by Timothy Egan
Pope John Paul II, leader of the faith when it became clear that clerical abuse of children was thick in the ranks of Catholicism, was slow to take any action during his twenty-seven years as pontiff. He never ordered a deep inquiry into how church culture allowed so many criminals to avoid justice, the catastrophic failures in accountability. Since his death, he has been elevated to sainthood. Late in life, he sent an email to parishes worldwide. “Sexual abuse within the church is a profound contradiction of the teaching and virtues of Jesus Christ.” No one would disagree with that, for nothing said by Jesus could ever justify what thousands of men who pledged their lives to him did to destroy countless children. And so I wonder whether the contradiction that the pope spoke of is so deeply woven into the ministry of men who take holy orders that nothing will ever change. I’m starting to doubt whether even the most reform-minded leader can do anything about this scourge. If not, why take another step in Rome’s direction?
Though the church now has a policy of zero tolerance for offenders, Pope Francis admits that the institution is tardy. Sexual abuse is not a by-product of celibacy or the all-male culture that rules the church, he says. Instead, Francis blames “clericalism,” the reflexive protection of Roman-collared guardians of the faith, the bishops and cardinals who moved monsters around within the system. “The conscience of the church arrived a little late,” the pope told an audience at the Vatican. Too late for the lives broken at the church on Indian Trail Road and all the parishes in every corner of Catholicism.
My brother lost his best friend. I doubt if he will forgive the church, nor should he be expected to. He’s fine, he says, and I have to believe him. I love him and want him to be happy and whole. He’s tried to put his pain in perspective. The children of his friend are without a father because of a priest in our parish, because clerics covered for one of their own. My mother was deeply shaken. She didn’t like to talk about what happened at our church; her thinking was stuck in a cul-de-sac with no way out. She used to hope that one of her four boys would become a priest, and she continued to defend the vocation as a great and selfless calling. When I raged against the bastards who inflicted so much pain, when I said no institution that hosted this level of malignancy was worthy of her trust, she tried to explain her reluctance to break up with Catholicism. Her loyalty was based on a connection to God, and could not be severed by the deeply flawed mortals who labored in God’s name. She’d had several genuine spiritual experiences, times when she shivered at the proximity of the divine, which the church had helped her comprehend. After O’Donnell’s crimes were revealed, she stewed in denial for a long time, then flared in occasional bursts of anger, and ultimately arrived at some degree of forgiveness. She kept her faith, troubled though it was. My brother did not.
“I used to enjoy the structure and tradition of the Catholic Church,” my brother said. “But I lost my wonder of what could be.”
Wonder is a simple virtue. Like childhood, it’s grounded in innocence, taken for granted until it’s impossible to reclaim. One of the reasons I’m on the Via Francigena is to see whether I can maintain my wonder of what could be, while never forgetting what was.
EIGHTEEN
REFUGE AND REFORM
In the maze of Geneva’s Old Town, the cobblestone paths go up and down, they narrow and twist and circle back to a center. It’s easy to get lost, which seems a perfect metaphor for the people who flooded into this city of refuge because they were unmoored from a faith that was supposed to guide them from birth to the hereafter. At the heart of Geneva is a house of fourteen rooms above a vast lake filled with snowmelt from the Alps. The maison, built over the cloister of a great cathedral, is dedicated to a handful of ideas that overturned the Christian world five hundred years ago, almost to the day I arrive. The source of so much of the trouble is inside: a single, five-century-old certificate mounted to a wall. It’s a “passport to paradise,” so called, issued by the pope, signed by a bishop, and made out in the name of the buyer. The cost for this letter of celestial transport depended on the number of years you wished to knock off from purgatory, or whether you were purchasing for a deceased relative—one of the luckless souls stuck between heaven and hell. The average time in purgatory was pegged at nine thousand years, though it’s unclear how the accountants of the faith came up with that number. What you bought was absolution; you paid protection money to stay out of hell or speed the flight to the highest level. Even a future sin could be forgiven for the right price. A coin box, decorated with an image of the devil tormenting those in a postdeath delay, was placed in churches by traveling indulgence hucksters. It was promoted with a slogan: “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.”
