Luther shook his head at the freedom of certain public manners of the
Italians which reminded him of dogs and of what he had read about
Kerkyra.
Luther heard of a Lenten collation, probably at the abbey of San Benedetto de Larione, where the word "fast" had to be spelled with an e as the second letter.
The loquaciousness, spicy talk, blasphemy, dishonesty, treachery, quarrelsomeness, and deadly animosities of the Italians, Luther regards as strange, considering that they live so near to the Holy City.
He wondered why the Italians do not permit their women to go out of their houses except deeply veiled.
He finds that the Italians show no respect for their beautiful churches and the divine service conducted in them. Even on great festivals the magnificent cathedrals are almost empty, the worshipers are chatting with one another while the service is in progress. Even quarrels are settled at these holy places, sometimes with the knife. When there is a burial, they hurry the corpse to the grave, not even the relatives being in attendance.
He is grieved at the irreligious manner in which the priests at Rome read mass. They hurry through the performance with incredible rapidity. They crowd each other away from the altar in their haste to get their performance finished. "Hurry, hurry! Begone! Come away!" he hears them calling to one-another. Sometimes two priests are reading mass at one altar at the same time. They had finished the whole mass before Luther had reached the Gospel in the service of the mass. And then they would receive money from the bystanders who had come in and had watched them. In a half hour a priest could get a handful of silver. Luther refused such gifts.
Luther heard few preachers at Rome, and those that he heard he did not like. They were very lively in the delivery of their sermons, they would run to and fro in their pulpit, bend far over toward the audience, utter violent cries, change their voice suddenly, and gesticulate like madmen.
Luther saw Pope Julius from a distance several times. He thought it queer that a healthy and strong man like the Pope should have himself carried to church in a litter instead of walking thither, and that such show should be made of his going there and a procession should be formed to accompany him. He saw the Pope sit at the altar and hold out his foot to be kissed by people. He saw the Pope take communion. He did not kneel like other communicants, but sat on his magnificent throne; a cardinal priest handed him the chalice, and he sipped the wine through a silver tube.
However, these and other things did not at the time shake Luther's belief in the Catholic Church. He came to Rome and left Rome a devout Catholic. Staupitz, the vicar of his order, had really gratified him in permitting him to go to Rome as the traveling companion of another monk. Luther had expressed the wish to make a general confession at Rome. With this thought on his mind he started out, and he treated the whole journey as a pilgrimage. After the manner of pious monks the two companions walked one behind the other, reciting prayers and litanies. Whether his general confession and his first mass at Rome, probably at Santa Maria del Popolo, gave him that sense of spiritual satisfaction which he craved, he has not told us. When he had come in sight of the city, he had fallen on his face like the crusaders in sight of Jerusalem, and had fervently blessed that moment. Now he ran through the seven stations of Rome, read masses wherever he could, gathered an abundance of indulgences by going through prescribed forms of worship at many shrines, listened to miracle-tales, knelt before the veil of St. Veronica near the Golden Gate at San Giovanni and before the bronze statue of St. Peter in the chapel of St. Martin, where a crucifix had of its own accord raised itself up and become transfixed in the dome, saw the rope with which Judas hanged himself fastened to the altar of the Apostles Simon and Judas at St. Peter's, the stone in the chapel of St. Petronella on which the penitential tears of Peter had fallen, cutting a groove in it two fingers wide, had the guide show him the Pope's crown, the tiara, which, he thought, cost more money than all the princes of Germany possessed, was perplexed at finding the heads and bodies of Peter and Paul assigned to different places, at the Lateran Church and at San Paolo Fuori, mounted the Scala Santa—Pilate's staircase—on his knees, passed with awe the relief picture in one of the streets which the popular legend declared to be that of the female Pope Johanna and her child, saw the ancient pagan deities of Rome depicted in Santa Maria della Rotonda, the old Pantheon, stared at the head of John the Baptist in San Silvestro in Capite, tried, but failed to read the famous Saturday mass at San Giovanni, the oldest and greatest sanctuary of Christianity, rested from a fatiguing tour through the Lateran in Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, where Pope Sylvester II, the Faustus of the Italians, was carried away by the devils, went through the catacombs with its 6 martyred Popes and 176,000 other martyrs, etc., etc.
Looking back to this visit later, Luther remarked, "I believed everything" Just what official Rome expected every devout pilgrim to do, just what it expects them to do to-day. And these Romanists want to point the finger of ridicule at the simpleton, the easy dupe, the holy fool Luther! Does Rome perhaps think the same of all the pious pilgrims that annually crowd Rome? Luther heard himself called "un buon Christiano" at Rome and discovered that that meant as much as "an egregious ass." But he considered that a part of Italian wickedness. The Church, he was sure, approved of all that he did, in fact, had taught him to do all that. It required ten years or more to disabuse his mind of the frauds that had been practised on him, and then he declared that he would not take 100,000 gulden not to have seen with his own eyes how scandalously the Popes were hoodwinking Christians. If it were not for his visit at Rome, he says, he might fear that he was slandering the Popes in what he wrote about them.