Chapter 6 – When The World Was About To End-A.D. 1000

But, as if the ownership of immense territorial domains and, indeed, the ownership of practically the whole of the western world were not sufficient, the Roman Catholic Church, prior to, during and after her acquisitions, set out with no less success to despoil of their riches the faithful who lived in them. This she did, via the greed of rapacious priests with their misuse of religion, their abuse of the credulity of multitudes, their exercise of fear and their unscrupulous use of promises designed to extract from these people land and valuables for which they had developed the most insatiable appetite since the times of Constantine.

Thus, while the Church’s possessions, identified in the gradual accumulation of lands, buildings and sundry good, multiplied with the erection of new monasteries, nunneries, abbeys and the like, her treasures in the shape of money, gold and jewels increased as new monastic and ecclesiastical centers arose. These, besides becoming the traditional repositories of the communal wealth became also the collectors, and therefore the users, of the tithes and all other legal, semi-legal and at times forced contributions which believers were compelled to “donate”.

When to these were added the voluntary contributions of believers either as a penance for their sins or as a thanksgiving for celestial favors received or on their death-beds, then the total wealth accumulated in the course of the centuries became equal to that of any baron or prince. Indeed, a time arrived when it surpassed the wealth of kings.

During the ninth and tenth centuries, after the time of the Emperor Charlemagne, her riches, already magnitudinous, became even more so by the accidental and planned combination of popular superstitions, genuine misrepresentations of the Scriptures, and the cunning promotion of a credence which in due course was accepted as the fearful reality of the steadily identified with belief in the end of all things. How such a prediction came to the fore and was so widely adopted by the Roman Catholic Institution and, above all, by the European populace, has yet to be assessed. Contributory factors of varied character seem to have given solidity to the belief that the world would come to an end with the closing of the first millennium of Christianity.

The Gospels, which spoke of the “present generations” before the coming of the Son of Man, became the main support of this belief – at least as interpreted by an ignorant or cunning clergy; for it must remembered that at this period the masses could neither read nor write. Books or any other form of literature did not exist. The only sections of western society (beside the true Christian believers hiding in the mountains, with copies of Bible manuscripts) which had access to the Scriptures were the monks and certain pockets of the clergy. They were the only sources for the reading, interpreting and explaining of the prophecies, particularly those concerned with the approaching end of the world.

That the credence was a gross by-product of popular ignorance, superstition and fear there is no doubt. That it was fostered, promoted and magnified by certain sections of their religious system is a fact. That what motivated them to do so was the collection of more riches is a certainty. Proof of this was to be found in her behavior before, during, and after the closing of the year 1000.

For, far from minimizing or discrediting the “millennium” prophecy the Roman Church fostered it even if in a negative fashion, by doing nothing! She let the legend grow, helped by many of her clergy and the monastic orders who genuinely believed in its concrete fulfillment. Thus her policy assumed a most sinister character when finally the credence which for a long time had remained somewhat vague, unreal, and distant, began to appear as a fast-approaching reality to the vast Christian multitudes, as the predicted date came nearer and nearer.

When at last panic seized the faithful and when practically the whole of Christendom, particularly its most ignorant and barbaric portion, that of Northern and Central Europe, prepared for the end of the world, the Roman Church, instead of preaching that this was all nonsense or at least preparing herself to meet the Lord, made herself ready to accommodate the terrorized believers who deemed it prudent to get rid of their earthly possessions prior to the Day of Judgment. For, had not Christ said that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God?

Many Roman Catholics, in fact, who until then had ignored Christ’s teaching about temporal wealth, now took it in deadly earnest. As the year 1000 drew nearer, they got rid of their possessions with increasing speed. How? By donating them to what they were told was Christ’s bride on earth, the Roman Church. And so it came to pass that monasteries, nunneries, abbeys, bishops’ palaces and the like bustled with activity. Believers came and went, not only to confess their sins, to repent and to prepare for the end of the world in purity and poverty, but also to donate and give to the Roman Catholic Institution all they had. They gave her their money, their valuables, their houses, their lands. Many of them became total paupers, since what would it avail them to die as the owners of anything when the world was destroyed? Whereas, by giving away everything they were gaining merit in the eyes of the Great Judge!

The Church, via her monastic orders and clergy, accepted the mounting offers of earthly riches. This she did by duly recording them with legal documents, witnesses and the like. Why such mundane precautions? To prove to the Lord on Judgment Day that Smith in England, Schmidt in Germany, Amundsen in Scandinavia, MacLaren in Scotland and O’Donovan in Ireland had truly got rid of their earthly possessions? Not at all! To prove with matter-of-fact concreteness that the possessions of all those who had given were, form then on, the possessions of the papacy.

