Hugues de Saint-Cher e il collegio cardinalizio al tempo di Urbano IV: una societas curiale del Corpus Domini?

A set of unique events in the history of sacraments and liturgy took place in 1264 at the roman curia in Orvieto. For the first time in the history of the Church, a pope promoted throughout latin Christendom not only the celebration of a particular liturgical feast (Corpus Christi), but also the adoption of a text to be used during celebrations. Urban IV’s eucharistic project was the first attempt, sponsored by the Apostolic See, to uniform liturgy in the latin Christendom. The paper intends to investigate the curial context in which this project took shape. In particular, it focuses on the contribution given by the pope’s collaborators, the cardinals, to its implementation. Between 1261 and early 1262, in fact, Urban IV, newly elected, deeply renewed the college of cardinals appointing fourteen new cardinals. Half of them were very close to the pope, relatives or clerics met during his ecclesiastical career. At least four of them (Hugues de Saint Cher, Eudes de Chateauroux, Enrico from Susa, Pietro Capocci) had been involved in the birth of the eucharistic devotion in the diocese of Liege. They were strong promoters in the roman curia of the institution of a liturgical feast dedicated to the cult of Corpus Christi. Others, like Giovanni Gaetano Orsini, showed throughout their career special attention to liturgical reforms; three other cardinals (Raoul Gosparmi, Guy Foucois, Simon de Brion), all French, before becoming cardinals, had been collaborators of the king of France and had breathed the christological spirituality that permeated the court of Louis IX. The latter promoted a concept of kingship clearly identified with the Passion of Christ, so that Jacques Le Goff called him a king-Christ. The Urban’s eucharistic project took shape in this curial context, but it remained the “great unfinished” of the French pope for the sudden death of some of its protagonists (Hugues de Saint Cher and the pope himself). The Urban IV’s letter Transiturus de mundo establishing the feast and the liturgical text (the Officium Sacerdos aeternum draw from Thomas Aquinas) probably was never released by the papal chancery and was recovered only at the beginning of the next century by Clement V.