The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [70]
Julius had already issued a distribution of indulgences to help pay for the new St. Peter’s. Leo in his first year of office authorized another issue for the same purpose and again in 1515 for special sale in Germany, to offset the costs of his war on Urbino. Offering “complete absolution and remission of all sins,” this one was to be sold over an unusual eight-year term. The financial arrangements, of Byzantine complexity, were designed to enable a young noble, Albrecht of Brandenburg, brother of the Elector of Brandenburg, to pay for three benefices to which the Pope had appointed him. At age 24 he had received the archbishoprics of Mainz and Magdeburg and the bishopric of Halberstadt for a total price variously stated to be 24,000 or 30,000 ducats. Representing simony, plural benefices and an unqualified nominee, this transaction was arranged while the Lateran Council was engaged in outlawing the same practices. Unable to raise the money, Albrecht had borrowed from the Fuggers, whom he was now to reimburse through the proceeds from the indulgences.
Tetzel, a Dominican monk, was a promoter who might have made Barnum blush. Upon arrival in a town, he would be greeted by a prearranged procession of clergy and commoners coming out to meet him with flags and lighted candles while church bells rang joyful tunes. Traveling with a brass-bound chest and a bag of printed receipts, and preceded by an assistant friar bearing the Bull of Indulgence on a velvet cushion, he would set up shop in the nave of the principal church in front of a huge cross raised for the occasion and draped with the papal banner. At his side an agent of the Fuggers kept careful count of the money that purchasers dropped into a bowl placed on top of the chest, as each received a printed indulgence from the bag.
“I have here,” Tetzel would call out, “the passports … to lead the human soul to the celestial joys of Paradise.” For a mortal sin, seven years of penance were due. “Who then would hesitate for a quarter-florin to secure one of these letters of remission?” Warming up, he would say that if a Christian had slept with his mother and put money in the Pope’s bowl, “the Holy Father had the power in Heaven and earth to forgive the sin, and if he forgave it, God must do so also.” In behalf of the deceased, he said that “as soon as the coin rang in the bowl, the soul for whom it was paid would fly out of Purgatory straight to Heaven.”
The ring of these coins was the summons to Luther. Tetzel’s crass equation of the mercenary and the spiritual was the ultimate expression of the message emanating from the Papacy over the past fifty years. It was not the cause but the signal for the Protestant secession, whose doctrinal, personal, political, religious and economic causes were old and various and long-developing.
In response to Tetzel’s campaign, Luther in 1517 nailed his 95 theses on the church door at Wittenberg, assailing the abuse of indulgence as sacrilegious, although without yet suggesting a break with Rome. In the same year the Fifth Lateran held its final session—the last chance for reform. Luther’s challenge provoked a counter-attack by Tetzel affirming the efficacy of indulgences followed by a reply by Luther in a vernacular tract, Indulgence and Grace. His fellow Augustinians took up the debate, opponents entered the dispute and within two months a German Archbishop in Rome called for heresy proceedings. Summoned to Rome in 1518, Luther petitioned for hearings in his native land, to which the Papal Legate in Germany and the lay authorities agreed in order not to exacerbate feelings during the imminent meeting of the German Diet which was supposed to vote taxes. The death of the Emperor Maximilian shortly afterward, requiring election of a successor by the Diet, was a further reason to avoid trouble.
Enclosed, like his predecessors, in the Italian drama, the Pope was unaware of the issues