, the cardinals had a bad time of it. Charles of Anjou, as Senator of Rome acting on the regulations of Gregory X, locked up the poor cardinals, and after eight days had produced no pope, reduced them to bread and water. Finally the French cardinals learned that Charles had no objection to Cardinal Ottoboni. He was thereupon elected unanimously. Ottoboni took the name Hadrian V. He was a sick man, indeed hastening toward the grave. Feeling no doubt that the severity of Anjou had hastened his end, he suspended the election regulations of Gregory X. He wished so to amend them as to make it impossible for the cardinals to be again mistreated as they were by the redoubtable Charles.

He had no time to amend them for though he went to Viterbo to escape the deadly Roman dog days, he died on August 18 in the Franciscan friary at Viterbo. Hadrian was never consecrated bishop or indeed, ordained priest. He had been a deacon when elected; a deacon he died.

He was buried in the Franciscan Church at Viterbo.