The coins filled sacks, which loaded down mules, which made it up and over the Alps to Rome, to bribe the Turks menacing off the Adriatic shore, and to enrich a papal hierarchy that had embarked in the early sixteenth century on one of the most ambitious construction plans in history: building a city of sanctified marble. The centerpiece was St. Peter’s Basilica. To encourage this industry, the pope allowed select clerics to keep half of what they collected—for themselves. In this way, bishops and cardinals were able to purchase palaces and stage sumptuous feasts off the meager earnings of people who gave up food for their children in order to get a shot at eternal salvation.
Martin Luther, the thirty-three-year-old Augustinian monk from a little German town, could find nothing in the Bible to justify this sordid trade in indulgences. Nor could he find anything in Scripture about purgatory. What was this waiting room, this halfway house, this place for people not saintly enough to make it to the next level or wicked enough for damnation? An ordained priest with a doctorate in theology, he was brilliant but prickly, conscience stricken at all times. Luther knew every verse of the Latin Bible—knew it well enough that he would soon go to the source, and translate it from the original Greek into the German vernacular of his people. He could not find a line connecting Jesus Christ to the shakedown scheme of the church he had given his life to. In 1517, Luther went public with 95 theses—formally titled “Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences”—sending his remarks to a bishop and pinning them up on the bulletin board of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. He did not nail his protest note to the door, most scholars now believe, nor did he call for establishment of a new sect of Christianity in his name. But religion, remember, is nothing without story. And the founding narrative of the Protestant movement sounds so much better with a hammer that cracked the most powerful institution on earth.
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THE WAY TO THE WRITTEN RELICS of the Reformation goes through the border town of Pontarlier, which is famous for the mind-altering drink of absinthe, into Switzerland through Sainte-Croix, Orbe, and ends in Lausanne—eighty-one miles along the Via Francigena from Besançon. Lausanne is the capital of Vaud, in the French-speaking part of this country. It’s a city of 150,000 built on three hills, sloping to the crescent-shaped lake we know as Geneva but called by the Swiss and the French—who share it—Lac Léman. Back in the day, as in the Mesolithic era, people in animal skins reacted the way I did when I first saw the expansive bowl of mountain water, framed by the forested and glaciated enormity of the Alps, and decided that heaven could wait—for here it is. The Romans felt the same, as did the Celtic tribe of the Helvetii, various Germanic assemblies, Gauls, writers and artists from Britain and the United States, all the way up to the distinctly nonnationalistic Swiss who comprise the lucky present-day inhabitants.
I crossed no border station coming in from France. But I’m clearly in another world now, the land of pampered and entitled cows with bells, of spotless trains to everywhere, of a universal health care system so fantastic it makes you want to get sick just to try a free sample. The V.F. is well signed, marked in yellow posts. And the Swiss, being the Swiss, inform you not just of the distance to the next stop on the road to Rome, but how long it takes to wal
k there. These calculations will shame many travelers into attempting a brisk pace just to be average, while leaving others stranded after dark.
I met my son, Casey, in Lausanne; he flew in from Washington, D.C., through several connections. He’ll be with me for six days. He’s full of graduate school enthusiasms, his mind alive with the questions that many people stop asking after forty-hour weeks of study are replaced by forty-hour weeks of work. And just when I was starting to wonder why I let my kid learn the struggling profession of his old man, he said he met a cable news celebrity and was unimpressed. Skepticism, thy name is journalism. He has a million ideas for things to see, restaurants to try, places to swim, and mountain trails to hike. When I said, Um, our first stop really should be the International Museum of the Reformation in Geneva, he looked at me like I had just offered him an afternoon of advanced dental flossing.
