Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (34 page)

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The Renaissance papacy, for all its glories, had shown itself again and again chronically resistant to reform. Yet everywhere in the Christian world, ever more urgently, reform was being called for. In Italy, that call was sounded most emphatically at the end of the fifteenth century by the Prior of the Dominican house of San Marco in Florence, Girolamo Savonarola. A revivalist preacher in the mould of john Capistrano or Vincent Ferrar, Savonarola announced apocalypse, and saw in the French invasion of Italy and the expulsion of the Medici from Florence the purifying scourge of God. Under his preaching, a heady mixture of biblical prophecy, cloudy political comment and moral fiilmination, Florence plunged into an extraordinary experiment in theocratic republicanism. Most forms of public amusement were
banned, membership of the Dominican priory rocketed from 50 to 238 friars, married women left their husbands and entered convents, and outside the Palazzo Vecchio there were bonfires of vanities – jewels, lewd books, immodest clothing. With his own hands, the great Florentine artist Sandro Botticelli burned his own ‘pagan’ pictures.

Savonarola identified the Rome of Alexander VI with the forces of Antichrist, whose downfall he predicted: ‘I saw in a vision a black cross above the Babylon that is Rome, upon which was written
Ira Domini
[the wrath of the Lord] … I say to you, the Church of God must be renewed, and it will be soon.’ Rome was a moral pig-sty, where everything, including the sacraments, was for sale. And in what everyone recognised as a reference to the Pope he lamented that ‘Once, anointed priests called their sons “nephews”; but now they speak no more of nephews, but always and everywhere of their sons … O prostitute Church.’
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Alexander excommunicated Savonarola in 1497, after two years of increasingly frustrating attempts to silence him by less drastic means. In 1498 the city, disillusioned by adversity, turned on its prophet, and he was hanged and burned in the square where he had presided over the bonfires of vanities. His attack on Alexander continued to resonate, however. At the height of their confrontation he had declared Alexander to be no true pope, because he was an immoral atheist, and had called for a general council to reform the Church, starting with the papacy. This revival of the demands of the Conciliar movement was widely seen as playing into the hands of the French, who would later try to convene just such a council to unseat Alexander’s successor, Julius II (at Pisa in 1511). It touched a chord, nonetheless. Savonarola’s memory continued to be venerated even by ardently pro-papal religious leaders like the English theologian Bishop John Fisher, who would go to the scaffold in defence of papal authority in Henry VIII’s England. All good men recognised that something would have to be done about the popes.

From the north, a cooler voice than Savonarola’s was calling for reform, the voice of Erasmus of Rotterdam. In northern Europe the Renaissance was a more sober and more exclusively Christian movement than in Italy, deeply influenced by late medieval religious movements such as the ‘Devotio Moderna’ and the search for a more authentic personal piety. For the northern Humanists, the quest for a return to the pure sources of human culture included Plato and
Cicero, but focused on Christian classics – the writings of the early Fathers of the Church, and above all the scriptures. Erasmus poured his energies into producing editions of the works of St Jerome, St Augustine, St Ambrose. Above all, his edition of the Greek New Testament with a modern Latin translation (1516) aimed to bring before his contemporaries ‘Christ speaking, healing, dying and rising’.

Erasmus was more than a pious scholar. He was also Europe’s wittiest satirist, and in a stream of lacerating comic works, like
The Praise of Folly
of 1509, he poked savage fun at the corruptions of the Church. He detested violence, and he had no desire to stoke the fires of revolution. He did want to use laughter to expose absurdity and corruption, however, to tickle the Church into reforming itself. He became the most celebrated man in Europe, and kings and cardinals competed for his friendship. Between 1506 and 1509 he lived in Italy, absorbing the glories of the Italian Renaissance, and casting a sardonic eye on the activities of Julius II.

