Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (27 page)

A stream is muddied from its source
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Luther castigated the practice of appointing one man to several ecclesiastical posts, “coupl[ing] together ten or twenty prelacies,” so that “one thousand or ten thousand gulden may be collected,” allowing a cardinal to live “like a wealthy monarch at Rome.”
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He criticized the widespread purchase of office: “No bishop can be confirmed unless he pays a huge sum for his pallium.” Legal cases over purely temporal matters are called to Rome, he complained, where judges are ignorant of local laws, justice (or injustice) is sold, and excommunication is used as a threat to blackmail people. Monasteries are given over to caretakers who appoint “some apostate, renegade monk,” who “sits all day long in the church selling pictures and images to the pilgrims.”
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And all this, Luther charged—in terms Egyptians and Tunisians echo today—was especially despicable because it was done under the color of law: “They have bound us with their canon law and robbed us of our rights so that we have to buy them back again with money.”
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Obviously, the copious and profound teachings of Martin Luther cannot be boiled down just to a diatribe against corruption. His exploration of such doctrines as the physical presence of Christ in the host at communion, the importance of faith to salvation, and the role of priests as intercessors with God go far beyond such economic concerns. Still,
many of the very elements of creed that he contested were used by the church to maintain a monopoly over the salvation of the faithful—a monopoly that made widespread extortion possible.
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L
UTHER WAS
hardly the first to lash out at the corruption of the Catholic Church. The twelfth-century mirror writer John of Salisbury reserved some of his choicest language for Rome:

Scribes and Pharisees sit[ting] within Rome . . . accumulate valuable furnishings, they pile up gold and silver at the bank . . . delight in the plunder of churches and calculate all profits as piety. They deliver justice not for the sake of truth but for a price. . . . Even the Roman pontiff himself is burdensome and almost intolerable to everyone, since . . . he erects palaces and parades himself about not only in purple vestments but in gilded clothes. . . . They pick clean the spoils of the provinces as if they wanted to recover the treasures of Croesus.
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In the 1430s, an anonymous cleric probably living in Basel, where today’s Switzerland meets Germany and France, conceived a far-reaching reform of the church and empire, purportedly on behalf of the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund (d. 1437). From its terms, a detailed picture of the church kleptocracy emerges. Along with indulgences—“as I love God, terrible simony and sin”
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—the text denounces multiple benefices,
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the sale of papal seals for official documents,
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and cardinals’ large retinues.
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The reform called for a fixed salary for all church officials and an end to clerics’ demands of “gifts” for their work, or the sale of dispensations for their illegal activities (such as sleeping with their maidservants).
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In the latter half of the fifteenth century and the early sixteenth, a whole body of complaint literature grew up, collectively referred to as the “grievances of the German people against Rome.” A treatise submitted to the Diet of Worms in 1521 listed one hundred and one specific complaints, including:

• Transfer of secular cases to Rome or ecclesiastical courts, under pain of excommunication,

• Transfer of benefices to Rome if a cleric dies there or on his way,

• High annual taxes (“annates” ) imposed on Germany,

• High confirmation fees for bishops, or the requirement that prelates buy or lease their benefices from Rome,

• Annulment of the local elections to church office to make way for the pope’s cronies,

• Sale of absolution or dispensation from sins, even future sins,

• Penances made “so formidable that the sinner is obliged to buy his way out of them,”

• “Mendicant friars, relic hawkers, and miracle healers [who] go . . . through our land, begging, collecting . . . and extracting large sums of money” ; permission to do so in return for a cut of the take,
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• Threat of excommunication or withholding of sacraments to extort money, collective punishment on whole villages, even for matters of debt,

• Appropriating a cut of pilgrims’ offerings at shrines,

• Extortion of contributions for public processions,

• Extortion of payment for graves in the churchyard,

• Pressure on dying people to bequeath their property to the church instead of their kin.
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There was enough material in those complaints for a sketch of the kleptocratic structure of church in the early sixteenth century, along the lines of that whiteboard drawing at ISAF headquarters that depicted the structure of acute corruption in Afghanistan.
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Without doubt, the Reformation—which ignited wars and toppled kingdoms, in one of the most sweeping upheavals in Western history—was a revolution against kleptocracy.

W
HERE THE
new reformed religion and its rebellion against church kleptocracy intersects most dramatically with the origins of modern representative government is during the Dutch Revolt.
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Key to that conflict was Phillip II’s savage repression of Protestant religious practice.

In the spring of 1566, barred from building their own churches, adepts of the new faith began congregating outside city walls, amid the hedgerows and pastures, to listen to itinerant preachers.

“I must not fail to inform your Highness,” wrote the governor of the city of Lille (now part of France) to King Philip II’s regent in the Netherlands, “of two preachings that were held last night. The principal one . . . attracted about four thousand people.” Reports from infiltrators he had placed in the crowd allowed the governor to quote some of the meeting’s incendiary language: “Pray God that He destroy these idolatrous Papists, and have courage, for we are strong, but our time has not yet come.”
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“Despair made those who dissented in religion more obdurate,” wrote an eyewitness after the events, “and made them prefer to oppose the government openly and confess their belief frankly, rather than to remain for ever oppressed and subdued.”
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The lack of recourse was pushing Dutch Protestants to extremes.

Try as the local nobility might “to punish and curb this insolence and disorder of the sectarians,” they could not keep the people from attending these “hedge sermons.”
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The crowds grew larger. Worshippers, returning home from the sermons, would clatter through town, “armed and be-cudgeled, and singing psalms.”
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By July, Philip’s regent was calling up soldiers, foot and horse.
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In mid-August, the Netherlands exploded.

