The pope likewise "reserved" to
himself the right of naming the holders of certain benefices: these he
gave preferably to Italians who drew the revenues but remained in their
own country; the people thus supported foreign prelates in luxury and
sometimes paid a second time in order to maintain resident
ecclesiastics. The archbishops paid enormous sums to the pope for their
badges of office (_pallia_). Fat fees for dispensations or for
court trials found their way across the Alps. And the bulk of the
burden ultimately rested upon the backs of the people. At least in the
Germanics the idea became very prevalent that the pope and Curia were
really robbing honest German Christians for the benefit of scandalously
immoral Italians.
There were certainly grave financial abuses in church government in the
fifteenth century and in the early part of the sixteenth. A project of
German reform, drawn up in 1438, had declared: "It is a shame which
cries to heaven, this oppression of tithes, dues, penalties,
excommunication, and tolls of the peasant, on whose labor all men
depend for their existence.
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