A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages; volume III

by Henry Charles Lea

Under such a system it is easy to conceive the character of the prelates and priests with which the Church was everywhere afflicted. Making some allowance for rhetorical enthusiasm, the invective of Nicholas de Clemangis must be received as true. As for the bishops, he says, as they have to spend all the money they can raise to obtain their sees, they devote themselves exclusively to extortion, neglecting wholly their pastoral duties and the spiritual welfare of their flocks; and if, by chance, one of them happens to pay attention to such subjects, he is despised as unworthy of his order. Preaching is regarded as disgraceful. All preferment and all sacerdotal functions are sold, as well as every episcopal ministration, laying on of hands, confession, absolution, dispensation; and this is openly defended, as they say they have not received gratis, and are not bound to give gratis. The only benefices bestowed without payment are to their bastards and jugglers. Their jurisdiction is turned equally to account. The greatest criminals can purchase pardon, while their proctors trump up charges against innocent rustics which have to be compounded. Citations under excommunication, delays and repeated citations, are employed, until the most obstinate is worn out and forced to settle, with enormous charges added to the original trifling fine. Men prefer to live under the most cruel tyrants rather than undergo the judgments of the bishops. Absenteeism is the rule. Many of the bishops never see their dioceses; and these are more useful than those who reside, for the latter contaminate their people by their evil example. As no examination is made into the lives of aspirants to the priesthood, but only as to their ability to pay the stipulated price, the Church is filled with ignorant and immoral men. Few are able to read. 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. Canons are no better; since, for the most part, they have bought exemption from episcopal jurisdiction, they commit all sorts of crimes and scandals with impunity. As for monks, they specially avoid all to which their vows oblige them—chastity, poverty, and obedience—and are licentious and undisciplined vagabonds. The Mendicants, who pretend to make amends for the neglect of duty by the secular clergy, are pharisees and wolves in sheep’s clothing. With incredible eagerness and infinite deceit they seek everywhere for temporal gain; they abandon themselves beyond all other men to the pleasures of the flesh, feasting and drinking, and polluting all things with their burning lusts. As for the nuns, modesty forbids the description of the nunneries, which are mere brothels, so that to take the veil is equivalent to becoming a public prostitute.[678]

We might suspect this to be the exaggeration of a soured ascetic if it were not for the unanimous testimony of all who describe the condition of the Church from the thirteenth century on. When St. Bonaventura defended the Mendicants against the charge of assailing, in their sermons, the vices of the secular clergy, he denied their doing so for the reason that any such arraignment would be superfluous; and, moreover, that if they were to unveil the full turpitude of the clerical class these would all be expelled, and there would be no hope of seeing their places more worthily filled, for the bishops would not select virtuous men. To do so, moreover, would deprive the people of all faith in the Church, and heresy would become uncontrollable. In another tract he declares that almost all priests were legally incapable of performing their functions, either through the simony attendant on their ordination or through the commission of crimes entailing suspension and deprivation. It was not infrequent, he says, for priests to persuade women that there was no sin in intercourse with a clerk.[679]

In 1305 Frederic of Trinacria, in a confidential letter to his brother, Jayme II. of Aragon, says that he has been led to doubt whether the Gospel was divine revelation or human invention, for three reasons. The first is the character of the secular clergy, especially of the bishops, abbots, and other prelates, who are destitute of all spiritual life, and are pestiferous in their influence through the public display of their wickedness. The second reason is the character of the regular clergy, and especially of the Mendicants, whose morals and lives stupefy all observers; they are so alienated from God that they justify the seculars and the laity by the comparison; their wickedness is so notorious that he fears that some day the people will rise against them, for they bring infection into every house which they frequent. The third reason is the negligence of the Holy See, which of old, as we are told, used to send legates through the kingdoms to look after the condition of religion; but now this is never done, and they are sent only for worldly objects. We see, he says, that it labors without ceasing to slay schismatics, but we never see it solicitous to convert them. The eloquence of Arnaldo de Vilanova was required to persuade Frederic that all this was compatible with the truth of Christianity, and he undertook to introduce a reformation in his own kingdom, commencing with himself.[680]

