Even greater social evils resulted from the immunities from secular law which the clergy succeeded in gaining. The first of these was that worthless men were attracted to the Church, and did as they pleased under the shelter of its privileges. Malefactors habitually pleaded clerical rights; the Church, in a spirit of comradeship worthy of a better cause, as regularly took up their defence. Crime flourished, and the community suffered. Innocent III reinstated a Bishop of exceptionally bad character who had been imprisoned for rebellion against the King of Denmark, and decided that priests could not be arrested by laymen and brought before the episcopal court even when detected in gross crime. Under these conditions it was almost impossible for laymen to obtain justice, whether in regard to offences against person or offences against property. And, the clergy being the only educated class, their opportunities for exploiting the popular ignorance were abundant and fully utilized.

Monasteries were the fruit of good intentions, but, in spite of occasional examples to the contrary, soon became degraded to an extraordinary degree. Rome could easily be bribed to grant exemption from the jurisdiction of the Bishops, and the liberty of monks and nuns degenerated into the foulest licence. The abodes of religion were feudal castles, in which the monks lived as riotously as the barons, and waged private war with equal ferocity. As for the nunneries, many of them were notoriously no better than brothels. With these varied attractions, it is not surprising that the lawless found in the monastic life a congenial refuge; and many a robber baron and many a criminal temporarily weary of crime discovered a safe and easy way of gratifying his untamed passions. So little were the obligations of honesty observed that within the monasteries themselves the inmates had to take special precautions against theft by their fellows, each monk having to keep a wary eye on his own spoons, dishes, and bedclothes. The holy tramps who wandered about selling false relics and working false miracles became so great a nuisance that they were sometimes killed without mercy when detected in their frequent crimes.

The system of indulgences so carefully worked out by the Church produced the most various results throughout Europe. A death-bed gift to the Church atoned for an evil life; trifling religious observances were thought to secure not only remission of the pangs of Purgatory, but forgiveness of all sins committed after baptism. In short, all sin was condoned on the most favourable terms, and eternal salvation purchased for the price of a pair of boots. The bones or the dead bodies of saints were held to protect believers from all ills, and to ensure prosperity; even a single glance at the image of St. Christopher preserving one from disease or sudden death for the rest of the day. Some of the beliefs connected with the worship of the sacred wafer reveal a credulity which only carefully-fostered ignorance could render possible. A specimen wafer placed in a beehive to check disease among the bees was so highly appreciated by those intelligent insects that they built a little chapel around it, with windows, roof, and bell-tower all complete, and an altar inside, on which they reverently placed the wafer. A woman who crumbled a wafer over her cabbages to protect them from caterpillars was at once punished by incurable paralysis.

Simony.

The scandals connected with the sale of indulgences are too well known to need description, but the universal prevalence of simony is less generally realized. Simony is defined as “giving or receiving, or intending to give or receive, anything temporal for anything spiritual.�[1] The term is derived from Simon Magus, who is stated in Acts viii, 18, 19, to have offered St. Peter money for the privilege of communicating the Holy Ghost. This abuse formed one of the great scandals in the Church, especially in the thirteenth century, and was so deeply rooted that the efforts of reforming Pontiffs like Gregory VII produced little result. Less conscientious Popes were such notorious offenders that the venality of the Papal court became a byword, and some vicars of Christ amassed enormous private fortunes by this dubious means.

Simony was a heresy which came under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, and could not long have flourished had that efficient body determined to stamp it out. There is no record that the Inquisition ever even undertook a prosecution for simony; it was too profitable to the Roman Curia. From the highest to the lowest the Church was infected with this vice: there was scarcely a church in Christendom free from it, and Pope John XXII drew up a regular scale of absolutions for the most moderate fees. In order to pay the expenses of his soldiers and of his building operations, Boniface XI once dismissed suddenly all the prelates at his Court and many others, and then sold their places to the highest bidders, with the result that some of the ejected Bishops wandered about in a state of starvation. Newly appointed prelates were bled freely, and if the demands were not met they became simple priests once more. Boniface appointed as Bishops the men who were willing to pay the most liberally, archbishoprics commanding the high figure of 60,000 to 80,000 florins. Yet one of the great questions debated in the thirteenth century was the question whether it was possible for the Pope to commit simony! Every one knew that many Popes actually did commit an offence of which the evil effects were far reaching. If the love of money is not the root of all evil, it is the root of much, and its effects in the sphere of religion are peculiarly deplorable. The Papal Court was filled with a swarm of ecclesiastics greedy for preferment by any means whatever. When they obtained it they at once set to work to recoup themselves for the time spent and the bribes they had to give, by extorting money from their flocks, to the complete neglect of their spiritual duties. In the administration of justice ecclesiastics acquitted the guilty for bribes, and trumped up charges against the innocent, which had to be compounded for cash. A bishop who resided in his diocese was the exception that proved the rule. Men preferred to live under the tyranny of the baron rather than under the dangerous protection of the Church.