The governor of Lille’s August 16 report recounts that Protestants on their way to outdoor sermons suddenly veered off toward the towns of “Messines, Quesnoy, Warnenton, Commynes,” where they “trashed, broke images, sepulchers, and made gigantic disorders at churches, hospitals, and cloisters.”
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The appalled governor of Aire wrote of similar unthinkable scenes in his region two days later:

I would not know how to express or spell out to Your Highness the great desolation that exists in Flanders, to see daily all the churches and chapels of the countryside devastated, ruined, and violated by the new evangelists. They carried out of the said churches all the furnishings for the holy sacrament, and played with them as with a bowling ball, and threw the very sacred consecrated host on the ground, broke the tables and altars, the figures and portrayals of the cross, of the virgin and the saints there represented, and set fires in several places. On top of that, they tore down the altars, shattering the stones of them, and also broke the baptismal fonts, tore up the books, and carried off all the ornaments and even all the cloths and other linen serving the said churches.
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On a quick-burning fuse, the riots leaped from the towns of the southern Netherlands to the north, leaving behind the smoking and amputated ruins of thousands of ecclesiastical buildings, and the torn and twisted remains of vestments, chalices, altars, statues, paintings, plate, candlesticks, books, and even kegs of wine and costly butter.
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It has been called “iconoclasm,” and indeed, the rioters went after icons, or religious images, whose presence in a place of worship they considered idolatrous. But they did not attack just images. They fell upon all the manifestations of the wealth and riches that the church had been extorting for so long and parading before their eyes. The ferocity of the destruction speaks to the depths of the people’s rage.

Those images—the painted statues of the saints or the Virgin Mary, the relics in their precious receptacles, even great crucifixes, were regularly
taken out on procession, bedecked in brocades and furs, jewels at wrists and neck, while an impoverished public, assembled by the sides of the streets, gazed up at them.
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“They put robes of silk on their idols made of old wood,” an anonymous complaint from the French-speaking southern Netherlands put it, “leaving us brethren of Christ naked and starving.”
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Sometimes, armed with a candlestick or a stave, the iconoclasts would simply beat an object to pieces, hammering it blindly. But often there was a method to their vandalism. Statues were defenestrated, beheaded, their noses cut off. In one case, a Saint Nicholas was executed by hanging.
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The rioters seemed to be acting out a ritual punishment upon the symbols of the church, in retribution for the crimes of the Roman kleptocracy.

And those early Protestants, in revolt against kleptocracy, can only be described as violent religious extremists.

S
KIP NOW
to 2012. Al Qaeda–linked rebels, garbed in Afghan-cut clothes and black turbans, fall upon the legendary Malian desert city of Timbuktu and—as they deal out savage shari’a law penalties—set about trashing dozens of historic shrines dedicated to Sufi saints. They reduce ancient mud-brick mausoleums to rubble, raze a fabled monument at the city gates, and smash modern statues. “Not a single mausoleum will remain in Timbuktu,” a rebel proclaimed to Agence France-Presse. “God doesn’t like it.”
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According to Human Rights Watch, “bars and hotels . . . associated with alcohol consumption and prostitution” were also targeted.
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Later, fleeing the town ahead of French and Malian troops in January 2013, the militants set fire to the governor’s office and libraries that have stored precious manuscripts for hundreds of years.
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The similarities between the early Protestants and today’s Islamist extremists don’t end with iconoclasm. The Puritans were famous for frowning on liquor, dancing, and festivities. They turned to the literal text of scripture for teachings on religious practice and the conduct of daily life. Where they could, they imposed their preferred practice on civilians by law, sometimes inflicting gruesome punishments on nonconformists.
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They wore ostentatiously modest black and white clothes—like
those special Islamist veils—allowing adepts to recognize each other, whether they were Dutch or Huguenot or natives of Plymouth on the Massachusetts Bay.

And, as adamantly as today’s Salafis, they flung the label of unbeliever at anyone who differed with their rigid doctrine. “Puritans,” spat James I, in the preface to his mirror for Harry, imagine themselves “in a manner without sin, the only true church, and only worthy to be participant of the sacraments, and all the rest of the world to be but abomination in the sight of God.”
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The other remarkable manner in which today’s violent jihadis parallel the early Protestants is that they articulate their struggle, at least in part, as a reaction to the kleptocratic practices of local rulers—in the modern case, inspired and enabled by the United States.

Even to suggest such an equivalency—including the proposition that violence in both cases grew out of legitimate grievances—may seem offensive to many Americans. But more than a dozen years after 9/11, the events of that day are now entering the realm of history. And to subject them, as historical events, to the type of critical analysis that episodes from earlier times and more distant places receive, is not to dishonor or belittle the victims.

Abstracted from that painful psychological context, the resemblance between the language Al Qaeda uses to explain its violence, and that of the earlier Protestant insurrectionaries castigating the acute corruption of the Catholic Church and its royalist allies, is unmistakable.

In a video sent to the Al-Jazeera cable television network in late fall of 2004, for example, Osama bin Laden emphasized the kleptocratic practices of Arab rulers—and U.S. officials’ emulation of them—as he sought to correct what he saw as Americans’ misunderstanding of the motivation behind the 9/11 attacks.

“Even though we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11th,” Bin Laden said, “Bush is still . . . hiding from you the real causes.”
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Among those causes, he listed U.S. support for the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and both Gulf wars. The aim of the 2003 war in Iraq, he emphasized, was “to replace [an old agent] with a new puppet to assist in the pilfering of Iraq’s oil.”

Then Bin Laden began analyzing the George W. Bush administration,
which resembled, in his view, “the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military, and the other half . . . by the sons of kings and presidents.” And those leaders—of Arab military dictatorships and Gulf monarchies alike—are “characterized by pride, arrogance, greed and misappropriation of wealth.”