Foundations of The Anglican Church XXXVIII

Young Luther in his days as an

Augustinian Friar

In posting his theses for debate Martin Luther had no intention of leading a revolt against the Catholic Church—far from it.  He was a most devout priest but he was also a serious academic and wanted these 95 points argued out in an academic forum in hopes of refocusing the Church and returning it to its roots in scripture and Apostolic Tradition.  Europe was alive with such debate and desire for Church Reformation.  In England you had John Fisher who had been tutor to young Henry before he succeeded to the throne and was now Bishop of Rochester.  And there was John Colet, Dean of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral. His friend and collaborator in the desire for Church Reform was the Flemish scholar, Desiderius Erasmus, who came to England and taught five years at Cambridge before returning to the Continent where he preached and wrote about Christian humanism and its potential for a renewed Catholicism.  Prior Houghton of the London Carthusians was another enthusiast for Reform as was the rising political star, the lawyer Thomas More.  Throughout Europe—and especially in northern Europe: England, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Austria, Bohemia—academics, churchmen, and serious laity discussed ways in which the Church might be revitalized. 
There had been in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the Rhineland—both German and Dutch—a flowering of spiritual writers including Henry Suso, Johannes Tauler, Thomas á Kempis, Jan Ruysbroeck, and others who made spirituality something for the everyday Christian.   The influence of this spiritual renaissance had spread to England as well with Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich and other spiritual authors who created a vast body of spiritual and devotional literature.  Luther himself had been very much influenced by Tauler and Suso. 
Nothing is more dangerous for the institutional Church than when you have an educated and devout laity and a lazy and comfortable clergy.  Of course many priests and religious had been touched by the revival of spirituality and by a desire for reform in the Church, but the hierarchy, for the greater part,  consisted of men who held their positions for reasons of politics and family.  They were more interested in maintaining their comfortable lives and social prestige.  (Does this sound familiar???  I mean an educated laity interested in renewal and Church leadership interested in protecting the institution for its own sake and their own sake???)  
As I said Luther had personally undergone a deep conversion, not from a sinful life to a graced one, but from a religion of fear of God’s Justice to a faith in God’s mercy.  He wanted to see others learn to trust that faith in Jesus Christ was sufficient and to be freed from the compulsive religiosity that too many clergy were instilling—or trying to instill—in the faithful.  His 95 theses represented not an attack on the Church but on a superficial and unhealthy religiosity that distorted the faith presented in the Scriptures.
The great events of history usually are rooted in conflicts of interest.  Luther—and others—were interested in a spiritual renewal for the faithful.  You may remember that back in 2011 we did a series of posts on the history of Saint Peter’s Basilica. (You can review those posts by clicking on Saint Peter’s Basilica in the column on the right of your webpage marked “labels.”)  In 1505 Pope Julius II—the patron of Michelangelo—had made the decision to demolish the basilica that Constantine had built almost twelve centuries earlier over the tomb of the Apostle and build a new basilica there.  He wanted a grand basilica to hold the elaborate tomb for himself that he had Michelangelo design.  And so the project of building the current basilica began.  It was an enormously expensive project and special indulgences were offered in return for contributions that would go to the building.  (In fact half the proceeds went to Albert of Brandenburg to enable him to recover the immense sum of money he had paid the Holy See to be named Archbishop of Mainz.  You see the problems?)  A Dominican friar by the name of Johann Tetzel was named the Commissioner of Indulgences for Germany and in his zeal to raise the required funds made some outlandish claims about indulgences.  Two of Luther’s 95 theses concerned these claims.  As Tetzel went about preaching indulgences, Luther went about preaching against them.  Luther’s theology was sounder and appealed to the more thoughtful and educated populace—and to the many who did not give a fig about theology but who resented the vast sums leaving Germany for Rome—and sales of indulgences began to drop.   Luther appealed to Pope Leo X, whom Luther mistakenly believed would be more concerned about souls and orthodoxy than basilicas and money but ended up being admonished by the Pope to back off his objections to the sales campaign.  Luther, who had been scandalized by his 1510 visit to Rome, now became increasingly disillusioned with the papacy and with the institutional Church in general.  He stated that far from being assured that “when money clinks in the collection chest” that souls are released from purgatory, one can be assured that “when money clinks in the collection chest” greed and avarice are increased in the hearts of prelates.   By 1521 sales had been in sufficient decline that Luther was excommunicated by the Pope.  (Keep in mind that Leo X was a Medici—that is an important piece of information for when we pick up with Henry and his request for an annulment.  And we will get there—this background is an important piece however to understand what led to Henry’s being refused.) 
Luther did not much bother about excommunication.  Plenty of good people, including saints, had been excommunicated at one time or another.  (And since as well, if you remember the story of Saint Mary MacKillop, the Australian foundress of the Sisters of Saint Joseph.)  What did happen was that more and more people flocked to Luther’s side of the argument.  The Elector Frederick was delighted with the reputation this brought his university.  And Luther began to write extensively attacking the theological exaggerations of the Scholasticism and Late Medieval Theological meanderings and to bring doctrine and practice more in line with the New Testament texts.  Unfortunately Luther did not have much of the historical critical tools we have today and his exegesis is by our standards rather primitive but in the sixteenth century it was state of the intellectual art. 
One of the defenders of Catholic doctrine at this time was no less than King Henry VIII who in 1519 wrote his own theological treaty against Luther, In Defense of the Seven Sacraments.  Henry dedicated the work to Pope Leo X who awarded Henry the title Fidei Defensor, Defender of the Faith.  Ironic, isn’t it; but the title is still carried today by the British Monarch. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church XXXVII

