Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/643

 SIMONY. 027 It would be impossible to exaggerate the corruption which from this cause interpenetrated every fibre of the Church, filling benefices with ignorant and worldly men, eager to wring from the unfortunates committed to their cure the sums with which they had bought the preferment. Stephen Palecz, in a sermon preached before the Council of Constance, declares that there is scarce a church in Christendom free from the stain of simony, owing to the desperate struggle of all kinds of men to obtain the honors, wealth, and luxury attending an ecclesiastical preferment, and re- sulting in the promotion of the ignorant, weak, and wicked, who could not find employment as shepherds or swineherds. So un- blushing was the venality of the Holy See that dialecticians and jurists of high authority seriously argued that the pope could not commit simony. This is scarce surprising when popes were found who could do a sharp stroke of business, like Boniface IX. In want of money to pay his troopers and defray the cost of his vast buildings, he suddenly deposed nearly all the prelates who chanced to be at the papal court, and many absent ones, or he translated them to titular sees, and then sold to the highest bidder the places thus vacated. Many unlucky ones, who were unable to buy back their preferment, wandered around the court without bread to eat, and the confusion and discord caused in many prov- inces was indescribable. Theodore a Niem, to whom we are in- debted for this fact, was himself a papal official for thirty-five years, and knew whereof he spoke when he compared the splen- did liberality of the German prelates with the stingy avarice of the Italians, who gave nothing in charity, but bent their whole ener- gies to enriching themselves and their families. But when they die, he says, the collectors of the apostolic camera seize the whole spoil, and through this depredation and rapine it would be impos- sible to exaggerate the destruction of the Italian cathedrals and monasteries, which are left almost tenantless. As for the camera itself, its officials have hard heads and stony bosoms, and hearts more impenetrable to mercy than steel itself. They are as pitiless to Christians as Turks or Tartars could be, stripping all newly pro- and was instructed to distribute these favors so as to remove obstacles to the enterprise (Urbani PP. IV. Epistt. 32-35, 40, 64-5, 68; Clement. PP. IV. Epistt. 8, 19, 20, 41, 383.— ap. Martene Thesaur. II.).