Masuccio Salernitano on the phony, immoral, infanticidal Franciscan and Dominican begging friars of 15th century Italy

  They cheat, steal, and fornicate, and when they are at the end of their resources, they set up as saints and work miracles . . . bring with them confederates who pretend to be blind or afflicted with some mortal disease, and after touching the hem of the monk's cowl, or the relics which he carries, are healed before the eyes of the multitude. All then shout 'Misericordia', the bells are rung, and the miracle is recorded in a solemn protocol. ... The nuns ... bring forth pretty little monks or else use means to hinder that result. And if anyone charges me with falsehood, let him search the nunneries well, and he will find there as many little bones as in Bethlehem at Herod's time. ... The best punishment for them would be for God to abolish Purgatory; they would then receive no more alms, and would be forced to go back to their spades.

 

 

-- Tommaso Guardati, aka Masuccio Salernitano (1410-1475), quoted in Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Phaidon, 1945), 283f.

The Lutheran Reformation saved the Papacy

The greatest danger of all--secularization--the danger which came from within, from the Popes themselves and their 'nipoti', was adjourned for centuries by the German Reformation. ... This alone had made the expedition against Rome (1527) possible and successful, [and] so did it compel the Papacy to become once more the expression of a world-wide spiritual power, to raise itself from the soulless debasement in which it lay, and to place itself at the head of all the enemies of this reformation. ... In the face of the defection of half Europe, was a new, regenerated hierarchy, which avoided all the great and dangerous scandals of former times, particularly nepotism ... It only existed and is only intelligible in opposition to the seceders. In this sense it can be said with perfect truth that the moral salvation of the Papacy is due to its mortal enemies. ... Without the Reformation ... the whole ecclesiastical State would long ago have passed into secular hands.

-- Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Phaidon, 1945), 79.

The good old days, when the sexual sins of Catholicism in Italy seemed more, shall we say, conventional

Closely connected with the political illegitimacy of the dynasties of the fifteenth century was the public indifference to legitimate birth, which to foreigners--for example, to Comines--appeared so remarkable. The two things went naturally together. ... In Italy ... there no longer existed a princely house where ... bastards were not patiently tolerated. ... The fitness of the individual, his worth and capacity, were of more weight than all the laws and usages which prevailed elsewhere in the West. It was the age, indeed, in which the sons of the Popes were founding dynasties.

-- Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Phaidon, 1945), 12.

 

Culture and enlightenment are powerless against delusions such as astrology

But in another way . . . antiquity exercised a perilous influence. It imparted to the Renaissance its own forms of superstition. ... The belief in a Divine government of the world was in many minds destroyed by the spectacle of so much injustice and misery. Others, like Dante, surrendered at all events this life to the caprices of chance . . .. But when the belief in immortality began to waver, then Fatalism got the upper hand, or sometimes the latter came first and had the former as its consequence. The gap thus opened was in the first place filled by the astrology of antiquity, or even of the Arabs. ... It is profoundly instructive to observe how powerless culture and enlightenment were against this delusion; since the latter had its support in the ardent imagination of the people, in the passionate wish to penetrate and determine the future. Antiquity, too, was on the side of astrology.

-- Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Phaidon, 1945), 313f.