I never told him the story of what happened in Spokane. Maybe he knows about it from one of his cousins. He grew up hearing me praise cerebral Jesuits who taught us to embrace the world and its contradictions. He was open-minded, even though he would probably say I romanticized my education. But he also came of age at a time when a global crisis of predatory priests dominated news about the Catholic Church. Contradictions, my ass, he used to say with a teenager’s certainty. Sounds like they’re all hypocrites. Well, you have a point, overstated though it is. Religion is fable. Yes, a story! Poetic. Universal. And I would start in about faith, which by its very nature can never be proven, and that the foundational narratives of most religious beliefs are perhaps more allegorical than factual.
We had this argument while he was growing up. His view is more nuanced now, and I’m trying to open him up even more with a gateway brief on behalf of Pope Francis. We didn’t raise our kids to be Catholic, or even Christian. Maybe this was a reaction to the detached, binary tutorials of Father Schwemin. And after what happened to my brother and his friends, I stopped caring about whether one religion had a monopoly on morality. Why set our kids up for the inevitable letdown? But now, they have no idea why people genuflect at a certain time in church, or put ashes on their forehead on a late-winter day, or why an Orthodox Jew wears a yarmulke. Our plan was to give them the basics of the major religions—the mythology, the philosophy, and as many of the verifiable facts as possible—and let the free market of ideas settle the debate as they thought it through. It hasn’t really worked. They have a reasonable person’s skepticism toward the supernatural claims of religion. They can spot the cons masquerading as holy men and women of faith. But they lack literacy in the spiritual canon. And how can you understand the world, as the archbishop of Canterbury said, without understanding religion? It’s one of my regrets as a parent. We didn’t want to close the door on spiritual curiosity. Our kids should be open enough to allow themselves to be surprised, as Francis said, and not to foreclose on the idea that a great faith, though flawed, can contain great truths.
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LAUSANNE WAS AFLAME with the Reformation in the first decades after Luther lit the fuse, and the city hosted a famous debate in 1536 on the merits of true Christianity. That was when Catholics and Protestants were still talking, and not yet slaughtering one another. But most of the action happened just down the lake at the city of Geneva, forty miles away. We took a slower, regional train and spent the hour with our faces pressed against the window. Vineyards! So glorious, on the steep slopes that meet the water, several thousand stone-terraced acres, not a vine out of place. And UNESCO-protected World Heritage vines at that, a legacy of the enological imperialism of monks in the eleventh century. Who’d have thought that Switzerland, surrounded by Europe’s highest peaks, could make so much wine? Surely the juice is plonk. Not by any stretch, we soon learned. They make Oregon-worthy pinot noir, a fruity chasselas, and several dry whites from grapes I’d never heard of. Switzerland may be wasted on the Swiss, as the old line has it, but the wine is not. They drink most of what they produce, which is why you don’t see a lot of vin de Suisse in American stores. Sunlight bounces off the lake and lights up the grapes, some of which are just starting to show early-summer gold.
We split up in Geneva, he for secular amusements, me to the Reformation shrines. The Protestant museum in Old Town, with the indulgence certificate, is packed with visitors. The docents show a trapdoor in a chimney, a hiding place for the Bible translated by Dr. Luther for the German people. There’s a painting of a woman with a tiny Bible nestled in her hair. People were forced to hide the book, for it was a crime in many a city to be in possession of any holy book other than church-authorized Scripture. The only legal way to God was through a clerical filter. Rome has spoken, the case is closed.
Luther democratized Christianity. He wanted a better Roman Catholic religion, closer to its source and the needs of people who filled the pews. “Out of love for the faith and the desire to bring it to light,” he wrote in the preamble to the 95 theses. As a young man, three years after he was ordained, Luther walked eight hundred miles to Rome. He was dismayed with what he saw—the indulgence racket, the profitable trade in phony relics, a debauched Vatican hierarchy. The church was the richest landowner on the Continent, and it was grooming Giovanni de’ Medici, of the wealthy Florentine dynasty, to become the next Vicar of Christ. He was made an archbishop at the age of eight, a cardinal at thirteen, Pope Leo X at thirty-seven. “Since God has given us the Papacy,” he said, “let us enjoy it.”
Luther certainly wasn’t the first to see hypocrisy in high holy places. The objections from the provinces of Christianity had been building for a long time, some coming from in-house dissidents like the brilliant Erasmus. But Luther was one of the first to do something about it. His concerns led him to a radical thought about the Word of God as messaged by its clerical carriers: “Who knows if this is really true?”
Back in the monastery, the Hermit of Wittenberg tried to find out. As he went into deep theological exploration, the corruption continued all around him. The lord of the nearby Castle Church had acquired a hoard of relics—a twig from the Burning Bush, a thumb from the grandmother of Jesus, a tooth from Saint Jerome, a straw from Bethlehem’s manger, mother’s milk from the Virgin Mary—and was charging a premium price for the right to feel the power. This went on as a despotic Dominican friar, Johann Tetzel, was shaking down the locals with his indulgence scheme. “I have here the passports to lead the human soul to the celestial joys of Paradise,” he would proclaim. The rich could buy their way into postdeath comfort; the poor were out of luck, unless they scraped together money needed to stay alive. Luther’s 95 theses were simply questions, an opening round of civilized argument, though his complaints came with real bite. “It is certain that when money clinks in the money chest, greed and avarice can be increased,” he wrote, a clever play on the coin slogan. He dared to raise the issue that other clerics felt but feared putting to paper. “Why does the pope . . . build the basilica of Saint Peter, with the money of poor believers?”
His critique might have reached no further than the city walls without the help of another revolutionary. Johann Gutenberg grew up reading hand-scripted manuscripts in early-fifteenth-century Germany. As he was coming of age, craftsmen using block printing—pages produced by inking a piece of hard wood with letters cut into it—could turn out a book faster than a monk. But the process was tedious, with each new page having to come from a different block carved from scratch. Gutenberg drew on ideas for squeezing wine grapes to create a printing press. The Chinese had done something similar with clay lettering, much earlier, though the technology was unknown to Europeans. Gutenberg arranged metal type on a tray. The letters were inked. Hundreds of pages were printed. Then the characters were rearranged into fresh sentences for a new page—movable type, it was called. The Gutenberg Bible was completed in 1455, the first book ever printed. It had sharp, clear lettering, forty-two lines to a page, on paper and calfskin vellum, telling the story of creation up until the f
irst days of Christianity. Two hundred copies were supposed to be printed of the first mass-produced book in Europe; the actual run was short of that. No longer would monks in tightly monitored scriptoria, or cardinals in a centralized church, or a tyrannical monarch, control the flow of ideas. The written word took flight just as the Renaissance was flourishing. Speech was freed.
The museum in Geneva has assembled a replica of Gutenberg’s invention—“the most extraordinary act of divine grace,” as Luther called it. Gutenberg, by the way, got his start selling “holy mirrors” used by pilgrims to capture the essence of a relic so they could take it home for healing. Had he not gone bust in a side business of the relic racket, he might never have crafted the invention that changed humanity. The curators also have on display one of the first 95 theses to be printed, and the tome which ensured that Luther’s writings would be wildly popular: the Vatican’s Index of Prohibited Books.
Rather than debate Luther’s legitimate arguments, the church went ballistic. They would nail the pious little bastard to his own cross. “In three weeks I will throw the heretic into the fire!” said Brother Tetzel after the theses were published. Once the battle was joined, Luther never backed down. An obscure monk, without so much as a sword or a coin to his name, stood up to the mighty powers of church and state, the Vatican and the Holy Roman Empire. Tossing pebbles against a fortress, he nearly brought it down. What he had going for him was what Victor Hugo would later describe: the power of an idea whose time has come. “The Church of Rome, formerly the most holy of all churches, has become the most lawless den of thieves, the most shameless of brothels, the very kingdom of sin,” Luther wrote the pope. Luther became a late-medieval celebrity; 300,000 copies of his writings were circulated between 1517 and 1520. In his lifetime, a third of all books published in German were penned by him.