Toxic Waste From the Family Line – 14th Century

Event

Generational Issue

Excommunication – A person under the ban was deprived of the sacraments and doomed to hell until such time as he made amendment and was absolved. The local priest was supposed to pronounce the curse of excommunication upon the sinner before the parish two or three times a year in the name of the Father, Son, Holy Ghost, Virgin Mary, and all the Apostles and saints while the funeral knell tolled… Supposedly the guilty one was cut off from all social and occupational relationships… p. 10

In his capacity as protector, the noble earned exemption from direct taxation by poll or hearth-tax…

The horse was the seat of the noble, the mount that lifted him above other men. P. 15

In 1325, after rains so incessant that they were compared to the Biblical flood, crops failed all over Europe, and famine, the dark horseman of the Apocalypse, became familiar to all.

Reports spread of people eating their own children, of the poor in Poland feeding on hanged bodies taken down from the gibbet. A contagion of dysentery prevailed in the same years. P. 24

Besides its regular revenue from fiefs, every office, every nomination, every appointment or preferment, every dispensation of the rules, every judgment of the Rota or adjudication of a claim, every pardon, indulgence, and absolution, everything the Church had or was, from cardinal’s hat to pilgrim’s relic, was for sale. In addition, the papacy took a cut of all voluntary gifts and bequests and offerings on the altar. It received Peter’s Pence from England and other kingdoms. It sold extra indulgences in jubilee years and took a special tax for crusades which continued to be proclaimed but rarely left home. P. 26

Money could buy any kind of dispensation: to legitimize children, of which the majority were those of priests and prelates; to divide a corpse for the favorite custom of burial in two or more places…

…the pardoners would sell absolution for any sin from gluttony to homicide, cancel any vow of chastity or fasting, remit any penance for money, most of which they pocketed…What they were peddling was salvation, taking advantage of the people’s need and credulity to sell its counterfeit.

Friars – They were notorious seducers of women. P. 30

…in all popular literature of the time, clerical celibacy is a joke.

Upon the approach of death, knights and noble ladies would have themselves clad in the Franciscan habit, believing that if they died and were buried in it, they could not go to hell.

In some monastic orders the monks had regular pocket money and private funds which they lent at interest. P. 31

Like the pardoner, they bilked the villagers, selling them relics of inspired imagination. Boccaccio’s Friar Cipolla sold one of the Angel Gabriel’s feathers which he said had fallen in the Virgin’s chamber during the Annunciation….(another)…sold a piece of the bush from which the Lord spoke to Moses.

They leave an impression of a Church so pervaded by venality and hypocrisy as to seem ripe for dissolution, but an institution so in command of the culture and so rooted in the structure of society does not readily dissolve. P. 32

It followed that banker, merchant, and businessman lived in daily commission of sin and daily contradiction of the moral code centering upon the “just price.” p. 37

Formed during the crusades to be the sword arm of the Church in defense of the Holy Land, the Templars had moved from ideals of asceticism and poverty to immense resources and an international web of power outside the regular channels of allegiance. P. 42

Philip…bullied…Pope, Clement V, into authorizing the trials of the Templars, and with his authority put them to atrocious tortures to extract confessions… many of them old men, were racked, thumb screwed, starved, hung with weights until joints were dislocated, had teeth and fingernails pulled one by one, bones broken by wedge, feet held over flames, always with pauses in between and the “question” put again each day until confession was wrung or the
victim died. P. 43