Pope Saint Celestine V (1215 – 19 May 1296).
Pietro Angelerio was born to Angelo Angelerio and Maria Leone in Sant'Angelo Limosano, in the Kingdom of Sicilia (Sicily). After his father's death he began working in the fields. From the time he was a child, he showed great intelligence and love for others. At the age of 17 he became a Benedictine monk at Faifoli in Benevento and showed an extraordinary disposition toward asceticism and solitude.In1239 he retired to a solitary cavern on the mountain Morrone, hence his name. Five years later he left this retreat, and went with two companions to a similar cave on the Mountain of Maiella in the Abruzzi region of central Italy, where he lived according to the example of St. John the Baptist.In 1244 Pietro Angelerio founded,the order of the Celestines.
After the death of Pope Nicholas IV in April 1292. Latino Malabranca, the aged and ill dean of the College of Cardinals cried out, "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I elect brother Pietro di Morrone." The cardinals promptly ratified Malabranca's decision. When sent for, Morrone obstinately refused to accept the papacy, and tried to flee, until he was finally persuaded by a deputation of cardinals accompanied by the kings of Naples and Hungary. Elected on 5 July 1294 at age 79, he was crowned at Santa Maria di Collemaggio in the city of Aquila in the Abruzzo on 29 August, taking the name of Celestine V.
Pope Saint Celestine V
Pope Saint Celestine V issued two decrees: one confirmed an earlier decree of Pope Gregory X that ordered the shutting of the cardinals in a conclave to elect a new pope and the second declared the right of any pope to abdicate the papacy, a right that he himself exercised at the end of five months and eight days at Naples on 13 December 1294. In the formal instrument of renunciation he recited as the causes moving him to the step, "the desire for humility, for a purer life, for a stainless conscience, the deficiencies of his own physical strength, his ignorance, the perverseness of the people, his longing for the tranquility of his former life".Having divested himself of every outward symbol of papal dignity, he retired to his old solitude.Pope Celestine V had become overwhelmed by the demands of the papal office, Pope Celestine V ,a hermetic pontiff stepped down after five months as pope.
