temporal princes might be delighted with the opportunity of secularising and seizing the Church possessions, the people might reasonably hope that the increase of their rulers' wealth would alleviate their own burdens, as well as release them from the direct oppression which many of them suffered from the religious establishments. Even more potential was the disgust everywhere felt for the flagrant immorality of the priesthood. The dread experienced by every husband and father lest wife and daughter might at any moment fall victims to the lust of those who had every opportunity for the gratification of unholy passions led them to welcome the change, in the hope that it would result in restoring decency and virtue to a class which had long seemed to regard its sacred character as the shield and instrument of crime. The moral character of the clergy, indeed, had not improved during the busy and eventful years which marked the first quarter of the sixteenth century. There is a curious little tract, printed in Cologne in 1505, with the approbation of the faculty, which is directed against concubinage in general, but particularly against that of the priests. Its laborious accumulation of authorities to prove that licentiousness is a sin is abundant evidence of the existing demoralisation, while the practices which it combats, of guilty ecclesiastics granting absolution to each other and mutually dispensing themselves from confession, show how easily the safeguards with which the Church had sought to surround her ministers were eluded.1 The degradation of the priesthood, indeed, can readily be measured when, in the little town of Hof, in the Vogtland, three priests could be found defiling the sacredness of Ash Wednesday by fiercely fighting over a courtesan in a house 1 Avisamentum de Concubinariis non absolvendis, 4to, 1505.-The author devotes a long argument to prove that incontinence in a priest is worse than homicide. His conclusion is "Omnis sacerdos fornicando est sacrilegus et perjurus; et gravius totiens quotiens peccat quam si hominem occidat." of ill-fame; or when Leo X., in a feeble effort at reform, was obliged to argue that systematic licentiousness was not rendered excusable because its prevalence amounted to a custom, or because it was openly tolerated by those whose duty was to repress it.2 it. In fact, a clause in the Concordat with Francis I. in 1516, renewing and enhancing the former punishments for public concubinage, would almost justify the presumption that the principal result of the rule of celibacy was to afford to the officials a regular revenue derived from the sale of licences to sin 3-the old abuse, which rises before us in every age from the time of Damiani and Hildebrand, and which, since John XXII. had framed the tariff of absolutions for crime known as the "Taxes of the Penitentiary," had the authority of the papacy itself to justify it. In the oldest form in which this has reached us, issued by Benedict XII. in 1338, absolution and dispensation for a concubinary priest is rated at only four gros tournois, or less than half a florin, and the same price is named for the absolution of one who has been suspended for adultery. In a somewhat later taxlist, dispensation for the son of a priest to be admitted to orders and preferment is rated at twelve gros, but if he desired a bishopric, it cost thirty. It is no wonder that 1 Wideman. Chron. Curiæ ann. 1505. 2 Neque superiorum tolerantia, seu prava consuetudo, quæ potius corruptela dicenda est, a multitudine peccantium, aliave quælibet excusatio eis aliquo modo suffragetur.-Concil. Lateran. V. ann. 1514 Sess. IX. 3 Quia vero in quibusdam regionibus nonnulli jurisdictionem ecclesiasticam habentes, pecuniarios quæstos a concubinariis percipere non erubescunt, patientes eos in tali fœditate sordescere.-Concil. Lateran. V. ann. 1516 Sess. XI.-Cf. Cornel. Agripp. De Vanitate Scient. c. lxiv.-Agrippa even states that it was a common thing for bishops to sell to women whose husbands were absent the right to commit adultery without sin. 4 P. Denifle, Die älteste Taxrolle der apost. Pönitentiarie (Archiv für Literaturund-Kirchengeschichte, Bd. v. pp. 227, 230).-Tangl. Das Taxwesen der päpstlichen Kanzlei, Mittheilungen des Instituts für Oesterreichische Geschichtsforschung, Bd. XIII., pp. 96, 97. These prices were simply for the letters; there were other fees which increased the cost considerably, and when sin had been committed there were pecuniary penances at the discretion of the papal penitentiaries. reforming bishops and councils found their efforts baffled when the only result was to increase the revenues of the papal chancery by stimulating the demand for its interference. That no concealment was thought necessary, and that sensual indulgence was not deemed derogatory in any way to the character of a Christian prelate, may be reasonably deduced from the panegyric of Gerard of Nimeguen on Philip of Burgundy, grand-uncle of Charles V., a learned and accomplished man, who filled the important see of Utrecht from 1517 to 1524. Gerard alludes to the amorous propensities and promiscuous intrigues of his patron without reserve, and as his book was dedicated to the Archduchess Margaret, sister of Charles V., it is evident that he did not feel his remarks to be defamatory. The good prelate, too, no doubt represented the convictions of a large portion of his class, when he was wont to smile at those who urged the propriety of celibacy, and to declare his belief in the impossibility of chastity among men who, like the clergy, were pampered with high living and tempted by indolence. Those who professed to keep their vows inviolate he denounced as hypocrites of the worst description, and he deemed them far worse than their brethren who sought to avoid unnecessary scandal by decently keeping their concubines at home.1 Even this reticence, however, was considered unnecessary by a large portion of the clergy. In 1512, the