We cannot reasonably wonder that to the sin of covetousness there was annexed a great and scandalous neglect of the functions of the ministry. A preaching bishop was so rare a thing during a long succession of ages, that it was rarely to be met with. The care of the poor, visiting the sick, comforting the afflicted, instructing the ignorant, studying the scriptures, and the various other duties pertaining to the pastoral office, were, if not totally abandoned, at least extremely neglected. The whole was almost reduced to a routine of lip-service, repeating the formularies of a liturgy, which very few of the people understood, and this would generally apply to the priest himself. Hence the complaint of Nicholas de Clemangis, archdeacon of Bayeux, who flourished in the beginning of the fifteenth century, that, "the study of the holy Scriptures and those who taught them were derided by all, and that which is yet more amazing is, that it is chiefly the bishops who scoff at them, preferring their own traditions to the ordinances of God." "Now a-days," says he, "the office of preaching, which is so admirable and so glorious, and which heretofore belonged to the pastors only, is considered by them so vile that there is nothing which they account more unworthy of their grandeur, or which brings more reproach on their dignity." They openly avowed that it belonged only to the begging friars to preach, and not to them. No wonder that ignorance was one inevitable consequence of such shameful neglect of duty on the part of the ministers of the church. This ignorance was both great and general; the fact is attested by the barbarism of the schools, by the matter and style of the greatest part of the books that were written from the tenth to the fifteenth century, and by the express testimony of various authors. "The church of God," saith St. Bernard, "every day, in divers manners, finds by sad experience in what great danger she is, when the shepherd knows not where the pastures are, nor the guide where the right way is, and when the very man who should speak for God, and on his side, is ignorant what is the will of his Master." Marsilius of Padua, also, in the "In fourteenth century, thus describes matters in his time. these days, when the government of the church is corrupted, the greatest part of the priests and bishops are but meanly instructed COMPLAINTS OF CATHOLIC WRITERS. 5 in the holy Scriptures, and I dare say they are incapable of deciding the doubts of their faith. For ambition, covetousness, and canvassings to obtain the temporal benefices, occupy their time and attention, and they purchase in effect by their services or their prayers, by their gold or by their favour, all the dignities of the age. God is my witness, and great numbers of his faithful also, that I remember to have seen many priests, many abbots, and many prelates, so void of knowledge, that they have not known how to speak even according to the rules of grammar."* Those who have any knowledge of ecclesiastical history cannot be ignorant of the lamentations that all honest men then made, and the appalling descriptions they have left us in their writings of those times. One may read St. Bernard, for the twelfth century,-Cardinal Hugo, for the thirteenth,--William, bishop of Mendo, for the fourteenth, and for the fifteenth, Werner Rollewink, a Carthusian monk of Cologne, in justification of what has now been said, and for the sixteenth, which was the age of the Reformation, who does not know that it was extremely corrupted? One of the matters so vehemently complained of by the ambassador of the duke of Bavaria before the council of Trent on the behalf of his master, and upon which he so much insisted, was the dissolute lives of the clergy! He declared that "he could not describe their horrible wickedness without offending the chaste ears of his audience"-that the prince, his master, must remonstrate with the council," that the correction of points of doctrine would be vain and unprofitable if they did not first correct their manners,—that the whole body of the clergy was defamed by reason of their luxury, that while the civil magistrate would not suffer a layman to have a concubine, yet among the clergy it was so common a thing to have them, that amidst a hundred priests not more than three or four could be found who either kept not whores or were not married, the one secretly, and the other publicly." + "It is with shame that I speak it," said the cardinal of ⚫ Bernard, de verbis evangel. "Dixit Simon," &c., p. 1000. Defens. pacis, part ii. cap. 20. + History of the Council of Trent, book vi. Marsil, de Pad. Lorraine, in an oration which he made to the same council, "but it is also with a sensible displeasure that I mention the lives we have led. We are the cause that have swelled this storm so high; let us cast ourselves into the sea; and since you have our confession, punish us after what manner you please." A little before this, he had said, "that the troubles wherewith France was agitated were the effect of a just judgment of God, and that they had drawn that judgment on themselves by that corruption of manners which was to be found among all orders of men, and by the subversion of all ecclesiastical discipline." His royal master, Charles IX., in the instructions which he had given the cardinal how to deport himself before that august assembly, the council of Trent, had expressly put down this article, "that his majesty, with the most extreme regret, was constrained to complain of the lascivious lives of the ecclesiastics, who brought so much scandal and corruption amongst the common people that to him it seemed necessary it should very speedily