CHAPTER 1: 1492: The Seven Deadly Sins Tumble out of Europe

Europe Rebelling Against Christianity:
The Role of Religion

INSTEAD OF SEEKING THE SALVATION OF SOULS AND THE WORSHIP OF GOD as ends, the fifteenth-century Catholic Church often used people's hunger for salvation and for God for its own profit. Pope Leo X sold two thousand church offices yearly for five hundred thousand ducats. With the annual income from their purchased offices, officials hired deputies at much lower salaries to do the spiritual tasks and pocketed the difference. One cleric often held many offices. Already archbishop of Magdeburg, Albert of Brandenburg desired another archbishopric (he had to support several mistresses), for which he owed Leo X about thirty-one thousand ducats. To raise the money, he sent the notorious Johann Tetzel to sell indulgences with the jingle

As soon as the gold in the basin rings,
Right then the soul to heaven springs.

In saints' relics, the church had another consumer good to sell.

The laypeople--the consumers--supported this system. Church profiteers were partly responding to laypeople, who created a human-centered religion for their solace. Historian Euan Cameron notes, "Most lay people were less worried about saving their souls, than about everyday security." Thus "they used an arsenal of supernatural charms" to solve "the immediate pressing concerns of human survival." Like indigenous peoples, they used material objects, festivals, images and paraphernalia to manipulate the supernatural world. "Firebrands from St. John's day bonfires were regarded as talismans, as were eggs laid on Good Friday." Popular religion stressed externals, not attitudes or understanding: "All the most popular activities of late medieval religion were based on doing something . . . on experiencing an event more than on learning or understanding a message." This lay religion corrupted the church and prevented true reform. The wealthy poured money on the reformed religious orders--hoping to buy the benefits of their greater holiness but corrupting them in the process.¹⁶ Mutually reinforcing were people's eagerness to buy and the church's eagerness to sell. The result was what two Dutch historians "kindly disposed to Catholic Christianity" describe as "a religious consciousness that can hardly be called Christian."¹⁷

Pope and church sought political power as well. The pope ruled the Papal States in central Italy. To obtain funds to finance construction in Rome and the States, Pope Sixtus IV in 1476 ruled that purchased indulgences could reduce a soul's time in purgatory. Upon seeing Pope Julius II in 1506 triumphantly parading through Bologna with his army, Erasmus reputedly asked, "Whose successor is this Julius, Julius Caesar or Jesus Christ?" Popes intervened in European politics. "The bequests of the devout, largely in the interests of their departed souls," made the church the largest landowner. Popes used "spiritual sanctions" to give their Papal States a monopoly on the sale of alum in Catholic Christendom.¹⁸ Spiritual powers became means to political ends.

In the first week or two of an American history course, these familiar examples are used to explain Martin Luther and the Reformation. Yet, as Cameron notes, they don't come close to explaining the Reformation. Europeans did not complain about this popular, human-centered religion "adapted to the needs, concerns, and tastes . . . of the people who created it." They grumbled about the church's appetite for funds and the clergy's privileges, not about shrines, rites, pilgrimages, saints, relics, indulgences and festivals.¹⁹

True, this human-created distortion of Christianity did not integrate society fully or control the powerful drives of political ambition and economic avarice. Yet the ambitious and the avaricious hardly complained. As we shall see, the Reformation resulted from God's complaints about medieval religion, not Europeans' grumblings about it. Medieval distortions did not pit some Europeans (clergy) against others (the devout laypeople), but almost all of them against a God who condemned human pride, ambition, lust and greed. Almost all conspired in a conquest of a Christianity whose original, pacific, self-denying, all-embracing character was as unfamiliar to them as any New World island. The church's spiritual functions and people's spiritual needs became mines to be worked for individual profit like the Potosi silver mines of Peru.