The interior of Wittenberg Castle

Church where Luther was to become

preacher

Well, in our last post we talked about Martin Luther and how his vocation evolved from the study of law to becoming an Augustinian friar of strict observance and a professor of Scripture at the University of Wittenberg.  Luther finished his doctorate in 1512 and the same year began teaching at that university.  The university was new and the pride of its founder, the Elector Frederick III “The Wise” of Saxony, who was anxious that his university take its place among the leading educational institutions.  It was the young friar, Martin Luther, who was to put the University of Wittenberg on the map. 
Luther had access to Erasmus’ Greek New Testament, published in 1514 and was thus able to read the New Testament in its original language.  Reading especially Paul’s Letter to the Romans proved to be a conversion experience for the young friar.  Long troubled by scrupulosity and unable to satisfy his spiritual anguish by religious observances, Luther discovered in Paul that we are set right with God not by our religious practices but by our faith in Jesus Christ.  This was revolutionary for Luther.
By the sixteenth century the Catholic Church had drifted far from the New Testament, not so much in doctrine as in piety and devotion.  Keeping the scriptures in Latin made the Bible the prerogative of the clergy and left the vast majority of laity dependent on the clergy for spiritual guidance.  There were always a few laity who were educated enough to be able to read the Latin text of the Scriptures, and even fewer among them who actually did.  In England, for example, you had Saint Thomas More who as a layman took his faith seriously and whose devotion was very much in line with the best biblical and patristic scholarship of his day.  This was, after all, the beginning of the Renaissance and More is perhaps the best example of the new piety emerging by those desirous of a reformed Catholicism.  But most people were less educated—and less committed—than Thomas More and simply listened to sermons and accepted the Christian faith second hand from preachers—not all of whom were sufficiently disciplined to maintain biblical orthodoxy.
As I write this I know that I am sounding like an anti-Catholic “evangelical” (the sort of person I usually refer to as “pseudo-evangelical” by how they themselves distort the scriptures by taking texts out of context and making the “Good News” (the evangelion) bad news for most of us.  (Evangelion means “The Good News of a Victory” but for many who call themselves evangelicals it has come to mean the bad news of sin supposedly trumping grace in anyone who doesn’t follow their particular religious notions.  They are sort of today’s scribes and Pharisees who claim to know God’s mind because of their particular twist on the Scriptures.) The fact of the matter is that I am an ardent and convinced Catholic but as a historian I need to acknowledge that the Catholic Church, in its practice if not in its doctrines, had drifted far from the apostolic faith revealed in the Christian scriptures.
One of the reasons—and I believe the primary reason—for this drift away from the apostolic truth was a dramatic switch in theological method that took place in the 13^th century and afterwards.  Saint Bernard is often called “the last of the Fathers” because he was the last major Christian writer to use the old patristic method of drawing theological reflection from the scriptures.  Bernard’s nemesis was Peter Abelard. (Actually the way it worked out was that Bernard was Peter Abelard’s nemesis for Bernard brought Abelard down and all but destroyed him for his new ideas.)  Abelard, a professor at the Cathedral School of Paris, drew not on the patristic tradition of scriptural reflection but on a new method based more on Aristotelian logic.  Aristotle’s philosophical methodology had recently been introduced in Europe through contact with the Arab world and its philosophers who had long preserved this tradition that they had learned from the Syrian culture that in turn was strongly shaped by Greek influence.  In Abelard’s system logic trumped Tradition and the new theologians were anxious to redefine the ancient truths of the Christian faith using his new system.  Abelard was condemned for his innovations,  but the methodology persisted and became know as “scholasticism,”—the methodology of the “schoolmen.” (The Latin word for school is schola.)  This revival also coincided with the revived interest in law and philosophers and theologians began working like lawyers—taking an established premise and drawing from it new conclusions far deviant from the intent of the original author.  Thus they might start with a scripture quote or a quote from the Fathers but by the use of logical deduction draw from it entirely new and very untraditional meanings.
The Christian author whose work legitimized the new system was Thomas Aquinas.  Aquinas, of course, was most orthodox in his conclusions even if he was quite revolutionary in his methodology.  The problem is not in the conclusions—at least in Aquinas’ conclusions—it is in the methodology.  Aquinas used the unorthodox system to establish the intellectual legitimacy of traditional doctrine.  Other writers were to take the faith and distort it way beyond the limits of authentic Tradition leading to all sorts of problems for the Church as bizarre practices  became legitimized by this faulty system that valued logic over Tradition. An example of this is that ideas about “sacrifice” were attached to the Mass that had no foundation in Scripture or the Fathers of the Church.  (There are legitimate concepts of sacrifice connected to the Eucharist found both in the language of the New Testament and the Fathers of the Church but the new theologians exaggerated them far beyond their Traditional meaning.)  There were also emerging among the scholastics bizarre notions about sin and about the forgiveness of sin and  the punishments due to sin.  There were exaggerations of the difference between clergy and laity and the “powers” of the priesthood.  All these and other distortions led to some very bad practices in Catholic life. 
One of the most egregious distortions concerned the notion of “indulgences.”  Indulgences were originally substitutes for public penance.  Perform certain acts or say certain prayers and days were taken off the penance given to a penitent in confession.  So, a donation to the Church or a pilgrimage to a local shrine might mean that a penitent had only to fast for a week instead of a month.   That was the original idea.  But as public penance disappeared in the central Middle Ages, let’s say the eighth through the twelfth centuries, and as the doctrine of purgatory gained more and more acceptance, indulgences became seen as so many “days” chopped of a soul’s sentence in purgatory.  Purgatory itself was a problematic doctrine without scriptural foundation and by the sixteenth century an elaborate understanding had evolved of how even when sins had been forgiven there was still a “temporal punishment” due for them.  In other words, most people would have to serve time in some sort of post-mortem jail until their sins had been sufficiently punished and then and then only could they go to heaven.  Indulgences shortened—or even wiped out—the punishment and won the poor soul an early parole.  This is just another example of how scholastic theology invented doctrines and created practices foreign to both the Scriptures and the Church Fathers. 
Luther looked on this whole theological house of cards that scholasticism had created and saw how far it was from the theology of Saint Paul, particularly in the Letters to the Romans and the Galatians.  He posted 95 theses he wanted argued at the university in order to re-focus the Church on its own authentic roots rather than the invented doctrines and practices of the scholastic era.  He would have caused not even a ripple in such debate except for one thing.  The pope needed money to build Saint Peter’s and a German preacher, the Dominican friar John Tetzel, was raking it in with  his distorted preaching on indulgences.      

Foundations of the Anglican Church XXXVI

Wittenberg Castle Church where Martin Luther

posted his 95 Theses

Before we look at why Henry didn’t get his annulment, we need to look for a moment at the broader picture of Europe in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. 

