Charles Beard's "Martin Luther and the Reformation in Germany, 2: Religi...

FIFTEENTH CENTURY, OMNIPRESENT, WESTERN CHURCH. All manner of dispensations were to be purchased—a monarch wanting to marry a distant relative, a merchant wanting to eat meat in Lent, to annual dispensations to priests (with a perpetual housekeeper of the female variety, a common occurrence). As for the latter, the people felt safer with a priest with a live-in, female housekeeper. We would add that an Italian family, 1999, told us the same thing and it was a widely held view in Italy. Despite clerical celibacy, dispensations were a money-maker. On the political front, the Pope and Royals were back and forth, sometimes being stronger and, at other times like King John of England, weaker. But, everyone knew that the wealth of their national churches was supporting the “shameless luxury of Rome” (33). Exactions and abuses were felt everywhere. Emperor Maxmilian alleged that the Roman curia had a revenue “a hundred-fold greater” than his imperial income (33). Germany was the “milch cow of the Papacy.” 15th century assemblies—Pisa, Constanz and Basel raised these issues. Diets at Augsburg in 1510, 1518 and 1521 raised these matters. Satire and invective were present. At the Diet of Nurnberg, 1522-1523, the Legate asked why the Edict of Worms had not settled the Luther-problem. Instead, the Legate was presented a bill of indictment against the Church—one hundred items. “Abuses of every kind, dispensations, indulgences, patronage, jurisdiction, spiritual pains and penalties, are here enumerated with cumulative effect. And the document, drawn up, it must be remembered, by representatives of Catholic States, only one or two of which were beginning to be affected by the breath of Lutheran reform, leaves upon the mind the impression of a system full of sordid corruption, and worked for the conscious purpose of extracting money from a superstitious and subservient people” (34). All of Europe groaned. Monasticism, or revivalism of sorts, was one answer—e.g., the outbreak of revivalism with Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians and revivals in other orbits, e.g. Benedictines. Prof. Baird notes that failure was inherent since the ideals were for athletes not ordinary humans, for individual athletes rather than the larger set—society. The monastics were one of “perpetual striving…to wind ourselves to high for sinful men beneath the sky” (37).