The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [69]
Writing in the same years, 1510–20, Machiavelli found proof of decadence in the fact “that the nearer people are to the Church of Rome, which is the head of our religion, the less religious are they.” Whoever examined the gap between the principles upon which the Christian religion was founded and their present application by the Church “will judge that her ruin and chastisement are near at hand.” Machiavelli’s anger was at the harm done to Italy. “The evil example of the court of Rome has destroyed all piety and religion in Italy,” resulting in “infinite mischief and disorders” which “keep our country divided.” This is “the cause of our ruin.” Whenever fearing loss of temporal power, the Church, never strong enough to be supreme, calls in some foreign aid, and “this barbarous domination stinks in the nostrils of everyone.”
The indictment was summarized in one sentence by Guicciardini: “Reverence for the Papacy has been utterly lost in the hearts of men.”
The abuse that precipitated the ultimate break was the commercialization of indulgences, and the place where the break came, as everyone knows, was at Wittenberg in northeastern Germany. Anti-Roman sentiment was strongest, and protest most vocal, in the German principalities owing to the absence of a national centralized power able to resist papal taxation as in France. Also, Rome’s exactions were heavier because of ancient connections with the Empire and the great estates held there by the Church. Besides feeling themselves directly robbed by papal agents, the populace felt their faith insulted by the ring of coin in everything to do with the Church, by the wickedness of Rome and its popes and their refusal to reform. A revolt against the Holy See could be expected, warned Girolamo Alessandro, Papal Nuncio to the Empire and a future Bishop and Cardinal. Thousands in Germany, he wrote to the Pope in 1516, were only waiting for the moment to speak their minds openly. Immersed in money and marble monuments, Leo was not listening. Within a year, the awaited moment came through the instrumentality of his agent for the sale of papal indulgences in Germany, Johann Tetzel.
Indulgences were not new, nor were they invented by Leo. Originally granted as a release from all or part of the good works required of a sinner to satisfy a penance imposed by his priest, indulgence gradually came to be considered a release from the guilt of the sin itself. This was a usage severely condemned by purists and protesters. More objectionable was the commercial sale of a spiritual grace. The grace once granted in return for pious donations for church repairs, hospitals, ransom of captives of the Turks and other good works had grown into a vast traffic of which a half or third of the receipts customarily went to Rome and the rest to the local domain, with various percentages to the agents and pardoners who held the concessions. The Church had become a machine for making money, declared John Colet in 1513, with the fee considered as the effective factor rather than repentance and good works. Employing charlatans, misleading the credulous, this traffic became one of the persistent evils of organized religion.
When pardoners allowed the belief—though never explicitly stated by the popes—that indulgences could take care of future sins not yet committed, the Church had reached the point of virtually encouraging sin, as its critics did not fail to point out. To enlarge the market, Sixtus IV ruled in 1476 that indulgences applied to souls in Purgatory, causing the common people to believe that they must pay for the relief of departed relatives. The more prayers and masses and indulgences bought for the deceased, the shorter their terms in Purgatory,