In 1517 a Saxon friar of the Augustinian Order, one Martin Luther, a professor of Sacred Scripture at the newly founded University of Wittenberg, posted 97 theses for debate on the door of Wittenberg Castle Church.  There was nothing unusual about this in an university town.  It was not an act of rebellion.  There was a long established tradition in university towns of professors or students posting subjects for debate.  Debate, particularly theological debate, was a major form of entertainment in university life.  Participation in such public debate was part of the requirements for one to be given the Doctorate.  Luther was a young hot-shot professor at a new university and both he and his university were trying to establish their respective reputations.  But this list of topics was to set off a chain reaction that shattered the Catholic world.
Luther had been born in 1483.  His parents were upwardly mobile but not particularly wealthy Germans of peasant stock but who had acquired some property and means.   His father was in the copper business, leasing mines and operating smelting works.  His mother was industrious and added to the family income through various domestic industries.  While the family was sufficiently devout, his father, Hans, wanted to see his eldest son, Martin, become a lawyer and was not enthused about Martin’s religious vocation when it emerged.  Martin had been given a very sound education by the Brothers of the Common Life.
Luther had a spiritual restlessness and Law was not meeting his psychological needs.  He seems from an early age to have been preoccupied with the question of his eternal salvation.  Law is a profession for cynics not searchers and Luther soon abandoned it.  There is a story—and it seems to be rooted in fact—that the young Luther was frightened during an electrical storm in which he was caught in a woods and vowed to Saint Anne that he would become a monk should he be delivered. 
Luther entered a very strict order, technically not of monks but of friars, the Augustinian observants.  (The various orders of the day mostly had observant branches which were reform movements within the orders and followed very strict rules regarding fasting, prayer, and separation from the world.  It is significant that Martin had joined an observant order, and one of the strictest, as that tells us about this religious enthusiasm.)     Luther had an excellent spiritual director in his superior, Johan van Staupitz, but seemed unable to break through scrupulosity that verged on a serious neurosis. Luther was ordained a priest and sent on for studies, receiving the Doctorate in 1512. Two years before he had made a fateful trip to Rome where he was thoroughly disillusioned by the scandalous conditions and cynical “faith” of so many involved in the governance of the Church.   (For information about Martin Luther’s trip to Rome, check out blog entries for September 13^th and 15^th 2011).   Rome can still be a scandal to the faithful.  Saint Francis had admonished his friars that for the good of their souls they should avoid going to Rome.  
Luther joined the faculty at Wittenberg in 1512 and a professor of Bible.  In 1514 the Dutch scholar, Desiderius Erasmus, published the first critical edition of the New Testament in Greek enabling biblical scholars to look at the text in the original language.  It was a huge breakthrough for scripture scholars and the young professor from Wittenberg threw himself into the task of studying the scripture in Greek.  He came to be thoroughly familiar with the Epistles of Saint Paul and was captured by Paul’s insistence that we are saved not by our righteous works but by faith in Jesus Christ.  Here Luther found a balm for his scruple troubled soul and as began to take St Paul to heart he became more and more uncomfortable with many contemporary Catholic practices.  This led to the publication of the 95 thesis.

