The question may be asked, What of it? What if the Church were to
rule? There are not a few Americans who believe that there have
to be rich and poor, and that rule by Roman Catholics might be
preferable to rule by Socialists. Before you decide, at least do
not fail to consider what history has to tell about priestly
government. We do not have to use our imaginations in the matter,
for there was once a Golden Age such as Archbishop Quigley dreams
of, when the power of the church was complete, when emperors and
princes paid homage to her, and the civil authority made haste to
carry out her commands. What was the condition of the people in
those times? We are told by Lea, in his "History of the
Inquisition" that:
The moral condition of the laity was unutterably depraved.
Uniformity of faith had been enforced by the Inquisition and its
methods, and so long as faith was preserved, crime and sin was
comparatively unimportant except as a source of revenue to those
who sold absolution. As Theodoric Vrie tersely puts it, hell and
purgatory would be emptied if enough money could be found. The
artificial standard thus created is seen in a revelation of the
Virgin to St. Birgitta, that a Pope who was free from heresy, no
matter how polluted by sin and vice, is not so wicked but that he
has the absolute power to bind and loose souls. There are many
wicked popes plunged in hell, but all their lawful acts on earth
are accepted and confirmed by God, and all priests who are not
heretics administer true sacraments, no matter how depraved they
may be. Correctness of belief was thus the sole essential; virtue
was a wholly subordinate consideration. How completely under such
a system religion and morals came to be dissociated is seen in
the remarks of Pius II, that the Franciscans were excellent
theologians, but cared nothing about virtue.
This, in fact, was the direct result of the system of persecution
embodied in the Inquisition. Heretics who were admitted to be
patterns of virtue were ruthlessly exterminated in the name of
Christ, while in the same holy name the orthodox could purchase
absolution for the vilest of crimes for a few coins. When the
only unpardonable offence was persistence in some trifling error
of belief, such as the poverty of Christ; when men had before
them the example of their spiritual guides as leaders in vice and
debauchery and contempt of sacred things, all the sanctions of
morality were destroyed and the confusion between right and wrong
became hopeless. The world has probably never seen a society more
vile than that of Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. The brilliant pages of Froissart fascinate us with
their pictures of the artificial courtesies of chivalry; the
mystic reveries of Rysbroek and of Tauler show us that spiritual
life survived in some rare souls, but the mass of the population
was plunged into the depths of sensuality and the most brutal
oblivion of the moral law. For this Alvaro Pelayo tells us that
the priesthood were accountable, and that, in comparison with
them, the laity were holy. What was that state of comparative
holiness he proceeds to describe, blushing as he writes, for the
benefit of confessors, giving a terrible sketch of universal
immorality which nothing could purify but fire and brimstone from
heaven. The chroniclers do not often pause in their narrations to
dwell on the moral aspects of the times, but Meyer, in his annals
of Flanders, under date of 1379, tells us that it would be
impossible to describe the prevalence everywhere of perjuries,
blasphemies, adulteries, hatreds, quarrels, brawls, murder,
rapine, thievery, robbery, gambling, whoredom, debauchery,
avarice, oppression of the poor, rape, 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 fourteen hundred murders committed in the
bagnios, brothels, gambling-houses, taverns, and other similar
places. When, in 1396, Jean sans Peur led his Crusaders to
destruction at Micopolis, their crimes and cynical debauchery
scandalized even the Turks, and led to the stern rebuke of
Bajazet himself, who as the monk of St. Denis admits was much
better than his Christian foes. The same writer, moralizing over
the disaster at Agincourt, attributes it to the general
corruption of the nation. Sexual relations, he says, were an
alternation of disorderly lust and of incest; commerce was nought
but fraud and treachery; avarice withheld from the Church her
tithes, and ordinary conversation was a succession of
blasphemies. The Church, set up by God as a model and protector
of the people, was false to all its obligations. The bishops,
through the basest and most criminal of motives, were habitual
accepters of persons; they annointed themselves with the last
essence extracted from their flocks, and there was in them
nothing of holy, of pure, of wise, or even of decent.