Marsiglio of Padua may be a suspected witness when he assumes, as a universally recognized fact, the corruption of the mass of ecclesiastics. They despoiled the poor, they were insatiable in their greed, and what they wrung from their flocks was wasted in debauchery. Boys, unlettered men, unknown persons, were promoted to benefices, and the bishops, by their example, carried to destruction more souls than they saved by their teaching. But his contemporary, Alvaro Pelayo, the Franciscan penitentiary of John XXII., is beyond suspicion, and he describes the Church of his time as completely secularized. There is no act of secular life in which priests and monks are not busy. As for the prelates, he can only compare them to the fabled Lamia, with a human head and the body of a beast—a monstrous fury which tears its own offspring to pieces and destroys all within its reach. The prelates, he says, give no teaching to their people, but flay and rend them. The bread due to the poor is lavished on jesters and dogs. Faith and justice have abandoned the earth; there is no humanity or kindness; the voracious flame of wrath and envy destroys the Church and skins the poor with fraud and simony. Scripture and the canons are regarded as fables. Through the iniquity of the priests and prelates the evils gather, for they publicly pervert the law, they render false judgments, they add blood to blood, for many perish through their frauds and machinations. They gloss and declare the law as they choose. The doctors and prelates and priests shed the blood of the just. They take the broad path that leads to destruction, and will not enter, nor permit others to enter, the narrow way that conducts to eternal life. This description is fully borne out by a letter of Benedict XII. to the Archbishop of Narbonne, describing the utter demoralization of the clergy of his province, so lately purified of heresy by the tireless labors of the Inquisition.[681]

Benedict’s well-intentioned effort at reformation was fruitless, and after his death matters only became worse, if possible. Under Clement VI. vices of all kinds flourished more luxuriantly than ever. In 1351 a Carmelite, preaching before the pope and cardinals, inveighed against their turpitude in terms which terrified every one, and caused his immediate dismissal. Shortly afterwards a letter was affixed to the portals of the churches addressed to the pope and his cardinals. It was signed Leviathan, Prince of Darkness, and was dated in the centre of hell. He saluted his vicar the pope and his servants the cardinals, with whose help he had overcome Christ; he commended them for all their vices, and sent them the good wishes of their mother, Pride, and their sisters, Avarice, Lust, and the rest, who boast of their well-being through their help. Clement was sorely moved, and fell dangerously sick, but the writer was never discovered. When Clement died, the next year, a majority of the cardinals were disposed to cast their votes for Jean Birel, Prior of the Grande Chartreuse, but the Cardinal of Périgord warned them that their favorite had such zeal for the Church, and was a man of such justice, equity, and disregard of persons, that he would speedily bring them back to their ancient condition, and that in four months their coursers would be converted into beasts of burden. Frightened at this prospect, they incontinently elected Innocent VI.[682]

These stories are verified by Petrarch’s descriptions of the papal court at Avignon, wherein even his glowing rhetoric fails to satisfy the vehemence of his indignation, while the details which he gives to justify his ardor are unfit to repeat. It is the Western Babylon, and nothing which is told of Assyria or Egypt, or even of Tartarus, can equal it, for all such are fables by comparison. Here you find Nimrod and Semiramis, Minos and Rhadamanthus, Cerberus consuming all things, Pasiphaë under the bull, and her offspring, the monster Minotaur. Here you see confusion, blackness, and horror. It is not a city, but a den of spectres and goblins, the common sink of all vices, the hell of the living. Here God is despised, money is worshipped, the laws are trodden under foot, the good are ridiculed till there scarce is one left to be laughed at. A deluge is necessary, but there would be no Noah, no Deucalion to survive it. Avignon is the woman clothed in purple and scarlet, holding the golden bowl of her abominations and the uncleanness of her fornications. He returns to the subject again and again with undiminished wrath, and he casually alludes to one of the cardinals as a man of a nobler soul, who might have been good had he not belonged to the sacred college. The mocking spirit of Boccaccio is equally outspoken. From the highest to the lowest, every one in the papal court is abandoned to the most abominable vices. The sight of it converts a Jew, for he argues that Christianity must be of God, seeing that it spreads and flourishes in spite of the wickedness of its head.[683]