More to follow. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church, XXX

The Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, on

the site of the Palace of Placentia, principal home

to Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon

I mentioned in my last post that Henry and Katherine of Aragon were married in a private ceremony in the Greyfriar’s Church in Greenwich, near the royal palace of Placentia which was at the time the principal royal residence.  The palace, which fell out of royal favor later in the reign of Henry VIII—perhaps because it was associated with his first marriage—eventually fell into disrepair and was demolished in the 17^th century during the English Civil War.  It stood on the site of the present royal naval hospital and observatory which marks “Greenwich Time,” longitude 0^o, by which the world’s clocks are set. 
The Greyfriars are the Franciscans, so named for the color of the Franciscan habit in the middle ages when it was made of undyed wool.  (Today elements of the Franciscan family have returned to wearing grey rather than the brown robes we usually associate with the family of the Assisi saint.)  Dominicans were called “Blackfriars” and Carmelites “Whitefriars” for the color of the mantles of their habits for the same reason.  But the Greenwich Greyfriars were not merely Franciscans, they were Franciscan Observants.  Almost from the time of the death of Saint Francis in 1224 there had been a faction among the friars calling for a reform that would keep alive the simplicity of Francis.  The pressures of the Church for the friars to be highly educated and the pressures of civil society for the friars to become involved in civic affairs were challenging the Franciscan spirit.  Francis had wanted his sons to remain simple brothers who by their poverty and gentle spirits would witness to the humility of Christ.  In the developing economic culture of medieval Europe with the rise of mercantile capitalism and the polarization of society into a small very wealthy capital class and large and semi-impoverished working class (hmm, sound familiar) Francis felt that the witness of men voluntarily adopting the life of the working class would align the Church with true Christianity of the masses rather than being the Church being coopted by the hierarchy for the service of the wealthy.  (hmmm, and why did the current Pope choose the regnal name “Francis?”  Cardinal Burke, Archbishop Lori, and others, are you paying attention?)   This was especially true because most of Francis’ followers came, as he did, from the wealthy merchant class not from the lower working classes.  For the sons of the wealthy to embrace voluntary poverty in witness to the poverty of Jesus the Carpenter, was indeed a powerful evangelism tool, as the current Pope keeps telling us.  Nevertheless the temptations of a comfortable life were hard to resist.  Bonaventure, Francis’ seventh successor as head of the movement, pushed education.  The brothers should study at the University.  Even in Francis’ lifetime students and professors had flocked to the Franciscan movement and education is an important tool for the clergy.  Simplicity is fine, but not stupidity.  Ultimately a sound theological education would have to be part of the friars’ formation.  But education requires books and books were a very expensive luxury in the thirteenth century.  And in education you constantly talk about abstract ideas and ideals—and few are less savvy in the everyday practicalities of life than the intellectuals.  Just spend some time among university faculty today and you will see the difference between knowledge and wisdom.  It was not long after the death of the Saint that the Franciscan spirit began to slide down the slippery slope to spiritual mediocrity.  The friars, once educated, were entrusted by the bishops with urban ministries among the professional classes.  The friars were invited to build churches and convents in the better neighborhoods.  The wealthy began showering them with gifts.  “Nothing is too good for the friars…” and the friars began to believe that themselves.  They wanted to look respectable and the patched robes of Francis’ day were replaced by habits of better fabric and more elegant tailoring.  They were living in the better neighborhoods so the ramshackle barns or wattle huts of Francis’ days gave way to fine stone convents with large rooms and airy courtyards.  The occasional treats which people sent for their table for feast days became the ordinary fare ordered from the grocer.  But some of the brothers could not let go of the ideals of their saintly founder and tried to return to the original spirit.  The first movement in this direction went overboard and the “Spirituals” as they were called were condemned by John XXII and ordered to give up their extreme poverty or face excommunication.  