Pardons and Millstones.

Early modern heretics finally got their hands on an Exocet with the scandal over indulgences. For, like John Webster, our 16th century forebears were ‘much obsessed with death’. 

  As anyone with a nodding acquaintance with Chaucer will know, sexual irregularity was rife amongst the mediæval clergy. For example, in 1397 seventy-two clerics from the 281 parishes which comprised the diocese of Hereford were accused of sexual incontinence by the parishioners. The difference between matters then and today is that the misconduct was on a vastly greater scale, that it involved consenting adults, was predominantly heterosexual, and was not considered a big-deal by anyone other than the Church authorities and the pious. Readers of Clochemerle will be aware that things weren’t vastly different in France in the 1930s; readers of The Power and the Glory, that being the priest’s mistress conferred a certain social prestige in rural Mexico. 

  But if the clergy’s sexual misbehaviour was tolerated, Luther eventually found a lethal weapon to attack the Church: indulgences. They were intended to reduce the time spent in Purgatory to expiate sins which had been confessed and absolved. They did not forgive the sin itself. But this distinction was blurred by the minor church officials responsible for distributing them, encouraging the uneducated to think that they replaced repentance, confession and absolution. And when people were alerted to the con by Luther they were very, very upset. For the average peasant the one consolation for his frequently miserable and harsh life was the hope of a happy afterlife. Where you went after death was the single most important issue in life. And to have coughed up money to buy an indulgence and thereby a place in heaven, only to find that - by the Church’s own teaching - it did no such thing was a step too far.

  Today, if people believe in the afterlife at all it’s a vague hope that there’s a heaven. In the Middle Ages people knew there was an afterlife and unless you were very careful it was likely to be very warm and involve demons pushing red-hot pokers up your backside. But if we’ve largely lost a belief in a personal immortality, we know that we live on in our children, our grandchildren and untold generations of descendants. And just as some mediæval clergy betrayed their congregations’ hope of heaven by mis-promoting indulgences, so their successors’ vile behaviour towards defenceless children has defiled what we hold most dear. 

   If you’d asked Pope Leo X whether an indulgence forgave sin as opposed to remitting time in purgatory he’d have replied, ‘Of course not.’ But he was very happy to let the misconception that it did raise funds to build St Peter’s. If you asked Benedict XVI whether he concurred with Christ’s statement that ‘whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea’ he would reply, ‘Of course’. But he’s presided over a regime where the reputation of the Church was more important than making sure that these unspeakably vile clergy could never have the opportunity to repeat their crimes. The Church paid dearly for Leo X’s dereliction of duty, I fear the consequences of Benedict’s may be terminal.

  And that, despite all, would be a pity. It’s not that the Church has suddenly become more wicked: arguably its members’ behaviour has improved over the past two millennia. Of the twelve apostles, Peter - the rock upon which Christ built his church - denied him three times; I’m not aware of any subsequent Pope having done so verbally, although their behaviour may sometimes have done so in practice. Judas sold his saviour for thirty pieces of silver,  and James and John spent most of the Last Supper arguing about who’d have the more important post in the Kingdom of Heaven. A hanger-on, Simon Magus, offered Peter money to acquire the power to transmit the Holy Spirit. Altogether a pretty unsavoury bunch, far removed from protestant evangelicals’ mythical primitive church untouched by the wiles of Rome. What we all have in common is that we’re human beings, utopianism as any reader of Swift or Orwell knows is a dangerous delusion, and as Christ said, ‘They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.’ Also worth recalling is his saying, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone …’  and, as John remarked in an epistle, ‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us’.