Renaissance Popes (Helping the Protestant Cause)

Bad popes and CEOs, while possibly not a sign of the apocalypse, are a sign that an institution has gone rogue. When the church is about the glorification of the pope, or the corporation is about enriching the CEO, it is an institution in bad need of reform or reinvention. It is hard to imagine three popes who could do more to dissuade Europeans of respect for medieval authority than the 3 Renaissance popes Alexander, Julius, and Leo.

Think of the fun Fox and MSNBC would have reporting on these popes. A pope with sword on hip, swearing at his soldiers to urge them on in military campaigns? Another pope who, when a cardinal, was rebuked for hosting orgies?

Alexander rather fittingly took his name from the conqueror Alexander the Great rather than some milquetoast saint. Pope Alexander purchased the papacy in 1492. As Columbus was discovering a new world, Alexander was bribing fellow cardinals for their vote, an investment that he and his children would recoup.

Where a modern CEO might think it fun to throw multi-million dollar parties for a child, Alexander’s gifts were more creative. He bought his children lavish wedding parties, private bull fights, political positions and even armies with which to conquer new territory. Alexander had at least 7 known illegitimate children, a natural enough product from a man who seemed so at ease with sex. As pope, he once hosted a party that included a contest matching his guests with prostitutes and then dispensing gifts to the guests who demonstrated the most impressive feats of virility.


The next pope had once tried to depose Alexander, an attempt that led Alexander to try to assassinate this impetuous cardinal. It is hard to imagine someone as reticent and peaceful as Pope John Paul even surviving in this era, much less aspiring to the papacy. The church had too much power to be left to any but alpha males with little compunction.

Julius was bold enough to lead armies and raze St. Peter’s Basilica and commission a new one in its place, a feat that made Michelangelo and his ceiling more famous than this warrior pope.
Erasmus, who did so much to open the door to secular learning, penned a satire after Julius’s death titled “Julius Exclusis.” In this piece, Julie protests that St. Peter would block his entry to heaven.


Peter: Is there no difference between being holy and being called Holy? . . . Let me look a little closer. Hum! Signs of impiety aplenty. . . Priest's cassock, but bloody armor beneath it; eyes savage, mouth insolent, forehead brazen, body scarred with sins all over, breath loaded with wine, health broken with debauchery. Ay, threaten as you will, I will tell you what you are.... You are Julius the Emperor come back from hell....

Julius: Make an end, or I will excommunicate you....


P: Excommunicate me? By what right, I would know?

J: The best of rights. You are only a priest, perhaps not that you cannot consecrate. Open, I say!


P: You must show your merits first....

J: What do you mean by merits?


P: Have you taught true doctrine?

J: Not I. I have been too busy fighting. There are monks to look after doctrine, if that is of any consequence. … I have done more for the Church and Christ than any Pope before me.


P: What did you do?

J: I raised the revenue. I invented new offices and sold them... I recoined the currency and made a great sum that way. Nothing can be done without money. Then I annexed Bologna to the Holy See.... I set all the princes of Europe by the ears. I tore up treaties, and kept great armies in the field. I covered Rome with palaces, and left five millions in the treasury behind me....


P: Why did you take Bologna?

J: Because I wanted the revenue....


P: And how about Ferrara?

J: The duke was an ungrateful wretch. He accused me of simony [the purchase of office], called me a pederast.... I wanted the duchy of Ferrara for a son of my own, who could be depended upon to be true to the Church, and who had just poniarded [plunged a small dagger into] the Cardinal of Pavia.


P: What? Popes with wives and children?

J: Wives? No, not wives, but why not children? [1]


As Europe became more secular, it made a kind of perverse sense that the church and its leader would also become more secular but this still did not set well with Europeans. Luther’s protests about the excesses of Rome found ready ears. In Erasmus’s account, Peter expresses dismay that there is no way to depose such a pope and in this speaks for many Europeans. Although revolutions may seem obvious in retrospect, people do look for a variety of options before the overthrow of the social order. It took a lot to embolden Europeans to give up on popes.

Alexander and Julius convinced many Europeans that the papacy – and by extension the church – was corrupt and unworthy of respect. This provoked two responses that each undermined the grip of the church.


The one response was probably best characterized by intellectuals like Machiavelli and Erasmus, who were less concerned about the excesses of the church than the need to complement religion with secular teachings and human will. Machiavelli actually admired Julius’s boldness. And even though Erasmus criticized Julius, he seemed more aligned with the Catholic Church than the Protestant movement. These men saw progress through a further embrace of the secular, but an embrace that came in the arms of something other than the church.

The other response was best characterized by Martin Luther and John Calvin. They did not approve of Europe’s secular tilt and sought, instead, to create a church uncorrupted by so much power and money.


As it turns out, these two approaches had more in common than an opposition to the status quo and the power of the Catholic Church. A church that kept itself pure by letting others care about secular things like money, the rule of territory proved a perfect complement to the newly emerging nation-state that was secular in its interests and focus. If all the world had to be funneled through the church, the church was either going to be an obstacle to progress or it was going to become secular. But if the church was to focus on religious matters, then we have the birth of a new kind of world.

----------
[1] Will Durant, The Reformation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957) 279-82.