But the spirit of reform did not die and it was not long before new reform movements, very careful to avoid criticism of the wealth of the Church lest the face the fate of the Spirituals, sprang up.  They wore simpler habits.  They lived in smaller houses, often in more out of the way towns or villages rather than in the large cities.  They did not disdain education but neither did they allow their members to give in to its conceits.  In 1517 Pope Leo X separated the “Observants” from the “Conventuals” and the various observant groups became independent of the unreformed friars.  It was to one of these “observant” movements that then Greenwich friars belonged.  The observant Franciscans were admired throughout Europe, wherever the movement spread, but they had especially strong ties to the English royal family and to the Spanish royal family of Katherine as well.  Isabella’s confessor and spiritual mentor, Cardinal Ximénez de Cisneros was an Observant Franciscan.  Indeed Ximénez and Isabella had been responsible for great reforms in the Spanish Church that purged it of much of the decay that in other countries would lead to the Protestant Reformations that would break out in Europe in the middle of the sixteenth century.  And the Franciscans at Greenwich were a sign of reform beginning in the English Church as well—reform that had it continued on a Catholic trajectory could have resulted in a very different England that would eventually come about.  But historians know you can’t play the game of “what if?” 
The Church in England, like the Church in most of Europe, was in desperate need of reform.  The Spanish Church, due to Isabella and Ximénez, had faced its decay and reversed the trend early on, creating an almost puritanical and certainly a rabid Catholicism, but a spiritually healthy one none the less.  England had potential for reform.  There was a strong and educated professional class—families of guildsmen—whose sons entered the service of the Church and the Crown—often entering the service of the Crown by beginning in the Church and then as bishops and abbots holding royal appointments.  Among the laity, the professional classes tended to be devout and had a taste for spiritual reading.  The Rhineland mysticism of Eckhardt, Ruysbroeck, Tauler and others had spilled over into England and England had its own mystics and spiritual writers in Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and others.  While most of the monasteries of England had settled into comfortable complacency there were those such as Glastonbury which had undertaken some reform and observance.  In addition to the Franciscan Observants, the Charterhouse monks (Carthusians) were known for their zeal and integrity.  Intellectual circles were alive with discussion of Church reform.  The Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus spent much time in England where he was friends with Dean Colet of Saint Pauls’ in London, Bishop Fisher of Rochester who had been tutor to the young Henry VIII, and Thomas More who was later to be Lord Chancellor. 
The type of reform envisioned by Erasmus, Colet, Fisher, and More was the culture of the old fashioned pan-European “Christendom” rooted in Christian antiquity and patristics that saw the Church as a transnational Christian imperium, the ark of salvation in which all humanity could be gathered without distinction of race or nation.  This was distinctly out of step, however, with the growing national consciousness of the emerging nations of Europe where people no longer saw themselves primarily as Christians with a commonality with other Christians but as Frenchmen, or Englishmen, or Spaniards, or as Portuguese, or as Scots, or as Genoese or Neapolitans, or Franconians, or as Saxons.  (Germany or Italy would emerge as nations only much later than the French or English or Spaniards.) 
In any event, the impetus for reform from within the Church would not have time to mature in England as it had in Spain.  Reform in England would initially be imported by the universities, Cambridge in particular, from Luther’s Germany and then become of tool of the Crown for ends more political than religious.  Finally the Crown would lose control of Church Reform and it would become a tool of the landed aristocracy for self-enrichment and then of the mercantile classes to justify their self-interested commercial revolution.  In the process the Church of England would first become far less Catholic and then more Calvinist and finally attain a sui generis identity as England’s organ of moral self-validation.  This would transplant to America where the expectation of religion would be to uphold the traditional social order and, in the case of Catholicism, give us the Spellman Catholicism of the 1950’s.  But all that is in the future. 

