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By Root 380 0

Europe, suspected the Vatican of exploiting them, tightening its grip on the masses by overawing them with beauty. One surprise rebel was Michelangelo, in his role as coarchitect for the new St. Peter’s. Pope Leo ordered exquisite Tuscan marble from the remote Pietrasanta range. The artist balked. Bringing it out, he said, would be too expensive. Unaware of Michelangelo’s mutiny, but thinking along the same lines, Martin Luther objected to the vast sums being raised for reconstruction of the great cathedral’s basilica. Luther was a man of faith, not reason. Nevertheless Leo’s prodigality troubled him. If the pope could see the poverty of the German people, he wrote, “he would rather see St. Peter’s lying in ashes than that it should be built out of the blood and hide of his sheep.”

Michelangelo had a choice. Luther’s conscience denied him one. That was also true of other troubled clerics, scholars, writers, and philosophers. They had to speak out. Change was imperative. Only the informed and the literate could demand it, and in the Europe of that time, they were few. At the outset, their objective was rehabilitation of the system, but this revolution, like Saturn—like all revolutions—was destined to eat its own children.

To them this was tragic. The doctrine that the Church was perfect, that the very idea of change was heretical, deeply disturbed learned Catholics, leaving them torn between faith and reason. In the eyes of Rome, Copernicus had died an apostate who had tried to subvert Ptolemaic theory, endorsed by the Church in the second century, more than two hundred popes earlier. But the solar system would not go away. It was too enormous. Within a century

Michelangelo’s cupola of St. Peter’s, seen from the rear

Galileo Galilei of Florence would confirm the Copernican system. Summoned to Rome, he, too, was found guilty of heresy. When he persisted in publishing his findings, he was called before the Inquisition, where, in 1633, under threat of torture, he disavowed his belief in a revolving earth. As he left the tribunal, however, he was heard to mutter, “Epur si muove” (“And yet it does move”). His recantation therefore was judged inadequate. He died blind and in disgrace. More than two centuries later, Thomas Henry Huxley, eulogizing him, scorned the Church as “the one great spiritual organization which is able to resist, and must, as a matter of life and death, resist, the progress of science and modern civilization.”

But there had been little science and no modern civilization in the Dark Ages, when acceptance of papal supremacy by all Christendom had rescued a continent from chaos. Faith had literally held Europe together then, giving hope to men who had been without it. The most callous despots of the time, fearing God’s wrath, had yielded to papal commands, permitting the Church to intervene when princes had been devouring one another, forcing them to submit to the argument that temporal rulers must yield to the one authority whose sacraments promised eternal salvation. Eminent Catholics knew that. And their piety was central to their personal lives. Now, though torn by inner conflict, they would shred “the seamless robe of Christ.” Jesus, commanding Peter to build his Church, had predicted that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” The gates of hell hadn’t; instead the terrible task of destroying the inviolability of the one true faith fell upon the devout, who prayed that they be spared it, and whose prayers were to be unanswered.

ERASMUS, THE SON of a priest, was a fastidious insomniac who spent much of his life in monasteries. Throughout the coming turmoil he remained an orthodox Catholic, never losing his love of Christ, the Gospels, and rites that comforted the masses. In his Colloquia familiaria he wrote: “If anything is in common use with Christians that is not repugnant to the Holy Scriptures, I observe it for this reason, that I may not offend other people.” Public controversy seemed to him an affront; though his doubts about clerical abuses were profound, he kept them to himself