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could not resist the temptation to preach crusades against offending
princes-until the crusading spirit was extinct.
It is possible that if the Church of Rome had struggled simply against the
princes and had had a care to keep its hold upon the general mind, it might
have achieved a permanent dominion over all Christendom. But the high claims
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of the Pope were reflected as arrogance in the conduct of the clergy. Before
the eleventh century the Roman priests could marry; they had close ties with
the people among whom they lived; they were indeed a part of the people.
Gregory VII made them celibates; he cut the priests off from too great an
intimacy with the laymen in order to bind them more closely to Rome, but
indeed he opened a fissure between the church and the commonalty. The church
had its own law courts. Cases involving not merely priests but monks,
students, crusaders, widows, orphans and the helpless were reserved for the
clerical courts, and so were all matters relating to wills, marriages and
oaths and all cases of sorcery, heresy and blasphemy. Whenever the layman
found himself in conflict with the priest he had to go to a clerical court.
The obligations of peace and war fell upon his shoulders alone and left the
priest free. It is no great wonder that jealousy and hatred of the priests
grew up in the Christian world.
Never did Rome seem to realize that its power was in the consciences of
common men. It fought against religious enthusiasm, which should have been its
ally, and it forced doctrinal orthodoxy upon honest doubt and aberrant
opinion. When the church interfered in matters of morality it had the common
man with it, but not when it interfered in matters of doctrine. When in the
south of France Waldo taught a return to the simplicity of Jesus in faith and
life, Innocent III preached a crusade against the Waldenses, Waldo's
followers, and permitted them to be suppressed with fire, sword, rape and the
most abominable cruelties. When again St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) taught
the imitation of Christ and a life of poverty and service, his followers, the
Franciscans, were persecuted, scourged, imprisoned and dispersed. In 1318 four
of them were burnt alive at Marseilles. On the other hand the fiercely
orthodox order of the Dominicans, founded by St. Dominic (1170-1221) was
strongly supported by Innocent III, who with its assistance set up an
organization, the Inquisition, for the hunting of heresy and the affliction of
free thought.
So it was that the church by excessive claims, by unrighteous privileges, and
by an irrational intolerance destroyed that free faith of the common man which
was the final source of all its power. The story of its decline tells of no
adequate foemen from without but continually of decay from within.
XLVII. Recalcitrant Princes and the Great Schism
ONE very great weakness of the Roman Church in its struggle to secure the
headship of all Christendom was the manner in which the Pope was chosen.
If indeed the papacy was to achieve its manifest ambition and establish one
rule and one peace throughout Christendom, then it was vitally necessary that
it should have a strong, steady and continuous direction. In those great days
of its opportunity it needed before all things that the Popes when they took
office should be able men in the prime of life, that each should have his
successor-designate with whom he could discuss the policy of the church, and
that the forms and processes of election should be clear, definite,
unalterable and unassailable. Unhappily none of these things obtained. It was
not even clear who could vote in the election of a Pope, nor whether the
Byzantine or Holy Roman Emperor had a voice in the matter. That very great
papal statesman Hildebrand (Pope Gregory VII, 1073-1085) did much to
regularize the election. He confined the votes to the Roman cardinals and he
reduced the Emperor's share to a formula of assent conceded to him by the
church, but he made no provision for a successor-designate and he left it
possible for the disputes of the cardinals to keep the See vacant, as in some
cases it was kept vacant, for a year or more.
The consequences of this want of firm definition are to be seen in the whole
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history of the papacy up to the sixteenth century. From quite early times
onward there were disputed elections and two or more men each claiming to be
Pope. The church would then be subjected to the indignity of going to the
Emperor or some other outside arbiter to settle the dispute. And the career of
every one of the great Popes ended in a note of interrogation. At his death
the church might be left headless and as ineffective as a decapitated body. Or
he might be replaced by some old rival eager only to discredit and undo his
work. Or some enfeebled old man tottering on the brink of the grave might
succeed him.
It was inevitable that this peculiar weakness of the papal organization [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]