For that is precisely what happened.

When, following the long night of terror of the last of December 999, the first dawn of the year 1000 lit the Eastern sky without anything happening, many Roman Catholics, whether they believed that the Lord had postponed the Day in response to prayers or that they had made a mistake, gave an audible sigh of relief throughout Christendom. Those who had given away their property made for the ecclesiastical centers which had accepted their “offerings,” only to be told that their money, houses, lands, were no longer theirs. It had been the most spectacular give-away in history.

Since the Church returned nothing, she embarked upon the second millennium with more wealth than ever, the result being that the monasteries, abbeys and bishoprics, with their inmates and incumbents, became richer, fatter and more corrupt than before.

To believe, however, that the accumulation of wealth ended with the grand coup of the millennium prophecy would be a mistake. The faithful, although spared the collective confrontation of Judgment Day in the year 1000, were still dying singly as individuals. That meant that to gain merit in heaven they had to give away solid goods down on earth. The tradition was never abandoned. It survived the shock of the year 1000, the wealth of the Roman Catholic system today in Europe and in wealth of the Roman Catholic system today in Europe and in the U.S. being the best witness to the veracity of this assertion.

Believers continued to give; and since believers have died generation after generation, their gifts have continued to increase in the bosom of a religious system which never died, which indeed continued to expand and to prepare for new temporal contributions, not only from generations as yet unborn, but equally from territories as yet un-Christianized.

The consequences of this uninterrupted process of wealth gathering became so blatant after the first two or three centuries of the second millennium that an increasing number of the most austere sons of Romanism revolted against it. And so it was, that Christianity witnessed the phenomenon of Francis Assisi, whose initial steps to sainthood were the renouncing of even the very clothes he wore, which he returned to his own father; after which, having thus openly signified his total renunciation of worldly goods, he dedicated himself to a life of total poverty by asking the protection of the bishop, stark naked. The episode was a rebuff to be the Church of his time, since St. Francis, following this symbolic gesture with practical concreteness, founded a new monastic order, that of the Franciscans, and saw to it that the most striking feature of such order was the total renunciation of the riches of this world.

St. Francis, however, was not the only figure reacting against the papacy’s barefaced and brazen concern with wealth. Other individuals came to the fore in sundry lands. Bernard of Clairvaux appeared to the north, in France. Like Francis, Bernard had renounced all earthly riches as an individual. He enjoined such repudiation upon his new monastic order as well. He not only gave new life to a corrupt and rich western monasticism, he enforced his rule of total poverty outside the monasteries’ walls whenever he could. To do so he did not spare ecclesiastics of low or high rank, thundering against the wealth and opulence of the Church Militant.

He fulminated again and again against a religious system with a voracious appetite for earthly goods, accusing her of worshiping Mammon instead of God. He spared neither priests, bishops nor even popes. In his Apologia he attacked “excessively rich prelates.” In his treatise On Customs and Duties of Bishops, he thundered against bishops who “grew fat on the revenues from bishoprics.” He did not hesitate to castigate the Papal Legates themselves. “Those rapacious men” who “would sacrifice he health of the people for the gold of Spain”, going so far as to declare that the Curia in Rome was nothing but “a den of thieves.” He even compared any pope who took pride in his office and riches to a monkey “perched high on a tree top”, this although the pope of that period had formerly been one of his monks and lived, like him, a most austere life.

If St. Bernard did not spare the Church, he was also a ruthless denouncer of heretics. Many he had arrested and imprisoned. Hundreds were pitilessly burned at the stake in public squares. He became the terror of any dissenter. The Roman Church turned him into another tool to strengthen herself in matters of this world: that is, in wealth, for she saw in the denunciation of heretics another important source of revenue.

St. Bernard had not been the first; he was one of many in a series of extirpators. But he gave a renewed impetus to the practice, since, with the increase of varied heresies and the even more varied measures to suppress them, the very profitable method of expropriating their property and levying crushing fines came increasingly to the fore. Thus the burning of heretics soon brought with two visible benefits – the elimination of dangerous, devil-inspired people, and the addition of ever-increasing wealth to the Church.

From sporadic denunciations of the early periods and the relatively mild punishments that followed, a time came when the charge of heresy transformed the ecclesiastical structures into a ponderous and terrifying machinery at the service of fanatical or corrupted monks and prelates. No one was safe from its tentacles. It could crush the humblest dwellers in the poorest burgh or the mightiest head of any clan, be he in their wilderness of Scotland or a Prince of Sicily, Portugal or Germany, with equally arrogant ease.