Erasmus and the many reform-minded Catholics who thought like him hated the. belligerent and worldly Julius, for the warrior-pope represented everything they thought a priest should not be. After Julius’ death an anonymous satire appeared entitled
Julius Exclusus
, which everyone assumed was the work of Erasmus, though he himself always resolutely denied it. Whoever its actual author was, it was saturated with the spirit of Erasmus’ angry mockery, a devastatingly funny but deadly indictment, in which the late pope was accused of every crime from sorcery to sodomy. The heart of the satire was the encounter at the gates of heaven between St Peter and the dead Julius, still clad in his armour and accompanied by an army of noisy ghosts created by his wars. Peter refuses to recognise this murderous thug as his successor, or to admit him to heaven, and in the ensuing argument Julius unwittingly betrays the sordidly materialistic vision of the papacy which many men feared underpinned the glories of Renaissance Rome. In reply to Peter’s demand whether he has been his true successor by teaching true doctrine, gaining souls for Christ, being diligent in prayer, Julius rebukes the presumption of the ‘beggarly fisherman’ and replies:

This bitter satire was rooted in disappointment at the failure of reform, above all, the failure of the popes to call a reform council. In 1511 a group of disgruntled cardinals supported by Louis XII of France had tried to reinvent the Conciliar era by summoning a council against Julius at Pisa. Quite obviously a French political ploy, this assembly received almost no support, but it forced Julius to reply in kind. In May 1512 he opened the Fifth Lateran Council in Rome, destined to be the last papal Council before the break-up of Western Christendom. In terms of reform, Lateran V was toothless, composed mainly of Italian bishops, its officials appointed by the Pope, its agenda dictated by him, its decrees published in the form of a papal bull. The summary of its proceedings which Julius Exclusus put in the dead pope’s mouth – ‘I told it what it was to say … We had two Masses, to show we were acting under Divine Inspiration, and then there was a speech in honour of myself. At the next session I cursed the schismatic cardinals. At the third I laid France under an interdict… Then the Acts were drafted into a bull and sent round Europe’ – is a caricature, but not all that far wide of the mark.
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Julius died before Lateran V had completed its work, and the advent of the new Medici Pope Leo X, young (he was only thirty seven), cultivated, peaceable and free from the grosser vices, led to a surge of expectation. He had signed an electoral pact which bound him to continue the Council, but nothing happened. A few of the milder reform measures found their way into the papal bull
Supernae Dispositions Arbitrio
, but nobody, least of all the Pope, paid any attention. From the Pope’s point of view the most satisfactory outcome of the Lateran Council was the discrediting of the schismatical Council of Pisa, and the French monarchy’s abandonment of Conciliar theory, a stick it had brandished over the heads of the popes for the best part of a century. While the Lateran Council was still sitting he signed the Concordat of Bologna (1516) with the French crown. This gave the King the right to appoint to bishoprics, abbacies and major benefices in his territories. But it restored the payment of annates to the Pope, permitted appeals to Rome (forbidden by the Pragmatic Sanction of 1438, which was now annulled), and formally acknowledged the Pope’s supremacy over a general council. In practice, the Concordat
made the French King master of a French national church, over which the Pope had little control. Leo considered this a price worth paying for the abandonment of the Pragmatic Sanction, the theoretical recognition of papal prerogatives and the actual restoration of a substantial part of papal revenues.

In the same year in which Erasmus published
Julius Exclusus
, in which the Lateran Council ended, and in which Pope Leo packed the College of Cardinals with thirty-one new creations, an unknown theology professor in Wittenberg, an obscure new German university, proposed an academic debate on the subject of indulgences. His name was Martin Luther, and he was reacting against the indulgence which Pope Julius and after him Pope Leo had issued to help fund the rebuilding of St Peters. Raising donations for Church projects by dispensing spiritual blessings was a long-established practice, and few people questioned it. The preaching of this indulgence, however, was riddled with corruption. In Luther’s part of Germany the profits were being shared between the Pope and Prince Albrecht of Brandenburg, Archbishop of Magdeburg, a twenty-three-year-old who had recendy also bought the archbishopric of Mainz, and was using proceeds from the Indulgence to pay off the bribes and loans this had involved. The chief publicist for the Indulgence, the Dominican preacher Tetzel, was eager to rake in contributions, and was none too subtle about what he promised in return. The Indulgence, he claimed, would release loved ones from their sufferings in purgatory: he even set the promise to a German rhyme which roughly translates as:

