Catholic writers ask the world not to believe Luther's tales about the
city of Rome. Luther, they say, came to Rome as a callow rustic comes to
a metropolis. To the wily Italians he was German Innocence Abroad; they
hoaxed him by telling him absurd tales about the Popes, the priests, the
wonders of the city, etc., and the credulous monk believed all they told
him. He left Rome with his faith in the Church unimpaired. Later in
life, after his "defection" from Rome, he told as true facts and as
reminiscences of his visit at the Holy City many of the false stories
which had been palmed off on him. This is said to have given rise to the
prevailing Protestant view that during his visit at Rome Luther's eyes
were opened to the corruption of the Roman Church and his resolution
formed to overthrow that Church. Luther himself is said to be
responsible for this false view. He fostered it by his tales of what he
had seen and heard at Rome with disgust and horror. His horrid
impressions are declared pure fiction, and simply serve to show how
little the man can be trusted in anything he states.
To leave a way open for a decent retreat, Catholics also point to a
difference in temperament between the phlegmatic Luther coming from a
northern clime, which through its atmospheric rigors begets somber
reflections and gloomy thoughts, and the airy, fairy Italians, who revel
in sunshine, flowers, and fruits, drink fiery wines, and naturally grow
up into a freedom of manners and lack of restraint that is
characteristic of people living in southern climes. All of which means--
if it means anything serious--that the Ten Commandments are subject to
revision according to the geographic latitude in which a person happens
to be. When your austere gentleman, raised among the fens and bogs of
the Frisian coast, sees something in a grove in Sicily which he
denounces as wicked, you must tell him that there is nothing wrong in
what he has seen. He has only omitted to adjust his temperament to the
locality. If you follow out this line of thought to the end, you will
come to a point where you strike hands with Rudyard Kipling, who has
sung enthusiastically about a certain locality beyond Aden where the Ten
Commandments do not exist. And to think that this plea is made by people
who have charged Luther with having put the Ten Commandments out of
commission for himself and others! Italians, lovers of freedom and
unrestraint, were the first to fill the world with tales about the moral
besottedness of Luther! This goes to show that in any application of the
Ten Commandments it matters very much who does the applying.
We have in a previous chapter briefly reviewed the Popes that were
contemporaries of Luther. Their character was stamped on the life of the
Holy City: The Popes and their following gave Rome its moral, or
immoral, face. The chroniclers of those days have described the existing
conditions. Luther need not have said one word about what wicked things
he had seen and heard at Rome, either ten years, or twenty years, or
thirty years after he had been there, and the world would still know the
record of the residence of the Popes. Luther really saw very little of
what he might have seen, and it is probable that he has told less. But
what he did see and hear are facts. He did not grasp their full meaning
nor see their true bearing at the time. The real import of his Roman
experiences dawned on him at a later period. He spoke as a man of things
that he had seen as a child. But that does not alter the facts.
Luther was shocked at the levity of Italian monks who were babbling
faulty Latin prayers which they did not understand and remarked laughing
to him: "Never mind; the Holy Ghost understands us, and the devil flees
apace."
Luther's confidence in the boasted unity of the Roman Church was
somewhat shaken when he discovered that he could not read mass in any
church in the territory at Milan, because there the Ambrosian form of
service was prescribed while he had been trained to the Gregorian.
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.
While Luther's visit at Rome, then, brought about no spiritual change in
him, it helped to give him a good conscience afterwards when his
conflict with Rome had begun.