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By Root 1426 0

his wildness and vindictiveness, two of Urban’s cardinals defected to Clement, but most felt they had no choice but to remain with Urban rather than accept a return to French subjection. Burdened with a crazed Pope, they planned a kind of regency council to govern for him while holding him in protective custody, but Urban learned of the plot and arrested the six cardinals involved. While they were being tortured to extract confessions of conspiracy, he was reported by an observer to have walked up and down beneath the windows, reading his breviary in a loud voice while listening to the cries of the victims. Five were executed for conspiracy. The sixth, an English cardinal named Adam Easton, spared through the intervention of Richard II, survived to testify to what he had witnessed. As the years passed, Urban became as hated and vilified as his rival. With two such men claiming leadership of Holy Church, it seemed as if God had good reason to repent of His house on earth.

Of all the “strange evils and adversities” predicted for the century, the effect of the schism on the public mind was among the most damaging. When each Pope excommunicated the followers of the other, who could be sure of salvation? Every Christian found himself under penalty of damnation by one or the other Pope, with no way of being sure that the one he obeyed was the genuine one. People might be told that the sacraments of their priest were not valid because he had been ordained by the “other Pope,” or that the holy oil for baptism was not sanctified because it had been blessed by a “schismatic” bishop. In disputed regions, double bishops might be appointed, each holding mass and proclaiming the ritual of the other a sacrilege. The same religious order in different countries might have divided allegiance, with its monasteries under two competing priors and its abbeys torn by strife. When, as in Flanders, political and economic rivalries caused a city to ally itself with the French under Clement, loyal Urbanists, fearing to live under Anti-Christ, left their homes, shops, and trades to move to a diocese of the “true” persuasion.

Though no religious issue had created the schism, once it became an accomplished fact, partisans were divided by the same hatred as marked the later religious wars. To Honoré Bonet in France, Urban appeared as the falling star to whom was given the key to the “bottomless pit” in St. John’s vision of the Apocalypse. The “smoke of a great furnace” arising from the pit to darken the sun was the schism darkening the papacy. The accompanying “locusts and scorpions” were the “traitorous Romans” who, by terrorizing the conclave, had forced the false election.

Since papal revenue was cut in half, the financial effect of the schism was catastrophic. To keep each papacy from bankruptcy, simony redoubled, benefices and promotions were sold under pressure, charges for spiritual dispensations of all kinds were increased, as were chancery taxes on every document required from the Curia. Sale of indulgences, seed of the Reformation, became financially important. Instead of reform, abuses multiplied, further undermining faith. When a French bishop or abbot died, according to the Monk of St. Denis who wrote the Chronicle of the Reign of Charles VI, the tax-collectors of Avignon descended like vultures to carry off his goods and furnishings on pretext of making up arrears in clerical tithes. “Everywhere the service of God was neglected, the devotion of the faithful diminished, the realm was drained of money, and ecclesiatics wandered here and there overcome with misery.”

Legates of each Pope no longer strove for peace between France and England, but worked openly for one side or another because each of the principals sought military support to eliminate his rival. Meanwhile their mutual vituperation and unedifying struggle over the body of the Church degraded Christendom. The Church was pulled this way and that, sorrowed the Monk of St. Denis, “like a prostitute found at the scene of a debauch.” She became “a subject for satire and object of