Devout minds everywhere were revolted by this sort of stuff, and there had been many protests before about such abuse of indulgences. But Luther was not protesting about the abuse of indulgences: he was protesting about indulgences themselves. Luther was a pious and scrupulous monk, who had recently passed through a profound spiritual crisis. Overwhelmed by a sense of his own sinfulness, he had found the idea of God’s justice terrifying, and the Church’s remedies through confession and acts of penance powerless to calm his fears. Release had come from a phrase in St Paul: ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’ For Luther, this one phrase turned the whole medieval system of salvation on its head. The saint was not, as the Church taught, a man or
woman who no longer sinned: the saint was a sinner who put all his or her trust in God. Good works, penance, indulgences, contributed nothing to salvation. Faith, a childlike dependence on God, was everything. There was a place for good works in the Christian life, but as a thankful response for salvation achieved, not as a means of earning it. A phrase from one of Luther’s lectures on Romans puts the matter in a nutshell. The Christian was ‘always a sinner, always a penitent, always right with God’.

For Luther, then, the St Peter’s Indulgence was a cruel and blasphemous con-trick, taking money for empty promises. He denounced it as a pious racket, and his protest was taken up on every side. This was the age of the printing revolution. For the first time a technology existed which could spread ideas rapidly across the whole of Europe, which could take theology out of the monastic cloister or the university lecture-room into the market place. Within a matter of months Luther was the most famous man in Germany. As the Church authorities moved against him, he abandoned the Indulgence issue and launched an attack on the whole range of Catholic teaching and practice. If faith was everything, and faith came from the Word preached and the scriptures read, then reliance on priests, sacraments, hierarchy, was all in vain.

These ideas spread through Germany like wildfire. Luther taught the priesthood of all believers, the right of the simple men and women of Germany to test for themselves the truth of what they were told by reading the Bible, which he proceeded to translate into German. To the poor, this seemed like a call to liberation from all that oppressed and impoverished them. It was a time of hunger and great social tension. In 1525 the peasantry of Germany rose against their masters, and many of them had slogans from Luther’s writings written on their banners. Luther hastily disowned these revolutionary readings of his message, but for the rich and powerful, too, his message had its charms. Luther’s denunciation of the racketeering of the medieval Church, his rejection of the monastic life as pointless and anti-Christian, meant that Church property was theft. Got by fraud, by right it belonged to the state. Luther called on the rulers of Germany to protect the Gospel. They responded by helping themselves to the property of the Church. His message was a stone thrown into a calm pond: the ripples spread and spread.

In Rome, Leo X failed utterly to grasp the seriousness of the crisis,
the need for drastic action to hold the Church together and to meet the legitimate demands of the reformers. The sophisticated Roman and Florentine worlds of classical learning and artistic patronage, the convoluted game of Italian dynastic politics in which the papacy must be a player if it was to survive at all, simply had not equipped him to appreciate the more immediate and existential anxieties of the earnest north of Europe.

Leo tried at first to have Luther silenced by the authorities of his religious order, the Augustinians. When that failed, he tried to remove the political protection being extended to Luther by the local Prince, Frederick of Saxony. Finally, in June 1520, he issued a bull,
Exsurge Domine
, condemning Luther’s teaching on forty-one separate counts. Luther responded by publicly burning the bull, adding that ‘this burning is only a trifle. It is necessary that the Pope and Papal See should also be burned. He who does not resist the papacy with all his heart cannot obtain eternal salvation.’ He was solemnly excommunicated, and took no notice whatever. A similar defiance of Alexander VI, a far worse pope than Leo, had undone Savonarola in 1498. Times had changed, however, and German hostility towards the papacy was of a different order from anything Italy knew.