An Irreverent Curiosity by David Farley

Author:David Farley
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

Chapter 16

“PRECIOUS RUBBISH”

In 1511, toward the end of a month-long stay in Rome, a young Augustinian monk from Germany walked up to the door of the Lateran Palace and stood at the bottom of a staircase. He eyed the twenty-eight steps for a long few seconds, made the sign of the cross, and knelt down on the first step. The marble stairway, known as the Scala Santa, or Holy Steps, had been brought back from the Holy Land in the fourth century by St. Helena, who was told the marble staircase had been taken from Pontius Pilate’s palace in Jerusalem. Thus, it was on these steps that Jesus Christ may have taken his final strides before being condemned to death.

Since it had been installed in the Lateran Palace in Rome, the same building where the Holy Foreskin was housed, the Scala Santa had been a hugely poplar destination for pilgrims. According to tradition, ascending the steps on one’s knees while reciting prayers along the way will release a soul from Purgatory. After finishing a short prayer for his departed grandfather, our young sixteenth-century German monk inched up to the second step on his way to the top of one of Christianity’s most esteemed relics.

About halfway up the stairway, having recounted a prayer with each move, the monk began thinking about all the relics he’d seen during his month-long stay in Rome. His knees slightly ached from scaling the marble steps, as he likely realized, Crawling up a staircase isn’t going to help get me—or my grandfather—into heaven. Neither, he would have agreed, would praying to Jesus’ foreskin or a vial of the Virgin’s breast milk. So he got up, walked down the stairs, and headed back to Germany. That monk’s name was Martin Luther, and the Reformation had just been born.

Up until this time, there had been little criticism of the Church. And those who hazarded it usually paid the ultimate price. Prague-based Jan Hus, who voiced protestations about, among many other things, the cult of the Holy Foreskin, and whose reform movement came a century before Luther’s, was burned at the Council of Constance in 1415 for speaking out against the pope and for preaching in the vernacular instead of Latin. But Luther was undeterred by threats of violence and after crossing back over the Alps, he nailed his famed Ninety-five Theses—a broadside against Church practices—to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral. This commenced the firestorm in Europe that would last more than a century and change the world forever.

And now, with Europe divided, criticism would rain down. The sale of indulgences, which were largely motivated to raise money for the building of the new St. Peter’s Basilica, was a major target of reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin. But it gave them a reason to look at all aspects of the Church. The nepotism within the papacy. The lavish lifestyle in which the popes lived. And, of course, the dubious nature of the cult of relics, particularly Christ relics.

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