Saints and Sinners Sözleri ve Alıntıları
Saints and Sinners sözleri ve alıntılarını, Saints and Sinners kitap alıntılarını, Saints and Sinners en etkileyici cümleleri ve paragragları 1000Kitap'ta bulabilirsiniz.
Nicholas did not live to complete his many projects, but in a speech to the cardinals from his deathbed in 1455 he emphasised the religious vision that underlay them. His buildings were to be sermons in stone, laymen’s books:
"...to create solid and stable convictions in the minds of the uncultured masses, there must be something that appeals to the eye: a popular faith, sustained only on doctrines, will never be anything but feeble and vacillating. But if the authority of the Holy See were visibly displayed in majestic buildings, imperishable memorials and witnesses seemingly planted by the hand of God himself, belief would grow and strengthen like a tradition from one generation to another, and all the world would accept and revere it."
Boniface prepared a bull excommunicating the French King in September 1303, but before it could be promulgated French forces, accompanied by two of the deposed Colonna cardinals and their relatives, broke into the papal palace at Anagni and mobbed the Pope. Boniface faced his enemies with courage, in full papal regalia and shouting, ‘Here is my neck, here is my head,’ challenging them to kill him. The French troops drew back from that final atrocity, and were driven out of the town by the citizens the next day. Boniface never recovered from his ordeal, however. He returned to Rome a broken man, roaming round his apartments crying out in rage and humiliation. He died a month later.
The ‘outrage of Anagni’ shocked Italy and Europe. Dante, who hated Boniface and placed him upside down in a subterranean furnace in hell, nevertheless saw the maltreatment of the Pope at Anagni as the recrucifixion of Christ.
In 1440 the great scholar Lorenzo Valla used Humanist techniques of textual and historical criticism in a devastating demolition job on the Donation of Constantine, proving that it was an eighth-century forgery. Valla was a client of King Alfonso I, ruler of Sicily, who was currently the Pope’s enemy, so he was not entirely without an agenda.
Nevertheless, he found a ready audience when he argued that the temporal claims derived from the bogus Donation had made the popes not the Father of the Faithful, but the oppressor of Christians – 'so far from giving food and bread to the household of God … they have devoured us as food … the Pope himself makes war on peaceable people, and sows discord among states and princes.'
The Renaissance papacy evokes images of a Hollywood spectacular, all decadence and drag. The popes themselves seemed to set the tone.
Alexander VI (1492–1503) flaunted a young and nubile mistress in the Vatican, was widely believed to have made a habit of poisoning his cardinals so as to get his hands on their property, and he ruthlessly aggrandised his illegitimate sons and daughters at the Church’s expense.
Julius II (1503–13), inspired patron of Raphael, Bramante, Michelangelo and Leonardo, was a very dubious Father of all the Faithful, for he had fathered three daughters of his own while a cardinal, and he was a ferocious and enthusiastic warrior, dressing in silver papal armour and leading his own troops through the breaches blown in the city walls of towns who resisted his authority.
The demand that councils should meet regularly was a nightmare prospect for a papacy struggling to reassert its authority, and one which Martin V and his successors were to resist vigorously. The Council of Basle (1431–9) was dominated by this conflict between Pope and Council.
The Council began to behave as if it collectively were pope, appointing its own officials, acting as judge in lawsuits, even granting indulgences. Its reform programme was wide-ranging and much needed, but it was dogged by an anti-papalism which was certain to bring it into conflict with Rome. The reform party worked on the belief that, if the head were reformed, reform of the members would follow. They therefore homed in on the corruptions of papacy and Curia, and decreed the abolition of the payment of clerical taxes to the Curia, a measure which would have deprived the Pope and cardinals of most of their income, without any form of compensation. Finally the Council declared itself superior to the Pope, and when Eugenius protested, declared him deposed, and elected the saintly Duke of Savoy as the Antipope, Felix V.
There had been a bloodbath in the imperial family as rivals scrabbled for power on the death of Constantine, and the empire was now ruled by his two surviving sons. Constantius, in the East, was a declared Arian. Constans, who ruled the West from Milan, was an ardent Catholic, and a strong supporter of Athanasius and Pope Julius.
The brothers agreed that a joint council of East and West should be held at Sardica. It was a fiasco, which widened the rift it had been called to heal. For a start, Athanasius and his friends were allowed to sit as equals among the Western bishops, despite the fact that the Arians now wanted their case reviewed by the Council. The enraged Easterners refused to enter the assembly, and set up their own rival council, which excommunicated Hosius, Athanasius and the Pope. In retaliation the Westerners restored Athanasius, excommunicated his leading opponents, passed a series of canons defining Rome’s right to act as a court of final appeals in all matters affecting other bishops throughout the empire.
It was the Syllabus , a list of eighty condemned propositions, which caused general consternation. It seemed designed to shock and offend, for example by denying that non-Catholics should be free to practise their religion (77). Above all, the last proposition seemed to sum up the Catholic Church’s war against modern society, for in it the Pope condemned the notion that ‘the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself with progress, liberalism, and recent civilisation’ (80).
The Syllabus was intended as a blow at liberal Catholicism, and everyone knew it. The French government, whose troops were the only bulwark between the Pope and the Risorgimento, banned the Syllabus ; it was publicly burned in Naples; Austria considered a ban but decided that this would breach the Concordat. Montalembert’s ally, Bishop Dupanloup of Orleans, wrote that ‘if we do not succeed in checking this senseless Romanism, the Church will be outlawed in Europe for half a century’.
The chief publicist for the Indulgence, the Dominican preacher Tetzel, was eager to rake in contributions, and was none too subtle about what he promised in return. The Indulgence, he claimed, would release loved ones from their sufferings in purgatory: he even set the promise to a German rhyme which roughly translates as:
"Place your penny on the drum,
The pearly gates open and in strolls mum."
If Charlemagne had any real reservations about the events of Christmas Day 800, they almost certainly focused on the Pope’s role. Thirteen years later, when Charlemagne passed his imperial title on to his son Louis, the ceremony consisted of Charlemagne’s placing a crown on the altar of his palace chapel at Aachen. Louis then himself took the crown from the altar, and put it on his own head. For Charlemagne, imperial power came direct from God, not from any priest, not even the successor of Peter the key-bearer.