The church is as beautiful on the inside as it is on the outside; there are huge brownish columns holding up the arched ceiling, which seems to reach all the way to the Milky Way itself. There are stained-glass windows, some with pictures in them, and there are statues of people in places around the building, but you don’t know much about the stories behind them, because you can’t read, and even if you could, your family couldn’t afford to buy a book. Until about 50 years ago, all books were copied by hand, and only churches or monasteries or very, very rich people had even one. Now books are being printed on machines, but they’re still very expensive, and you’ve never even seen one.
So you’d like to know about God, but you can’t read, and at church they speak a language you don’t understand. So you ask your father and mother, but they don’t understand the church language, and they can’t read either, so that’s that.
It occurs to you that if the church is the only way you can get to God, they ought to make it easier to find out how. They have the paintings, but they hardly ever talk about them, and the homilies are all about saying prayers and doing things, most of which you can’t afford to do.
Is that what God is like? Does he only like rich people? Is there no way you can get to him?
You wouldn’t know this, but the problems go a lot deeper than you’ve observed, and the situation is seemingly beyond reformation.
For centuries now, church scholars have been focused on highly impractical speculations—such as, famously, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Philosophy has overwhelmed theology, and the sheep have been fumbled in the process. Little of what comes from the scholars is of any practical use. There is certainly nothing resembling the gospel.
The church has tried to make salvation simple for the poor illiterate peasants, so it’s reduced the way to God down to some simple, objective, countable things: you tell them what you’ve done wrong, and then they tell you how to be forgiven: you say memorized prayers, you do a list of mechanical things the priest tells you to do, you give money to various church-related causes. And when you do enough of the things, you’ll be forgiven. The church seems more interested in the quantity of your works than their quality.
But here’s the problem. You keep doing wrong things—in fact, you do the wrong things faster than you can do enough good things to make up for them, and you just get further and further behind.
Even worse, the leadership realizes this, because they see it in their own lives too. Even though the good things are fairly simple to do—anybody can say 100 Hail Marys or Our Fathers—they don’t change your heart, and you keep going back to the dark side, and you keep falling behind, and eventually it’s all just pointless.
For centuries the church has held pretty much all the power, and as someone’s going to say someday, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Rich people see the church’s power as more important than its forgiveness or even its access to God, and they become unremittingly cynical. They buy positions in the church—for a healthy fee, you can become a bishop, or an archbishop, or even a cardinal! In fact, you can buy several offices at once, and be bishop in multiple cities at the same time! Of course, that means that the bishop isn’t going to be in most of his cities most of the time, and that’s a recipe for bad administration and further corruption.
And with their riches they buy all the things they want—lands, castles, servants, clothing, jewels, amusements. Cardinal Wolsey was said to march in procession followed by a train of 500 servants.
Photo by Wim van ‘t Einde on Unsplash
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