Popes Come and Go, but Saint Peter's Basilica Remains

the tomb of Leo X in Santa Maria Sopra

Minerva, Rome,

We mentioned that Julius II died in 1513,  Hopefully God judged Julius with mercy but the humanist scholar Erasmus who along with his English friends, Sir Thomas More and Dean (of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, London) John Colet were leading voices calling for Church Reform  did not.  The Dutchman  wrote:
The popes are sufficiently generous with …the terrible bolt of the papal bull, which by a flicker hurls the souls of men to the depths of hell.  Our Christian fathers and Vicars of Christ wield the bold against no one with more zeal than against those who are moved by the devil to nibble at an diminish the patrimony of Peter  …  they look on themselves as true apostles…scattering what they are pleased to call her enemies   As if the Church had more deadly enemies than impious popes who by their silence cause Christ to be forgotten, who use His laws to make money, who adulterate his word with force interpretations, and who crucify him with their corrupt life 
Whatever the judgment rendered and where Julius finds himself today, his death meant that there was to be a new pope.  He was worse.  At least Julius, if not a good man was a good—even great—Pope.  His successor, Leo X, was a disaster both as a man and a pope.  As a man he was indolent and given to the most indulgent luxury.  He was a Medici, son of il Magnifico, and had been raised to see conspicuous consumption to be the highest of the virtues.  His sexual exploits were more discreet than most of his contemporaries but no less avid.  His preferences in bed were for other males—not an uncommon trait in the high renaissance—so he left no progeny but rumors abounded of young artists and even younger clerics anxious to advancement who feathered their nests by feathering his bed.  As a pope—well, it wasn’t that he did much bad just that he didn’t do much of anything.  “The papacy is ours, let us enjoy it” was his theme and so the Chair of Peter was mostly an opportunity for hunting, dining, theatricals, and entertainments of all sorts. He had absolutely no interest in Julius tomb and little more in the basilica.  At this point the basilica was a hodgepodge of new construction and old ruins, for the most part unroofed, with the papal altar left exposed to the elements beneath the open sky where the dome was planned to someday rise.   Julius for whatever his faults was a soldier and weathered the papal ceremonies in the open air, but Leo was of a more delicate constitution and so Bramante was told to build something of an open shed to enclose the papal altar—not unlike those carports one sees in the less well to do neighborhoods of Mississippi or East Texas. Bramante was getting old and the death of Julius meant that the changes of patronage were blowing through the Renaissance.   With Julius—and under Bramante’s influence—the Renaissance threw its patronage to artists from Urbino.  But Leo was a Medici and the Medici were Florentines.  And the Florentine artists, kept on the margins of influence under Julius—were now the chief beneficiaries of patronage.  Bramante was out of favor.  But Leo was a gracious man who showed his displeasure with a velvet gloved hand.  Bramante was not removed as chief architect of Saint Peters, only given two “assistants” to help him.  Like Bramante they were old men—Leo didn’t want to make long term commitments.  One was the Dominican friars Giovanni Giocondo.  He was no mere theologian—a philosopher, engineer, mathematician, Latinist, illustrator, antiquarian—he was a true renaissance man.  But he was eighty.  The other “assistant”—and one who was given managing control over the project—was Giuliano da Sangallo.  Sangallo had been both friend and architect to Julius until Bramante maneuvered his way into the Pope’s confidence.  (Again, he did it by building the Tempietto which may be the most beautiful building in Rome so it wasn’t an unmerited advancement.)  Now Sangallo was back—and holding the real power.  It was I imagine a sweet revenge.  It did not last long,however.  Bramante died within the year.  Strangely it was not a Florentine who replaced him but the young artist from Urbino who had so charmed Julius—Raphael 