Bishop of Ratisbon issued a series of canons in which, after quoting the Basilian regulations, he adds that many of his ecclesiastics maintain their concubines so openly that it would appear as though they saw neither sin nor scandal in such conduct, and that their evil example was the efficient cause of corrupting the faithful. In Switzerland the same abuses 1 Gerardi Noviomagi Philippus Burgundus (Mathæi Analect. I. 230). were quite as prevalent, if we may believe a memorial presented, in 1533, by the citizens of Lausanne, complaining of the conduct of their clergy. They rebuked the incontinence of the priests, whose numerous children were accustomed to earn a living by beggary in the streets, but the canons were the subjects of their especial objurgation. The dean of the chapter had defied an excommunication launched at him for buying a house near the church in which to keep his mistress; others of the canons had taken to themselves the wives of citizens and refused to give them up; but the quaintest grievance of which they had been guilty was the injury which their competition inflicted on the public brothel of the town. What was the condition of clerical morality in Italy may be gathered from the stories of Bishop Bandello, who, as a Dominican and a prelate, may fairly be deemed to represent the tone of the thinking and educated classes of society. The cynical levity with which he narrates scandalous tales about monks and priests shows that in the public mind sacerdotal immorality was regarded almost as a matter of course.2 The powerful influence of all this on the progress of the Reformation was freely admitted by the authorities of the Church. When the legate Campeggio was sent to Germany to check the spread of heresy, in his reformatory edict issued at Ratisbon in 1524 he declared that the efforts of the Lutherans had no little justification in the detestable morals and lives of the clergy, and this is confirmed by his unsparing denunciation of their licentiousness, drunkenness, quarrels, and tavern-haunting; their traffic in absolution 1 Art. 18e "Item. Mais, Nous nous plaignions d'aucuns chanoines qui nous gâtent nôtre bordeau de la ville, car il y en a qui le tiennent en leurs maisons, privément, pour tous venans."-Quoted from a contemporary MS. by Abraham Ruchat in his "Histoire de la Reformation de la Suisse," T. I. p. xxxiii.-v. (Genève, 1727.) According to Cornelius Agrippa, the Roman prelates derived a regular revenue from this source, the right to keep definite numbers of strumpets in the public brothels being partitioned out between them.-De Vanitate Scient. c. lxiv. 2 See, for instance, Novelle, P. III. Nov. lvi. for enormous offences; their unclerical habits and hideous blasphemy; their indulgence in incantations and dabbling in witchcraft.1 Very significant is his declaration that the canonical punishments shall be inflicted on concubinary priests, in spite of all custom to the contrary or all connivance on the part of the prelates." How little, indeed, licentious ecclesiastics might reasonably dread the canonical punishments is illustrated in the report, by the celebrated jurisconsult Grillandus, of a case which came before him while he was auditor of the 1 Reformat. Cleri German (Hartzheim VI. 198).—" Hanc perditissimam hæresin . . . non parvam habuisse occasionem, partim a perditis moribus et vita clericorum" etc. There was no scruple in confessing this fact by those who spoke authoritatively for the Catholic Church, and it long continued to be alleged as the cause of the stubbornness of the heretics. Thus the Bishop of Constance, in the canons of his Synod of 1567-"Estote etiam memores, damnatam et detestandam cleri vitam huic malo in quo, proh dolor! versamur, majori ex parte ansam præbuisse... Omnes sapientes peritique viri unanimi sententia hoc asserunt, hocque efflagitant penitus, ut prius clerus ecclesiarumque ministri ac doctores a vitæ sordibus repurgentur, quam ulla cum adversariis nostris de doctrina concordia expectari queat." And then, after describing in the strongest terms the vices of the clergy and their unwillingness to reform, he adds, "Quæ sane morum turpitudo, vehementer et tantopere imperiti populi animos offendit ut subinde magis magisque a catholica nostra religione alienior efficiatur, atque sacerdotium una cum sacerdotibus doctrinam juxta atque doctores, execretur, dirisque devoveat: ita ut protinus ad quamvis sectam deficere potius paratus sit quam quod ad ecclesiam redire velit."-Synod. Constant. ann. 1567 (Hartzheim VII. 455). Pius V. himself did not hesitate to adopt the same view. In an epistle addressed to the abbots and priors of the diocese of Freysingen, in 1567, he says—“ Cum nobiscum ipsi cogitamus quæ res materiam præbuerit tot tantisque pestiferis hæresibus tanti mali causam præcipue fuisse judicamus corruptos prælatorum mores, qui :. eandemque vivendi licentiam iis, quibus præerant permittentes et exemplo eos suo corrumpentes, maximum apud laicos odium contemptionem et invidiam non immerito contraxerunt" (Hartzheim VII. 586). ... 2 Reformat. Cleri German. cap. xv.-So when, in 1521, Conrad, Bishop of Wurzburg, issued a mandate for the reformation of his clergy, he described them as for the most part abandoned to gluttony, drunkenness, gambling, quarrelling, and lust. -Mandat. pro Reformat. Oleri. (Gropp, Script. Rer. Wirceburg. I. 269). —In 1505 the Bishop of Bamberg, in complaining of his clergy, shows us how little respect was habitually paid to the incessant repetition of the canons." Condolenter referimus vitam et honestatem clericalem adeo apud quamplures nostrarum civitatis et dioceseos clericos esse obumbratam ut vix inter clericos et laycos discrimen habeatur: et ipsa statuta nostra synodalia in ipsorum clericorum cordibus obliterata et a pluribus non visa aut perlecta vilipendantur: nullam propter nostram, quam hactenus pii pastoris more tolleravimus patientiam, capientes emendationem."(Hartzheim VI. 66.) |