Editing Gregorian Reform (section)

==Central status of the church==
Before the Gregorian Reforms the Catholic Church was a heavily decentralized institution, in which the pope held little power outside his position as Bishop of Rome. With that in mind, the papacy up until the twelfth century held little to no authority over the bishops, who were invested with land by lay rulers. Gregory VII's ban on lay investiture was a key element of the reform, ultimately contributing to the centralized papacy of the later Middle Ages.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/halsall/source/g7-reform2.asp|title=Internet History Sourcebooks Project|website=sourcebooks.fordham.edu|access-date=2017-11-04}}</ref>

The reform of the church, both within it, and in relation to the [[Holy Roman Emperor]] and the other lay rulers of Europe, was Gregory VII's life work. It was based on his conviction that the church was founded by God and entrusted with the task of embracing all mankind in a single society in which divine will is the only law; that, in his capacity as a divine institution, he is supreme over all human structures, especially the secular state; and that the pope, in his role as head of the church under the petrine commission, is the vice-regent of God on earth, so that disobedience to him implies disobedience to God: or, in other words, a defection from Christianity. But any attempt to interpret this in terms of action would have bound the church to annihilate not merely a single state, but all states. Thus Gregory, as a politician wanting to achieve some result, was driven in practice to adopt a different standpoint. He acknowledged the existence of the state as a dispensation of [[Divine Providence|Providence]], described the coexistence of church and state as a divine ordinance, and emphasized the necessity of union between the ''[[sacerdotium]]'' and the ''imperium''. But, during no period would he have imagined the two powers on an equal footing. The superiority of Church to State was to him a fact which admitted no discussion and which he had never doubted.

He wished to see all important matters of dispute referred to Rome; appeals were to be addressed to himself; the centralization of ecclesiastical government in Rome naturally involved a curtailment of the powers of bishops. Since these refused to submit voluntarily and tried to assert their traditional independence, his papacy was full of struggles against the higher ranks of the clergy.