Lay Abbot
(abbatocomes, abbas laicus, abbas miles).
A name used to designate a layman on whom a king or someone
in authority bestowed an abbey as a reward for services rendered; he
had charge of the estate be longing to it, and was entitled to part
of the income. This baneful custom had a bad effect upon the life of
the cloister. It existed principally in the Frankish Empire from the
eighth century till the ecclesiastical reforms of the eleventh.
Charles Martel (q.v.) was the first to bestow extensive
ecclesiastical property upon laymen, political friends, and warriors
who had helped him in his campaigns. At an earlier period the French
Merovingians had bestowed church lands on laymen, or at least
allowed them their possession and use, though not ownership.
Numerous synods held in France in the sixth and seventh centuries
passed decrees against this abuse of church property. The French
kings were also in the habit of appointing abbots to monasteries
which they had founded; moreover, many monasteries, though not
founded by the king, placed themselves under royal patronage in
order to share his protection, and so be came possessions of the
Crown. This custom of the Merovingian rulers of disposing of church
property in individual cases, as also that of appointing abbots to
monasteries founded by or belonging to themselves, was taken as a
precedent by the French kings for rewarding laymen with abbeys, or
giving them to bishops in commendam. Under Charles Martel the Church
was greatly injured by this abuse, not only in her pos sessions, but
also in her religious life. St. Boniface and later Hincmar of Reims
picture most dismally the consequent downfall of church discipline,
and though St. Boniface tried zealously and even successfully to
reform the Frankish Church, the bestowal of abbeys on secular abbots
was not entirely abolished, Under Pepin the monks were permitted, in
case their abbey should fall into secular hands, to go over to an
other community.
Charlemagne also frequently gave church property,
and sometimes abbeys, in feudal tenure. It is true that Louis the Pious aided St. Benedict of Aniane in his endeavours to reform the
monastic life. In order to accomplish this it was necessary to
restore the free election of abbots, and the appointment as well of
blameless monks as heads of the monastic houses. Although Emperor
Louis shared these principles, he continued to bestow abbeys on
laymen, and his sons imitated him. The important Abbey of
St. Riquier (Centula) in Picardy had secular abbots from the time of
Charlemagne, who had given it to his friend Angilbert, the poet and
the lover of his daughter Bertha, and father of her two sons (see
ANGILBERT, SAINT). After Angilbert's death in 814, the abbey was
given to other laymen. Under such influences the Church was bound to
suffer; frequently the abbeys were scenes of worldliness and
revelry. Various synods of the ninth century passed decrees against
this custom; the Synod of Diedenhofen (October, 844) decreed in its
third canon, that abbeys should no longer remain in the power of
laymen, but that monks should be their abbots (Hefele,
"Konziliengeschichte", 2nd ed., IV, 110). In like manner the Synods
of Meaux and Paris (845-846) complained that the monasteries held by
laymen had fallen into decay, and emphasized the king's duty in this
respect (op. cit., IV, 115). But abbeys continued to be bestowed
upon laymen espe cially in France and Lorraine, e.g. St. Evre near
Toul, in the reign of Lothaire I. Lothaire II, however, restored it
to ecclesiastical control in 858, but the same king gave Bonmoutier
to a layman; and the Abbeys of St. Germain and St. Martin, in the
Diocese of Toul, were also given to secular abbots. In the Diocese
of Metz, the Abbey of Gorze was long in the hands of laymen, and
under them fell into decay. Stavelot and Malmédy, in the Diocese of
Liège, were in the eleventh century bestowed on a certain Count
Ragin arius, as also St. Maximin near Trier on a Count Adal hard,
etc. (Hauck, "Kirchengeschichte Deutschland", II, 598). In 888 a
Synod of Mainz decreed (can. xxv) that the secular abbots should
place able provosts and provisors over their monasteries.
Councils,
however, were unable to put an end to the evil; in a synod held at
Trosly, in the Diocese of Soissons, in 909, sharp complaints were
made (ch. iii) about the lives of monks; many convents, it was said,
were governed by laymen, whose wives and children, soldiers and
dogs, were housed in the precincts of the religious. To better these
conditions it was neces sary, the synod declared, to restore the
regulur abbots and abbesses; at the same time ecclesiastical canons
and royal capitularies declared laymen quite devoid of authority in
church affairs (Hefele, op. cit., IV, 572-73). Lay abbots existed in
the tenth century, also in the eleventh. Gosfred, Duke of Aquitaine,
was Abbot of the monastery of St. Hilary at Poitiers, and as such he
published the decrees issued (1078) at the Synod of Poitiers
(Hefele, op. cit., V, 116). It was only through the so-called
investitures conflict that the Church was freed from secular
domination; the reform of religious and ecclesiastical life brought
about by the papacy, put an end to the bestowal of abbeys upon
laymen.
THOMASSINUS, Vetus et nova ecclesiæ disciplina circa
beneficia, part II, lib. II, c. 12 sqq. (Lyons, 1705, 586-622);
Hefele, History of the Councils; Digby, Ages of Faith; FOSTER,
British Monasticism; LINGARD, History of England (Dublin, 1878); D'Alton, History of Ireland; STUART AND COLEMAN, History of the
Diocese of Armagh.
J.P. KIRSCH
Transcribed by Mario Anello
The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia