by W. E. Gutman
Leonardo da Vinci is driven underground. Cervantes is placed on the Index of forbidden authors. So are Bacon, Maimonides, Petrarch and Rabelais. Tax-exempt and immune from honest labor, fat and opulent, the Church and the aristocracy harass and exploit the serfdom. In their shadow, rich merchants fleece their patrons and bleed the populace.
Across the Atlantic, the plunder of the Americas by bearded savages brandishing a sword in one hand and wielding a cross in the other is in full swing, punctuated by forced conversions, looting, rape and genocide.
Most Christians never hear a disparaging word about popes, some of whom have risen to mythical status. It’s as if a perpetual halo of saintliness hovers over their heads. Yet the history of the papacy bears no resemblance to its modern-day portrayal. Over time, the truth about them has been obscured. Their true character was so craftily altered, or glossed over, that few people realize that scores of popes were not only decadent but were also the most savage warring men ever known. Egomaniacal, lustful self-promoters who wallowed in vice -- traits Catholic historians conceal -- popes were widely resented and feared by the laity. When the early glow of Enlightenment awakened heretofore blinkered minds, freethinkers rebelled against them. Doctrinal disobedience steeled the papacy and led to new pinnacles of barbarism.
With the unctuous gentility of modern papacy as a backdrop, it is hard to imagine that the ancient gurus of Christendom were brutal thugs who retaliated against “heresy” with torture and death. Popes waded through torrents of blood to fulfill their earthly objectives and many led their mercenaries on evangelical fields of battle from which they returned enriched through murder and pillage.
Bishop Liutprand of Cremona, author of the Antapodosis, a florid but highly literate satire of the kings of the first half of the 10th century, paints a remarkable portrait of the debauchery of the popes and their sacerdotal confederates, perhaps with a tinge of envy:
“They hunted on horses with gold trappings, feasted at rich banquets with dancing girls when the hunt was over, and retired with these shameless whores to beds lined with silk sheets and gold-embroidered covers. All the Roman bishops were married, and their wives made silk dresses out of the sacred vestments.”
Christian historians dismiss with annoying flippancy the true character of the popes, arguing that they never considered them “faultless.” Yet they keep on whitewashing their evil doings. It is in the nature of proselytism, political or religious, to mis-inform when it can, to dis-inform when it must. The truth drowns in the process.
Pope John XII, one in a long dynasty of dissolute popes, put his mistress Marcia, a prostitute, in charge of his brothel in the Lateran Palace. He “liked to have around him a collection of Scarlet Women,” wrote Benedict of Soracte, a 10th century monk-historian the Catholic Encyclopedia smugly dismisses. At the pope’s trial for the murder of a rival, his clergy swore that he had engaged in incest with his sisters and had raped his nuns. He and his mistresses got so soused at a banquet that they accidentally set fire to the building. In an epoch when the average tenure of a pope was less than two years, John XII sat on St. Peter’s throne for a decade. His life came to a sudden and violent end when, according to Church officials, he was slain by the Devil while raping a woman. The truth is prosaic and infinitely more gratifying. The Holy Father was beaten so severely by the woman’s husband that he died of his injuries a week later.
On occasion, the Catholic Encyclopedia provides grudging accounts of papal misconduct. The scandal surrounding Pope Benedict IX is a case in point. In 1032, after clawing his way up to the papacy, he promptly excommunicates clerics he considers hostile and launches a reign of terror. He opens the doors of the papal palace to homosexuals and turns it into a lucrative male brothel. His violent and licentious conduct infuriates the citizens of Rome who replace him with John of Sabine, crowned Pope Sylvester III. But Sylvester is driven out by Benedict’s brothers. Benedict sells the papacy to his godfather, Giovanni Graziano, later known as Pope Gregory VI. Benedict then engineers a coup and reclaims the papal seat. The Church grudgingly remembers him as
“… immoral, cruel and indifferent to spiritual things … depraved and unsuited for the ascetic life. He was the worst pope since John XII.”
Upon Benedict’s death, undertakers refuse to build him a coffin. He is hastily interred in a shroud under the cover of darkness.
According to the testimony of St. Bruno, the learned, self-effacing and frugal founder of the Carthusian Order of cloistered contemplative monks,
“The whole Church was in wickedness, holiness had faded, justice had perished, and truth had been buried … popes and bishops were given to luxury and fornication. The training of the popes left much to be desired, the moral standard of many being very low and the practice of celibacy seldom observed. Bishops obtained their offices in irregular ways; their lives and conversations were strangely at variance with their calling. They discharged their duties, not for Christ but for motives of worldly gain. The clergy were in many places regarded with scorn, and their avaricious ideas, opulence and immorality rapidly gained ground at the center of clerical life. When ecclesiastical authority grew weak at the fountainhead, it necessarily decayed elsewhere. Papal authority lost the respect of many, inspiring resentment against the Curia [the body of tribunals and offices through which the pope governs the Catholic Church] and against the papacy.”
Showing contempt for titles, Bruno declined to be made bishop, withdrew with a group of followers and built a monastery.
Pope Leo IX was an unscrupulous buccaneer who spent his pontificate sightseeing Europe with a retinue of armed knights and left the world worse than he had found it. The Church calls him “lapsed,” coyly admitting that
“He defected from the faith… he fell away by actually offering sacrifice to the false gods.”
St. Peter Damian (1007-1072), an aficionado of self-mortification, and the fiercest censor of his age, unrolled a frightful picture of decay in clerical morality in the lurid pages of his Book of Gomorrah, a curious document that remarkably survived centuries of Church cover-ups and book-burnings. He wrote:
“A natural tendency to murder and brutalize appears with the popes. Nor do they have any inclination to conquer their abominable lust; many are seen to have employed into licentiousness for an occasion to the flesh, and hence, using this liberty of theirs, perpetuating every crime.”
British historian Lord Acton (1834-1902) summed up the martial nature of the popes when he noted,
“They not only murdered in the great style, but they also made murder a legal basis of the Christian Church and a condition of salvation.”
Perhaps the popes were dutifully obeying Jesus’ command:
“But those mine enemies which would not that I reign over them, bring hither and slay before me.” (Luke, 19:27).
Today’s Christian clergy works diligently to represent Jesus as an inspired but harmless preacher and a prophet of peace. But they cagily avoid any discussion of the passage from the Gospels that nullifies in one sentence everything Christianity purports to embody. Are proponents of the death penalty and the lunatics who advocate the murder of abortion doctors merely human, or do they knowingly draw their inspiration from that ruthless telltale verse?
The “magnificent 12th century” that the faithful inexplicably glorify above all others of the Dark Ages, begins with the Inquisition, which lingers in various forms for the next six centuries, and ushers in the 35-year crusade against the Cathars (also known as the Albigenses). The Catholic Encyclopedia readily acknowledges -- and obliquely rationalizes -- the Church’s arrogance and tyrannical nature when it describes the Inquisition as
“a special ecclesiastical institution for combating or suppressing heresy -- ‘heresy’ meaning ‘holding a different opinion’.”
Establishment of the Inquisition was the only time in Christian history when the Church was united in purpose and spoke with one voice. The Inquisition became a permanent office of Christianity and
, to justify its principles and objectives, the popes introduced a persuasive instrument in the form of fictitious documents known as The Forged Decretum of Gratian. The forgeries constitute some of the greatest impostures known to mankind, the most successful and most stubborn in their hold on unenlightened people. Philosopher John William Draper calls them
“a mass of fabrications … that made the whole Christian world, through the papacy, the domain of the Italian clergy. It inculcated that it is lawful to constrain men to goodness, to torture and execute heretics and to confiscate their property; that to kill an excommunicated person is not murder, that the pope, in his unlimited superiority to all law, stands on an equality with the Son of God.”
