The Sex Lives of Popes by Nigel Cawthorne

Author:Nigel Cawthorne [Cawthorne, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw, mobi
Published: 2014-02-23T21:00:00+00:00

He also lamented that the money-grubbers took all his money. The local riffraff were kicked out of the town, but still two people were murdered in street brawls and, in all, 263 bodies were fished out of the lake. Churchmen took the opportunity to settle old scores.

With so much sinning going on, and so many foreigners in town, confessionals had to be marked with languages the confessor understood. The Ethiopians were out of luck, though; they were denied absolution because no one understood their tongue.

The grand opening of the Council – delayed by an outbreak of noli me tangere, a contagious ulceration of the face which especially attacks the nose – was finally set for 3 November. But with everyone robed and in their place, Pope John feigned illness, so the Council was delayed again. Two days later, on 5 November 1414, it at last got underway.

Despite what he took to be evil omens, John XXIII still felt he was in with a chance. After all, the other two contenders Benedict XIII and Gregory XII had not even dared show their faces in Constance. Many of the clergy who attended the Council were as corrupt as he was, if not so good at it. It was generally accepted that the priests were worse than the people – Chaucer made the comparison of ‘a shiten sheperde and a clene sheep’.

In England, the civil authorities even stepped in to try and clean up the Church. In 1414, King Henry V asked the University of Oxford to prepare articles for the reform of the Church. Article 39 began: ‘Because the carnal and sinful life of priests today scandalizes the entire church and their public fornications go completely unpunished…’ The good gentlemen of Kent had their own, radical, solution for clerical incontinence. They suggested enforced castration as a rite of ordination.

In France, Nicolas de Clemanges, rector of the University of Paris and archdeacon of Bayonne, deplored priests ‘softened by an effeminate excess, they then had to satisfy three masters: wantonness, which required the delights of wine, of meat, of sleep, of splendid games, of whores and panders. Pride, which desired tall houses, towers and castles, costly garments, horses bred for speed. Avarice, which had carefully amassed great treasure to pay for these things.’ The result, he said, was that ‘every stroke of the pen had its price’ and a clergy who ‘would rather suffer the loss of ten thousand souls than of ten sols’. There were twenty sols to the old French livre.

De Clemanges also drew attention to a perennial problem in the Church, saying: ‘What are the convents of girls today if not execrable houses of Venus?’

John XXIII felt comfortable among the company of such clergymen. He also felt those cardinals who had convened the Council of Pisa were bound to support his claim to the papacy as he was the uncontested successor to their choice Alexander V. Better still, John’s arch enemy King Ladislas had died.

In fact, John felt that he was in such a strong position that he could thwart the Council by not attending their meeting.

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