Money being the real qualification for the ministry of the Gospel, the priests were generally as illiterate as they were immoral. “They haunt the taverns and brothels, consuming time and substance in eating, drinking, and gambling; they quarrel, fight, and blaspheme, and hasten to the altar from the embraces of their concubines.�[2] The higher clergy, who could readily purchase exemptions, considered themselves free to indulge in every kind of excess; the monks were licentious and unruly vagabonds, who carefully avoided keeping their vows; the mendicants, who pretended to greater strictness, gave themselves up to every kind of fleshly indulgence; the morals of nunneries were such that to join one was the same thing as becoming a public prostitute. A Jew is said to have become convinced that Christianity must be of God, since it continued to exist in spite of the wickedness of the clergy. The visions of St. Birgitta and the vehement warnings of St. Catherine of Siena were fruitless to stem the torrent of iniquity. Nearly the whole Church being in this condition, reform from within was hopeless, as indeed was stated in 1437 by a Dominican bishop. Exaggeration may be suspected, but that it was not easy to exaggerate the following incident will show. “In 1459 there died at Arras at the age of eighty Nicaise le Vasseur, canon and head of the Chapter of Arras. He not only had daughters and committed incest with them, but also with a granddaughter whom he had by one of them. Yet so blunted was the moral sense of Church and people that, as we are told, this monster officiated très honorablement in Divine service on all feasts and holidays, and the only comment of the chronicler is that he did it most becomingly. When in 1474 news of the death of Sixtus IV was received in Rome with a pæan of joy, people commented not so much upon his selling benefices to the highest bidder and his other devices for extorting money as upon the manner in which he rewarded the boys who served his unnatural lusts by granting to them rich bishoprics and archbishoprics.�[3] When Pope Alexander VI was reproached with Papal connivance with crime, he is said to have made the cynical reply: “God does not desire the death of a sinner, but that he should pay, and live.�[4]

That the Church should have made its principal aim correctness of belief (or rather obedience to its authority), and purity of life a secondary consideration, involved the policy of religious persecution systematically followed by the Inquisition. Except as a source of revenue, crime was of little consequence. Virtuous heretics were exterminated, and the guilty orthodox absolved from the worst crimes, in the name of Christ. A Flemish chronicler relates in 1379 “that it would be impossible to describe the prevalence everywhere of perjuries, blasphemies, adulteries, quarrels, brawls, murder, rapine, thieving, robbery, whoredom, debauchery, avarice, oppression of the poor, drunkenness, and similar vices, and he illustrates his statement with the fact that in the territory of Ghent within the space of ten months there occurred no less than 1,400 murders committed in bagnios, brothels, gambling houses, taverns, and other similar places.�[5] In the Italian Church there was no devotion, in the laity neither faith nor morals. Factions filled the streets with blood, the roads were closed by robbers, the seas swarmed with pirates. “Parents slew with rejoicing their children who chanced to be of the opposite faction.�[6] Æneas Sylvius wrote in 1453: “Whether I look upon the deeds of princes or of prelates I find that all have sunk, all are worthless.... Execration and falsehood and slaughter and theft and adultery are spread among you, and you add blood to blood..... There is no shame in crime, for you sin so openly and shamelessly that you seem to take delight in it.�[7]

The flagrant immorality of many of the Bishops, and the frequency with which they took part in war, were even in rude times deemed unbecoming to their profession; but the difficulty of getting them punished by any ecclesiastical court was so great that in most cases the offenders could continue to tread the primrose path of dalliance without fear of retribution. About the worst of these clerical rakes was the Archbishop of Besançon, who in 1198 was accused of perjury, simony, and incest. He was formally indicted by his Chapter, but the Pope, on the authority of the Gospel story of the woman taken in adultery, charitably dismissed the charge with a caution. The hardened old sinner continued his gay career for sixteen years, but was at length driven from his see by the townspeople. It took ten years to get rid of another prelate, a Bishop of Toul, and a few years later he was killed by his uncle in revenge for a murder. This gentleman’s favourite mistress was a daughter of his own, the mother being a nun.

Whatever were the causes of this appalling state of things, it is difficult to reconcile it with the claim that the Christian Church is a Divine institution. Yet it would not be true to say that no virtue existed. Even in the Church there were good and sincere men who strove earnestly to check the tide of iniquity. And those whom the Church hounded to death far surpassed it in purity of life. The poor persecuted heretics were noted for their blameless conduct, their singular industry, their self-sacrifice and endurance, which formed a lesson to the orthodox. “Ignorant and toiling men and women—peasants, mechanics, and the like—dimly conscious that the system of society was wrong, that the commands of God were perverted or neglected, that humanity was capable of higher development if it could but find and follow the Divine Will; striving, each in his humble sphere, to solve the inscrutable and awful problems of existence, to secure in tribulation his own salvation, and to help his fellows in the arduous task—these forgotten martyrs of the truth drew from themselves alone the strength which enabled them to dare and to endure martyrdom.â€�[8] The earnest and devoted ministers of the Church, the virtuous and humble believers among the laity, were as drops in the ocean of evil; and it was popularly believed that Antichrist was ruling in the world, and that the awful Day of Judgment was at hand.