A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [22]
Excommunication and anathema, the most extreme measures the Church could command, supposedly reserved for heresy and horrible crimes—“for by these penalties a man is separated from the faithful and turned over to Satan”—were now used to wring money from recalcitrant payers. In one case a bishop was denied Christian burial until his heirs agreed to be responsible for his debts, to the scandal of the diocese, which saw its bishop lying unshriven and cut off from hope of salvation. Abuse of the spiritual power for such purposes brought excommunication into contempt and lowered respect for clerical leaders.
Money could buy any kind of dispensation: to legitimize children, of which the majority were those of priests and prelates;* to divide a corpse for the favorite custom of burial in two or more places; to permit nuns to keep two maids; to permit a converted Jew to visit his unconverted parents; to marry within the prohibited degree of consanguinity (with a sliding scale of fees for the second, third, and fourth degrees); to trade with the infidel Moslem (with a fee required for each ship on a scale according to cargo); to receive stolen goods up to a specific value. The collection and accounting of all these sums, largely handled through Italian bankers, made the physical counting of cash a common sight in the papal palace. Whenever he entered there, reportedAlvar Pelayo, a Spanish official of the Curia, “I found brokers and clergy engaged in reckoning the money which lay in heaps before them.”
The dispensation with most serious results was the one permitting appointment to a benefice of a candidate below the canonical age of 25 or one who had never been consecrated or never taken the required examination for literacy. Appointment of unfit or absentee clergy became an abuse in itself. In Bohemia on one occasion in the early 14th century, a boy of seven was appointed to a parish worth an annual income of 25 gulden; another was raised through three offices of the hierarchy, paying at each stage for a dispensation for non-residence and postponed consecration. Younger sons of noble families were repeatedly appointed to archbishoprics at 18, 20, or 22. Tenures were short because each preferment brought in another payment.
Priests who could not read or who, from ignorance, stumbled stupidly through the ritual of the Eucharist were another scandal. A Bishop of Durham in 1318 could not understand or pronounce Latin and after struggling helplessly with the word Metropolitanus at his own consecration, muttered in the vernacular, “Let us take that word as read.” Later when ordaining candidates for holy orders, he met the word aenigmate (through a glass darkly) and this time swore in honest outrage, “By St. Louis, that was no courteous man who wrote this word!” The unfit clergy spread dismay, for these were the men supposed to have the souls of the laity in their charge and be the intermediaries between man and God. Writing of “incapable and ignorant men” who could buy any office they wanted from the Curia, the chronicler Henry of Hereford went to the heart of the dismay when he wrote, “Look … at the dangerous situation of those in their charge, and tremble!”
When Church practices were calculated at a money value, their religious content seeped away. Theoretically, pardon for sin could only be won through penitence, but the penance of a pilgrimage to Rome or Jerusalem had little meaning when the culprit could estimate the cost of the journey and buy an indulgence for an equivalent sum.
The popes—successors, as Petrarch pointed out, of “the poor fishermen of Galilee”—were now “loaded with gold and clad in purple.” John XXII, a Pope with the touch of Midas who ruled from 1316 to 1334, bought for his own use forty