century, protest had taken form and found a voice in the dissident movements of Lollards and Hussites, and in communal lay groups like the Brethren of the Common Life, where genuine piety found a warmer home outside the official Church. Here, many of the doctrinal dissents that were later to mark the Protestant revolt were already being expressed: denial of transubstantiation, rejection of confession, of the indulgence traffic, of pilgrimages and of the veneration of saints and relics. Separation from Rome was not unthinkable. In the 14th century, the famous doctor of theology William Ockham could envisage the Church without a pope and in 1453, a Roman, Stefano Porcaro, led a conspiracy aimed at total overthrow of the Papacy (although it seems to have been more political than religious in origin).Printing and growing literacy nourished dissent especially through direct acquaintance with the Bible in the vernacular. Four hundred such editions appeared in the first sixty years of the printing press, and anyone who could read could find in the lore of the Gospels something missing from the hierarchy of his own day gowned in their purple and red.
The Church itself talked regularly of reform. At the Councils of Constance and Basle in the first half of the 15th century, renowned preachers harangued the delegates every Sunday on corrupt practices and loose morals, on simony in particular, on failure to generate the saving instrument of Christian revival, a crusade against the Turks, on all the sins that were causing the decay of Christian life. They called for action and positive measures. The Councils held endless discussions, debated countless proposals and issued a number of decrees dealing mainly with disputes between the hierarchy and Papacy over distribution of incomes and allocation of benefices. They did not reach down, however, to the places of basic need in such matters as bishops’ visitation of their sees, education of the minor clergy, reorganization of the monastic orders.
The higher clergy were not solidly indifferent; among them were abbots, bishops, even certain cardinals who were earnest reformers. The popes too made intermittent gestures of response. Programs of reform were drawn up by order of both Nicholas V and Pius II in the 1440s and 1460s preceding the six of this study, in the latter case by a dedicated reformer and preacher, the German Cardinal and legate Nicholas of Cusa. On presenting his plan to Pius II, Nicholas said that the reforms were necessary “to transform all Christians beginning with the Pope into the likeness of Christ.” His fellow reformer, Bishop Domenico de Domenichi, author of a
Tractatus
on reform for the same Pope, was equally unsparing. It was useless, he wrote, to uphold the sanctity of the Papacy to lawless princes because the evil lives of prelates and Curia caused laymen to call the Church “Babylon, the mother of all fornications and abominations of the earth!”
At the conclave to elect a successor to Pius II in 1464, Domenichi summarized the problem that should have earned the attention of Sixtus and his successors: “The dignity of the Church must be reasserted, her authority revived, morals reformed, the Curia regulated, the course of justice secured, the faith propagated,” papal territory regained and, as he saw it, “the faithful armed for Holy War.”
Little of this was to be accomplished by the six Renaissance popes. What frustrated reform was the absence of support, if not active dislike,for it by a hierarchy and Papacy whose personal fortunes were embedded in the existing system and who equated reform with Councils and the devolution of papal sovereignty. Throughout the century since the uprising of Hus, a religious revolution was in the making but the rulers of the Church failed to take notice. They regarded protest merely as dissent to be suppressed, not as a serious challenge to their validity.
Meanwhile a new faith, nationalism, and a new challenge in
The Church itself talked regularly of reform. At the Councils of Constance and Basle in the first half of the 15th century, renowned preachers harangued the delegates every Sunday on corrupt practices and loose morals, on simony in particular, on failure to generate the saving instrument of Christian revival, a crusade against the Turks, on all the sins that were causing the decay of Christian life. They called for action and positive measures. The Councils held endless discussions, debated countless proposals and issued a number of decrees dealing mainly with disputes between the hierarchy and Papacy over distribution of incomes and allocation of benefices. They did not reach down, however, to the places of basic need in such matters as bishops’ visitation of their sees, education of the minor clergy, reorganization of the monastic orders.
The higher clergy were not solidly indifferent; among them were abbots, bishops, even certain cardinals who were earnest reformers. The popes too made intermittent gestures of response. Programs of reform were drawn up by order of both Nicholas V and Pius II in the 1440s and 1460s preceding the six of this study, in the latter case by a dedicated reformer and preacher, the German Cardinal and legate Nicholas of Cusa. On presenting his plan to Pius II, Nicholas said that the reforms were necessary “to transform all Christians beginning with the Pope into the likeness of Christ.” His fellow reformer, Bishop Domenico de Domenichi, author of a
Tractatus
on reform for the same Pope, was equally unsparing. It was useless, he wrote, to uphold the sanctity of the Papacy to lawless princes because the evil lives of prelates and Curia caused laymen to call the Church “Babylon, the mother of all fornications and abominations of the earth!”
At the conclave to elect a successor to Pius II in 1464, Domenichi summarized the problem that should have earned the attention of Sixtus and his successors: “The dignity of the Church must be reasserted, her authority revived, morals reformed, the Curia regulated, the course of justice secured, the faith propagated,” papal territory regained and, as he saw it, “the faithful armed for Holy War.”
Little of this was to be accomplished by the six Renaissance popes. What frustrated reform was the absence of support, if not active dislike,for it by a hierarchy and Papacy whose personal fortunes were embedded in the existing system and who equated reform with Councils and the devolution of papal sovereignty. Throughout the century since the uprising of Hus, a religious revolution was in the making but the rulers of the Church failed to take notice. They regarded protest merely as dissent to be suppressed, not as a serious challenge to their validity.
Meanwhile a new faith, nationalism, and a new challenge in
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