1113: papal recognition
In February 2013, and throughout that year, the Sovereign Order of Malta celebrated a major anniversary: exactly 900 years earlier Pope Paschal II had issued the bull that officially recognised the religious community of the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem.
This document, known from its opening words as the bull Pie Postulatio Voluntatis, laid the legal foundation for the sovereignty and independence of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, today the Sovereign Order of Malta, and was fundamental to its development.
The Order had been founded in the Holy Land more than half a century earlier as a monastic community caring for poor pilgrims in a hospital in Jerusalem. Through the bull the Hospitallers became a lay religious order.
The document is also of great institutional importance: in it the Pope granted the Order the absolute right to secure the continuation of its work by electing, on its own, the successors of its founder, Brother Gerard.
The bull, now kept in the National Library of Malta, still gives a clear picture of the role and importance of Blessed Gerard, of his personal holiness and of the group of distinguished religious who worked with him. It also stresses the importance of the services offered to pilgrims and the poor in Jerusalem.
The list of hospitals and hospices in France and Italy named in the bull, which existed only a few decades after the community was founded, shows that the institution founded by Brother Gerard was not confined to the Kingdom of Jerusalem but had already spread into Europe.
During 2013 the institutions of the Order on five continents marked the anniversary with many events. The most important was the gathering in Rome on 9 February 2013, when Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone celebrated Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica. Afterwards Pope Benedict XVI addressed more than 5,000 members and volunteers of the Order who had come from all over the world.