be provided against." Now, if such was the character of the clergy of those days, it is not difficult to divine what that of the common people must have been; for men of such impure manners could be ill qualified to be guardians of faith and piety. Indeed, those who have looked into the histories of Luitprand, of Glaber, Matthew Paris, Platina, Baronius, and many others, must be aware, that from the ninth century and onwards the see of Rome has been most frequently filled with pontiffs whose lives and actions have been a scandal to the world. Every one knows the complaints with which Europe rang, not merely against the popes, but against all that they call the court of Rome, the corruption of which was looked upon as the cause of a similar state of things throughout Christendom. Thinking men naturally reasoned that persons whose lives were so licentious could not have much concern about the glory of God and the salvation of their fellow-creatures, or that a court which for many ages had been accused of being the very focus of vice, could at the same time be the centre of faith and holiness. Another striking feature in the complexion of the Romish hierarchy at this period, was the intolerable pride and arro PRIDE AND ARROGANCE OF THE POPEs. 7 gance of those who filled the papal chair: requiring their feet to be kissed with a submission beyond what was yielded to kingsmaking themselves to be borne on men's shoulders-and to be served by the greatest princes, or by their ambassadors to wear a triple crown-and be adored upon the altar, after their election. And what shall we say of those proud titles which they affected to have given them-blasphemously arrogating the very titles of the Most High, of which take the very words of the canon law: "It evidently appears that the pope, who was called God by Constantine, can be neither bound to anything, nor loosed by any secular power; for it is manifest that a God cannot be judged by men." To the same purport writes Augustine Steuchus-viz., "that Constantine called the pope God, and that he acknowledged him to be so; and he assures us that on this account it was that he made that excellent edict in his favour-he would rather say, that false donation. He adored him, says he, as God, as the successor of Christ, and of Peter, and rendered him in every possible way divine honours, worshipping him as the living image of Jesus Christ."* So also Clement VII., who was an anti-pope, with his cardinals at Avignon, in a letter which they wrote to Charles VI., made no scruple of calling him a God upon earth; for thus they write: "Seeing there is but one only God in the heavens, there cannot and ought not of right to be more than one God on earth."+ After the same manner Angelus Politianus, in an oration which he made for those who were sent as deputies from Sienna to Alexander VI., ascribes divinity to him. "We rejoice among ourselves,” says he, "to behold you raised above all human things, and elevated even to divinity itself, seeing there is nothing next unto God, which is not set under you." And what could our forefathers think of that plenitude of power which the flatterers of the pope attributed to them? Thus, for instance, the Glossary of the Decretals remarks, "that every one said of the pope that he had all divine power, cœleste arbitrium; that by reason thereof he could change the nature ⚫ Distinct. 96, Canon 7, Aug. Steuchus, de fals. Donat. Constantini. of things, applying the essential properties of one thing to another—that he could make something of nothing, that a proposition which was nothing he could make to be somethingthat in all things which it should be his pleasure to do, his will might serve him for a reason—that there is none who could say to him, why dost thou do that?—that he could dispense with whatsoever was right, and make injustice to become justice, by changing and altering of that which was right: and, in fine, that he possessed a plenitude, a fulness, of power."* And what shall we say of those titles which the popes arrogated to themselves, of being the spouses, or husbands, of the church, and the vicars of Jesus Christ? "The church, my spouse," said Innocent III., "were not married to me if she did not bring me something: she has given me a dowry of inestimable value, the fulness of all spiritual things, the greatness and spaciousness of temporals, the grandeur and abundance both of the one and the other. She has bestowed on me the mitre in token of things spiritual; the crown for a sign of the temporal,the mitre for the priesthood, the crown for the kingdom; substituting me in his place who had it written on his vestment and on his thigh-King of kings, and Lord of lords."+ Precisely after the same style, Martin V. thus entitles himself, in the instructions which he gave to a nuncio whom he sent to Constantinople, as Raynaldus relates: "The most holy and most happy, who has heavenly power, who is the lord of the earth, the successor of Peter, the Christ or anointed of the Lord, the Lord of the universe, the Father of kings, the Light of the world, the Sovereign High Priest, Pope Martin."+ And what, again, shall we say to the blasphemous conduct of the popes in arrogating to themselves, or allowing others to apply to them, such passages of scripture as only and immediately respect God himself and his Son Jesus Christ? Baronius relates, that Alexander III. making his entry into the town of Montpellier, a Saracen prince "prostrated himself before him, adoring him as the holy and venerable God of the Christians," and Decretal, Greg. lib. 1. tit. 7. Can. Quanto. in Glossa. + Itineray. Ital. Part ii. de Coron. Rom. Pontif. Raynaldus, ad ann. 1162. |