Gregory XI. was the fiercest persecutor of heresy in the fourteenth century, incessantly active against Brethren of the Free Spirit, Waldenses, and Fraticelli. He could boast that even as his namesake and prototype, Gregory IX., had founded the Inquisition, so he had restored it and had extended it into Germany. Yet, with all this zeal for compelling unity of faith, St. Birgitta was divinely commissioned to convey to him this message from the Lord:

“Hear, O Gregory XI., the words I say to thee, and give unto them diligent attention! Why dost thou hate me so? Why are thy audacity and presumption so great against me that thy worldly court destroys my heavenly one? Proudly thou despoilest me of my sheep. The wealth of the Church which is mine, and the goods of the faithful of the Church, thou extortest and seizest, and givest to thy worldly friends. Thou takest unjustly the store of the poor and lavishest it without shame on thy worldly friends. What have I done to thee, O Gregory? Patiently have I suffered thee to rise to the high-priesthood, and I have foretold to thee my will by letters divinely sent to thee, warning thee of the salvation of thy soul, and reproaching thy recklessness. How then dost thou repay my many favors? Why in thy court dost thou suffer unchecked the foulest pride, insatiable avarice, wantonness execrable to me, and all-devouring simony? Moreover, thou dost seize and carry away from me innumerable souls, for well-nigh all who go to thy court thou plungest into the fire of hell.... Gird up thy loins, then, and fear not. Arise and bravely seek to reform the Church which I have purchased with my blood, and it will be restored to its former state, though now a brothel is more respected than it is. If thou dost not obey my command, know verily that thou wilt be condemned, and every devil of hell will have a morsel of thy soul, immortal and inconsumable.”

In another vision St. Birgitta was ordered to represent to the pope the deplorable state of all orders of the clergy. Priests were rather pimps of the devil than clerks of God. The monasteries were well-nigh abandoned, mass was only celebrated in them intermittently, while the monks resided in their houses and had no shame in acknowledging their offspring, or wandered around, frequently clad in armor under their frocks. The doors of the nunneries were open night and day, and they were rather brothels than holy retreats. Such is the burden of St. Birgitta’s repeated revelations, and nothing that Wickliff or Huss could say of the depravity of the clergy could exceed the bitterness of her denunciation.[684]

The inspiration of St. Catharine of Siena was equally outspoken. In her letters to Gregory XI., Urban VI., and the dignitaries who listened respectfully to her enunciations of the voice of God, her constant theme is the corruption of every rank in the hierarchy and the immediate necessity for reform. To Gregory she announces that God will sharply rebuke him if he does not cleanse the Church of its impurities; God demands of him to cast aside lukewarmness and fear, and to become another man, that he may eradicate the abundance of its iniquity. To Urban she says that it is not possible for him to put an end to the evil everywhere committed throughout Christendom, and especially by the clergy, but at least he can do what lies within his power. The prelates she describes as caring for nothing but pleasure and ambition; they are infernal demons carrying off the souls of their subjects, they are wolves and traffickers in the divine grace. As for the priests, they are the exact opposites of what they should be, injuring all who come in contact with them; all their lives are corrupt, and they are not worthy to be called men, but, rather, beasts, wallowing in filth and indulging in all the wickedness craved by their bestial appetites; they are not guardians of souls, but devourers, delivering them up to the Wolf of Hell.[685] All these warnings fell upon deaf ears, and the Church, during the Great Schism, plunged, if possible, deeper into the pit of abominations.