Bishops and cardinals themselves were not immune. This became so because the desire to preserve the Faith in all its purity, the concern of monks, ultimately became so intertwined with greed for wealth in anonymous denunciators that in the long run the two became inseparable. So it came to pass that the fulminations of the popes, for instance, launching anathemas, interdicts or excommunications, in addition to arrest, torture and the death penalty, led also to the expropriation of all the goods, money and property of those who had been denounced.

This became a source of untold wealth for prelates, bishops and popes who practiced or pretended orthodoxy, so that very often no one knew with certainly whether the accused had been arrested because of their deviation from the Faith or because of greed for their wealth on the part of their anonymous denunciators. The authorities, lay or ecclesiastical, were compelled under pain of excommunication “to seize all the heretic’s property, good, lands and chattels, to arrest him and throw him into prison.”(1)

Pope Innocent III issued specific instructions concerning this. The Corpus Juris, the official law book of the Papacy, gave details: “The possessions of heretics are to be confiscated. In the Church’s territories they are to go to the Church’s treasury”. (2)

This papal injunction was carried out everywhere the Roman Catholic Institution ruled. Thus, for instance following the edict to the authorities of Nimes and Narbonne, in 1228, Blache of Castille ordered that any person who had been excommunicated “shall be forced to seek absolution by the seizure of all his property.” (3)

This order became so general that, in a collection of laws known as the Etablissement, it is commanded that royal officers, whenever summoned by the bishops, shall seize both the accused and his property.

(4) Sundry French kings eventually enacted similar decrees – Philip III and Louis X for instance. Church councils did the same. Popes strengthened them. To mention one example the pontiff in 1363 ordered that any heretic “should be arrested, imprisoned, and all his property seized.”

When Pope Honorius crowned Emperor Frederic II in 1220, he hurled a solemn excommunication against anyone “infringing the privileges of the Church.” He declared that, among others, “Bishops could excommunicate any Prince or Secular Ruler who refused to persecute heretics..” They were to be reported to the pope himself, who would then “deprive them in their ranks, power, civil liberties, followed by the seizure of all their temporal possessions.” (5) Thanks to such decrees the Church could obtain vast estates and substantial wealth merely by accusing a rich man of heresy.

This practice was not, however, confined to wealthy individuals. As it became more common it degenerated to such an extent that it was turned into the most blatant pretext for collecting money, often in connivance with secular rulers. To cite only one case: witness the Regent, Blache of Castille, who in 1228, besides, as already mentioned, decreeing the seizure of any heretic’s property, ordered that “to quicken the process a fine of ten livres would be exacted on all those excommunicated who had not entered the church within forty days.”

The clergy, high and low, then began to practice another money-extracting device. They forced the faithful when these were beyond reproach and could not be accused of heresy, to purchase escape from excommunication. This yielded tremendous sums to the clergy throughout Christendom. Prelates, cardinals and popes used their position to make money, not only for the Church, but also for themselves. Bishops became Cyfeiliawg, for instance. The bishop excommunicated his king. when the latter asked for the excommunication to be lifted, the bishop agreed – but at a price. This price? A plate of pure gold the size of the bishop’s face. (6)

Besides such trivia for extracting money, more serious abuses became common practice. Thus, for example, if during a quarrel one single drop of blood was shed in a cemetery, an interdict was automatically proclaimed. The latter was not lifted unless the people collected the sum of money demanded by the clergy. Refusal to pay meant that the corpses for which the necessary fine had not been paid were dug up and thrown off consecrated ground.

If a priest was killed, a whole district would be put under an interdict until the crime had been paid for with money or the equivalent in goods.

Greed for money went even further. The clergy began to excommunicate the neighborhood of the man who had been originally excommunicated; this with the specific objective of seizing the properties concerned.

The anathemas, interdicts, and excommunications employed by popes, cardinals, bishops, and minor clergy, for motives of the basest avarice became so frequent, so wide-spread and so scandalous that many genuinely religious individuals, no less than lay authorities, began openly to revolt against the abuse.

The scandal was not confined to any limited period or country. It became universal, and it lasted for centuries. Indeed, with the passing of time the greed for worldly riches ultimately permeated the whole system to such an extent that the cry of the Diet of Nuremberg, uttered in 1522, expressed the anguish of countless individuals throughout Christendom: “Multitudes of Christians are driven to desperation whenever their properties are confiscated, thus causing the utter destruction of their bodies no less than their souls.” The Verdict of the Diet of Nuremberg was not a gross exaggeration. It was a most accurate assessment of the Roman Church’s insatiable thirst for the riches of this world.

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