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

Julius II

Well Popes may  be infallible at times but they are never immortal.  (The “t” is crucial in that word, they are often, as we have seen, immoral.)  Julius died in 1513.  It was only at the very end of his life, in those last few days, that he thought to ask the members of his household for their prayers for his soul.  Better late than never.  And Julius, though not a good man, was a good pope—in fact a great pope.  That is how it often is.  Saints almost invariably make bad kings, presidents, rulers-for-life, and popes.  And they are, of course, absolute failures at being despots.   Nevertheless, Julius went off to his reward, whatever it may have been (and would, of course, still be).  Personally, I am inclined to trust in the mercy of God even for someone like Julius, but the Dutch humanist Erasmus wasn’t.  He wrote a scathing essay: Julius Exclusus de Caelis (Julius kicked out of heaven) a biting satirical dialogue between an adamant Peter and a Julius bewildered that with all his power and wealth Peter won’t admit him to paradise.  After all what is a little pederasty (and a lot of simony) compared to all the art he sponsored, the battles won, the wealth accumulated for the Church.  (Boy it sounds like Bernie Cardinal Law, doesn’t it???   Of course Bernie’s battles were with people like Cardinal Bernadin and Joan Chittister and I don’t recall any art. Well, moving on--)    
     Julius died and he left Michelangelo 10,000 ducats (approximately 450,000.00 in toda’s money).  The tomb was never built.  But the Basilica would continue.  Julius was interred in the vault of his uncle, Sixtus IV.  The arrangement was meant to be temporary and in a certain way it was.  About fifteen years later, during the sack of Rome, the tomb was violated and the graves desecrated.  The elegant bronze tomb of Sixtus IV was  displaced (it is now in the museum of the Treasury in Saint Peter’s Basilica) and replaced--a cenutry anhd a half later--by stone slab marking the vault as the grave of Clement X who died in 1676.  The three popes are jammed in the vault like the poor three to a bed.  Sic transit gloria mundi. 
      Julius died leaving the Church quite secure financially—with the equivalent of about  18,000,000 USD in the treasury—half in gold the other in jewels and ornaments.  It wouldn’t go far in the Vatican today but was a lot in those days.  Nevertheless, Julius was anxious to provide a steady flow of income for his basilica and so only a few months before he died he approved his banker, Agostino Chigi’s, scheme of selling indulgences.  Julius didn’t know it, but it was an unfortunate note to go out on.    On the brighter side he also called a Council—Lateran V—for the reform of the Church.  It was not totally a noble gesture; it was meant to ward off the threat from calls for Reform coming from papal enemies such as Louis XII of France, but better to do the right thing for the wrong reason than not to do the right thing.  We’ll talk more about Lateran V when our blog entries on Reformations catches up to this point.  In the meantime stay tuned.