Now that the smoke surrounding the papal election has begun to clear, this may be the moment to take a more distanced look at the spectacle. And to see through it — for instance, by listening to a dissenting voice, in this case: Arnold of Brescia. Nine hundred years ago, he was already calling for a thorough reform within the Church. And he did not stop at words: he drove the pope out of Rome, proclaimed a republic, and transformed the Vatican into a commune. Edward Gibbon wrote about him:
‘He [Arnold of Brescia, 1143] presumed to quote the declaration of Christ, that His kingdom is not of this world; he boldly maintained that the sword and the sceptre were intrusted to the civil magistrate; that temporal honours and possessions were lawfully vested in secular persons; that the abbots, the bishops, and the Pope himself must renounce either their state or their salvation; and that after the loss of their revenues, the voluntary tithes and oblations of the faithful would suffice, not indeed for luxury and avarice, but for a frugal life in the exercise of spiritual labours.’ [The terror of successive popes, he was hanged, burnt, and his ashes cast into the Tiber, A. D. 1155]
The Quote in the above section is taken from Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ch. 69.
And introducing the 14th Century as a distant mirror to our present times, Babara Tuchman wrote:
By Constantine’s gift (The donatio constantini), Christianity was both officially established and fatally compromised. As William Langland wrote,
When the kindness of Constantine gave Holy Church endowments
In lands and leases, lordships and servants,
The Romans heard an angel cry on high above them,
“This day dos ecclesiae has drunk venom
And all who have Peter’s power are poisoned forever.”1
That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages. The claim of the Church to spiritual leadership could never be made wholly credible to all its communicants when it was founded in material wealth. The more riches the Church amassed, the more visible and disturbing became the flaw; nor could it ever be resolved, but continued to renew doubt and dissent in every century.
Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century