Pope John XXII

Yeah.

I was also thinking there about Pope John XXII.

I'm not a religious person, but I find the history of religion very fascinating.

who was driven nuts by the Franciscans who insisted that the apostles had no possessions.

And so true followers of Christ shouldn't have any possessions at all.

But this meant that the Vatican had to act as unpaid bankers for the Franciscans' vast wealth.

And John XXII got in enormous trouble by saying, listen, you can have possessions and could you please look after them? on your own, instead of pretending that you are these, you know, these kind of ragged beggars.

Yeah.

on the contrary the evidences of extreme activity of mind meet us on every hand in the monuments of its literature architecture and invention a few facts strikingly illustrate the divergent tendencies of thought and public opinion Thus we may remember how it was currently reported that the profligate Pope Boniface VIII was privately an unbeliever, even deriding the idea of the immortality of the soul at the very time when he was maintaining against Philip the Fair the right of the Pope to sit as Christ's representative in judgment on the living and the dead, and to take the sword of temporal power out of the hands of those who misused it, Whether this accusation was true or not, it is a remarkable sign of the times that it should have been widely believed.

Some years later, and when the increased corruptness of the clergy after the removal of the papal court to Avignon provoked still louder complaints, we see the religious and patriotic Emperor Louis IV accusing John XXII of heresy in a public assembly held in the square of St. Peter's at Rome and setting up another pope in order to please the Roman people.

but though the new pope was every way fitted by his unblemished character and ascetic manners to gain a hold on public esteem we see that the emperor could not maintain him against the legitimately elected pope who from his seat at avignon had power to harass the emperor so greatly with his interdicts that the latter finding all efforts at conciliation fruitless would have brought peace by unconditional submission had not the estates of the empire refused to yield to such humiliation yet we find this very pope obliged to yield and retract his opinions on a point of dogmatic theology he had in a certain treatise propounded the opinion that the souls of the pious would not be admitted to the immediate vision of the deity until after the day of judgment the king of france in thirteen thirty three called an assembly of prelates and theologians at his palace at vincennes where he invited them to discuss before him the two questions whether the souls of departed saints would be admitted to an immediate vision of the deity before the resurrection and whether if so their vision would be of the same or of a different kind after the judgment day the theological faculty having come to conclusions differing in some respects from those of the pope the king threatened the latter with the stake as a heretic unless he retracted and john the twenty second issued a bull declaring that what he had said or written ought only to be received in so far as it agreed with the catholic faith the church and holy scripture no circumstance perhaps offers a more remarkable spectacle to us in its contrast with the spirit of our own times at the present moment when the pope could not sit for a day in safety of his temporal throne without the defence of french or austrian bayonets we can scarcely conceive an emperor of france or austria taking upon himself to convene an assembly of catholic theologians and the latter pronouncing a censure on the dogmas propounded by the head of the church it would be hard to say whether the sovereigns of the present day would be more amused by the absurdity of devoting their time to such discussions or the consciences of good catholics more shocked at the presumption of such a verdict Still, it must not be forgotten that the importance of religious affairs in that age must not be ascribed too exclusively to earnestness about religion itself, for the ecclesiastical interest predominated over the purely religious.

The pope and the emperor represented the two great antagonistic powers, spiritual and temporal, the rivalry between which absorbed into itself all the political and social questions that could then be agitated.

Philip must undoubtedly have proposed this change of residence as a means of securing his own control over the head of the church.

In 1323 John XXII, the pope at the time, declared that to him belonged the right of sanctioning an election, that Louis therefore had taken his title of king illegally, and that all his decrees so far were null and void.

Going further still, he pronounced sentence of excommunication on the unsubmissive Bavarian, and expecting to find ready support from Bohemia and Austrian rivals of the emperor, proposed a new candidate in the shape of Charles IV of France.

But he did not reckon on the growing national feeling in Germany.

They dropped away from him.

Towns which had received him gladly closed their gates upon him on his return journey.

The terrified Antipope fled to John XXII, humbly craved for pardon, and was imprisoned.

The whole imperial position in Italy was rotten to the core.

Absolutely.

Pope John XXII, uh, who was the pope from 1316 to 1334, had a huge fear of sorcery and even felt like that his life was in danger from witchcraft.

No way.

So you're gonna bend his ear.

Once sorcery was understood as an act of apostasy rather than mere superstition, it became a target of the Inquisition.

John XXII's bull, Super Ilius Specular, in 1326, treated attempts to negotiate with demons as heresy.

A century and a half later, Innocent VII issued Summis Desiderantes Affectibus in 1484 authorising the inquisitorial work of Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger.

These treaties on how to deal with witchcraft, Malleus Maleficarum, followed in 1487.

As for its orthodoxy, to evangelical Christians, Martin Luther's own words ought to be sufficient warrant, for he has said that he owed more to this than to any other book, saving the Bible and St. Augustine.

Those, on the other hand, to whom Luther's name does not seem a sufficient guarantee, must recollect that the author of this book was a knight of the Teutonic Order, one who considered himself and was considered, as far as we know by his contemporaries, an orthodox member of the Latin Church, that his friends and disciples were principally monks, exercising a great influence in the Catholic Church of their days, that one of their leaders was appointed by Pope John XXII nuncio and overseer of the Dominican Order in Germany, and that during the hundred and seventy years which elapsed between the writing of this book and the Reformation, it incurred no ecclesiastical censure whatsoever in generations which were but too fond of making men offenders for a word.

Not that I agree with all which is to be found in this book.

It is for its noble views of righteousness and of sin that I honor it, and rejoice at seeing it published in English now for the first time from an edition based on the perfect manuscript.

Thus we may remember how it was currently reported that the profligate Pope Boniface VIII was privately an unbeliever, even deriding the idea of the immortality of the soul at the very time when he was maintaining against Philip the Fair the right of the Pope to sit as Christ's representative in judgment on the living and the dead, and to take the sword of temporal power out of the hands of those who misused it.

Whether this accusation was true or not, it is a remarkable sign of the times that it should have been widely believed.

Some years later, and when the increased corruptness of the clergy after the removal of the papal court to Avignon provoked still louder complaints, we see the religious and patriotic Emperor Louis IV accusing John XXII of heresy in a public assembly held in the square of St. Peter's at Rome and setting up another Pope in order to please the Roman people.

But though the new Pope was every way fitted by his unblemished character and ascetic manners to gain a hold on public esteem, we see that the Emperor could not maintain him against the legitimately elected Pope, who from his seat at Avignon had power to harass the Emperor so greatly with his interdicts that the latter, finding all efforts at conciliation fruitless, would have brought peace by unconditional submission had not the estates of the Empire refused to yield to such humiliation.