Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/150

 134 THE FRATICELLI. Holy Mother Church, and to the apostles, and though he concluded by submitting himself to the decisions of the Church, he could not escape the wrath which he had provoked. It was not many years since Clement V. had confined him for resisting too bitterly the extravagance of the Spirituals : he still consistently occupied the same position, and now John cast him into a 2ou and dismal dun- geon because he had not moved with the world, while the only answer to his protest was taking down from the church doors the bull Ad conditorem and replacing it with a revised edition, more decided and argumentative than its predecessor.* All this did not conduce to a favorable decision of the question as to the poverty of Christ. John was now fairly enlisted against the Franciscans, and their enemies lost no opportunity of inflaming his passions. He would listen to no defence of the decision of the Chapter of Perugia. In consistory a Franciscan cardinal and some bishops timidly ventured to suggest that possibly there might be some truth in it, when he angrily silenced them — " You are talking heresy " — and forced them to recant on the spot. When he heard that the greatest Franciscan schoolman of the day, William of Ockham, had preached that it was heretical to affirm that Christ and the apostles owned property, he promptly wrote to the Bishops of Bologna and Ferrara to investigate the truth of the report, and if it was correct to cite Ockham to appear before him at Avignon within a month. Ockham obeyed, and we shall hereafter see what came of it.f The papal decision on the momentous question was at last put forth, ^November 12, 1323, in the bull Cum inter nonnullos. In this there was no wavering or hesitation. The assertion that Christ and the apostles possessed no property was flatly declared to be a perversion of Scripture; it was denounced for the fut- ure as erroneous and heretical, and its obstinate assertion by the Franciscan chapter was formally condemned. To the believers in the supereminent holiness of poverty, it was stunning to find themselves cast out as heretics for holding a doctrine which for generations had passed as an incontrovertible truth, and had repeat- edly received the sanction of the Holy See in its most solemn form f Wadding, ann. 1323, No. 3, 15.
 * Nicholaus Minorita (Bal. et Mansi III. 213-24).