The darker features of that era are not in dispute among honest historians. In this period of Christian history, hundreds of thousands of people were massacred by the Church. In 1182, Pope Lucius III grabbed control of the Church and two years later declared the Cathars heretics and authorized a crusade against them. A crusade is a gratuitous war instigated by the Church for alleged religious ends, and sanctioned by a papal bull.
Eighty-six years earlier, in 1096, Pope Urban II approved the first of eight crusades -- there would be a total of nineteen -- and they went on for 475 years. Heresy, the Church declared, was a blow in the face of God and it was the duty of every Christian to kill heretics. Earlier still, Pope Gregory VII officially asserted that “the killing of heretics is not murder,” and decreed it legal for the Church to slay “non-believers.” Up until the 19th century, popes forced Christian monarchs to make heresy a crime punishable by death under their civil codes. But it was not heresy that inspired the crusade against the Cathars. Its purpose was to give the papacy additional land and revenues. The popes engaged in untold brutalities to fulfill these objectives.
The Cathars, a peaceful and pious Christian sect who believed that humans are divine souls trapped in a material world created by an imperfect creator, were now marked by the Catholic hierarchy for annihilation. The crusade against them, a demonstration of Church ruthlessness and one of the most gruesome massacres in history started on July 22, 1209. What followed was horrific. The pogrom began in Béziers, in southern France. Some say that all the inhabitants were slaughtered in one week. Others put the number of dead at 40,000 men, women and children. During the first few days, 6,000 or 7,000 people were dragged to the Church of St. Mary Magdalene and executed.
Shamefully, condemnation of the Church’s horrors against the Cathars, which lasted 45 years, has been subdued until recent times. Worse, there have been serious attempts to minimize the scope of this infamy and devalue the scale of the carnage to irrelevancy. Such efforts to suppress the truth seem to have bolstered the faith of those who wish to believe, against all reality, in the saintliness of the Church. The way mainstream Catholic writers now make light of this appalling event is unforgivable. The excuse that popes carried out these murders in the name of Christ is indefensible. If we accept the Church’s explanation that crusaders were brave men who, imbued with deep religious sentiments, set out to punish people who veered away from conventional Christianity, then we are accepting an untruth. What is beyond doubt is that as soon as the Catholic armies were mobilized they became the most formidable killing machines Europe had ever known.
And that was just the beginning.
From the earliest times, religion and politics become intimately intertwined. The cross-fertilization between statecraft and religious objectives leading to the manipulation of religious sensibilities for political purposes has a long and sordid history. Powerful individuals, most often high-ranking members of the clergy, ban essays, pamphlets and books viewed as anti-religious, particularly those that promote “secular humanism” (heresy), are deemed “seditious” (they utter inconvenient truths) or “obscene” (deeply offensive to feigned standards of decency). These multiple surges of inhibited thought combine to form a continuum of ignorance and irrationality that has a chilling effect on the dissemination of information and the exchange of rational ideas.
From The Analects of Confucius to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, from Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed to Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason, the Popol Vuh and the Talmud, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, from Voltaire’s Candide to Huxley’s Brave New World, thousands of books are banned, suppressed and censored on flimsy political, religious, sexual and social pretexts based on the tastes and beliefs of the dominant power structure of the moment. Ultimately, curtailment of free thought engulfs the mind in a sea of naïveté and absurdity that, abetted by the strident militancy of religion, persists to this day.
Medieval society struggles with arbitrary restrictions enforced by pressure groups not averse to subduing the timid, the unknowing and the pious with the blackjack tactics of intimidation, intellectual persecution, historical revisionism and the vilification of nonconformity. The expurgation of important ideas, compelling speculations and verifiable truths tacitly accepted by many, yet offensive to a vocal and influential minority, is widespread during the late Middle Ages. Censorship, propaganda, disinformation and the laundering of impressionable minds survive in various forms into modern times. If cogitation is intrinsic in man, so is, once his mind has been commandeered, his robotic rejection of concepts that elude him, defy his interpretation of reality, or undermine his social, political or religious stature.
Sometimes cloaked in symbolism, often flaunted with chilling realism, these lamentable human traits that the Church has so deftly manipulated would provide courageous artists, writers, philosophers and social activists endless grist for the anti-conformist mill. And, to the consternation of fantasy vendors, they would also delight in reminding the world that everything that is will cease to be.
As Dawn Alights
Dawn alights and the pestilential haze of ignorance and stubborn attachment to absurd myths slowly begins to lift. A pale shaft of nascent self-awareness, a maturing consciousness of the natural world, spread little by little across Western Europe.
Gutenberg opens a print shop in Mainz. A goldsmith by trade, he is the first to use movable type printing and the originator of the mechanical printing press. His invention feeds the fledgling Renaissance and, as it greatly enhances scientific publishing, becomes a major catalyst for the ensuing scientific revolution. Troubled by the spread of knowledge (heresy) and always on the lookout for new sources of revenue, a papal court attempts to force printers to obtain a license. Inspired by this early form of extortion, the modern licensing system is far less interested in establishing norms of professional competency than in creating capital.
The first stock exchange begins trading in Antwerp.
Copernicus lays the foundations of astronomy and demonstrates the double movement of the planets -- rotation about their axes and revolution around the Sun. A century later, contradicting Biblical assertions (Psalms, Chronicles and Ecclesiastes) which insist that “the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved,” Galileo defends Copernicus’ heliocentrism. Found “vehemently suspect of heresy” by the Roman Catholic Church, he is ordered imprisoned; the sentence is later commuted to house arrest.
Leonardo da Vinci, architect, painter, sculptor, writer, musician and engineer painstakingly develops the most accurate and comprehensive human anatomical chart. He visualizes the screw, the pulley, the articulated wing, the submarine, the helicopter and the armored assault vehicle long before practical uses are found for his ideas.
Concerned not with lofty ideals but with viable governance, the multi-talented Niccoló Machiavelli draws on his own experience and pens his famous satirical treatise on statecraft, The Prince. His reputation as a grey eminence or sinister political instigator is unfounded. “Machiavellism,” the use of cunning and duplicity in politics, predates him. Man needs no instruction manual to sharpen his basest instincts.
Alart de Hameel, engraver and architect, supervises the erection of St. John’s cathedral in ’s-Hertog
enbosch in the province of Brabant in the Low Countries. He completes the southern wing of the transept and begins work on the central nave. Lodges of operative masons flourish in the shadow of Europe’s great castles and churches.
Erasmus, Dutch humanist, satirist and philosopher, examines the social and religious problems of his day with sobriety and logic. He criticizes popular Christian beliefs and infuriates Catholics and Protestants alike. He tries to establish a spiritual commonality on which Catholics and Protestants can agree. His efforts earn him the ire of both camps.
Michelangelo, Rafael, Botticelli, Dürer create subtle and sophisticated visions that stir the imagination and awaken dormant or repressed emotions.
Bawdy, irreverent and politically incorrect, Cervantes and Rabelais turn fantasy, satire and the grotesque into an art form hitherto unequaled in literature.
Less than revered in his own lifetime, Shakespeare, by any other name, will be remembered as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. Transparently anti-royalist and anti-clerical, his sometimes poignant, often scathing, always eloquent portraiture of kings, courtiers, nouveaux riches, simpletons and fools comes alive in his comedies and dramas.
Columbus stumbles upon a New World. His “discovery” forever alters the course of human events.
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the “father of micro-biology,” invents the microscope. The breakthrough, and the findings it educes, will put an end to the belief of the time, that life is the result of God-mandated spontaneous generation. The microscope will later help dispel the notion that diseases are spawned in the “ether” -- the upper regions of Heaven -- are caused by “mal aria” (bad air) or are meted out by witches and evil spirits.