Vulnerability

The Vulnerability of the Late Medieval Church:
An Interpretation

By 1500 or so, a great many people in Europe did not think that all was well with the Church. Why? One possilibity is that the church was vulnerable to criticism partly because it had taken on too many challenges—tasks that distracted it from what most people perceived to be its “primary task” or purpose, to provide religious services to communities of believers and to see to their salvation. These secondary tasks, in other words, distracted the church from its main purpose, as ordinary people understood it. The argument runs something like this:

1) As an institution, the church was not only the main institution responsible for meeting the religious needs of the community—it was also the main custodian of virtually all writing to boot. This got the church involved in all kinds of business that required writing—“secondary tasks” of various sorts. The roster of “secondary tasks” was huge:

Virtually the entire educational system in Europe, from grammar schools on up to universities, was operated by the church; the faculties of Canon Law and theology were staffed almost exclusively by churchmen; Church corporations were responsible for poor relief in cities and towns throughout Europe; high church officials often served as ministers to the kings and princes of Europe—prelates such as Cardinal d’Amboise in France, or Ximénez de Cisneros in Spain; a large number of high church officials were sovereign lords in their own right—beginning with the pope, ruler over the Papal State in central Italy.

2) As society became more and more complex, the church was slow to hand over these “secondary tasks” to lay people—even though more and more non-clerics were able to read and write. And finding the money to pay for it all was not easy. To support all its activities, more and more demands were made against the church’s incomes; this in turn caused the church to look for new ways to raise money and to divert resources away from its primary activity—serving the spiritual needs of communities of believers. Not surprisingly, much popular resentment against the church focused on money, and the perception that the church was too concerned with it.

3) There was a great danger in this: many of the church’s main sources of income stemmed from its claim to supreme authority in spiritual matters. Therefore resentment against the church’s perceived preoccupation with money converted easily into criticism of its spiritual authority. The list of incomes that derived from the church’s spiritual authority was long. It included:

Tithes: a proportional tax on the fruits of the land, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10%, which was intended to support spiritual functions at the parish level;
Spiritual Fees: charges for the performance of religious services, such as masses for the dead;
Papal taxes: incomes that derived from the pope’s authority as head of the church;
Annates: a payment equal to the worth of one year’s incomes, in return for receiving the office, which was sually passed on to the “consumer” in the form of extraordinary diocesan taxes; and
Expectancies: payments for a candidacy for the office of bishop.

For a variety of reasons, new sources of income almost never flowed into the parishes—where it might have served the church’s “primary tasks.” Instead, they were usually ‘targeted.’ To make matters even more complicated, money that was ear-marked for the support of religious services in the community were often diverted, too. For example, secular rulers often found ways to pocket a share of the tithe—which was intended to support the parish clergy. Finally, the church often used parishes as a means of “financial aid.” This is the characterization of one, fifteenth-century critic, the author of a text called the Reformatio Sigismundi:

Here is what goes on nowadays: a man sends his son to school to study; the son is graduated. As soon as he becomes a master [degree], he applies for a post as a member of a cathedral chapter. If he gets it, he is not satisfied until he obtains a parish church as well. To administer the parish, he hires a priest for as little money as he can. He does not ask the priest if he knows anything; he merely wants someone to hold down the job. Thus all the learning [the man] acquired in school is lost to the world. He does not serve God; he serves only pride and arrogance.

As this example indicates, an individual could hold more than one church office at once, which meant that the people who actually performed the church’s rituals and ceremonies in the villages were often not the designated priest for that parish, but someone the priest had hired, who was usually less qualified and almost always less well educated than himself.

4) This “image problem” was not helped by the fact that a massive church bureaucracy had grown up to administer all the church’s activities. the administrative bureaucracy of the Roman church was huge by medieval standards—the largest of any in Europe—and it had begun to grow long before the Great Schism in 1378.

By 1500, however, there was a widespread perception that the bureaucracy had outgrown its usefulness; moreover, many offices in the papal bureaucracy were up for sale to the highest bidder. Sales of offices yielded no less than one sixth of papal incomes in the reign of Leo X (1513-1521). Again, this bureaucracy was not cheap: in the early sixteenth century, salaries ate up 30% of regular papal incomes in the 1520s; by the 1560s, that proportion had risen to 50%.

And so the circle closes: “secondary tasks” place too many demands on the church; the church seeks and finds new sources of income; new sources of income create the need for more administration; but administration is yet another costly “secondary task”; and so on.