why reformers are always a menace

A recent post on A Political Refugee From The Global Village got me thinking abut the mediæval Catholic Church. The conventional view is that by the fifteenth century the mediæval Church was corrupt and morally lax and desperately in need of reform. But is that really true?

We only get the reformers’ side of the story, partly because they won and partly because they had good propagandists on their side (people like Erasmus).

The Church in the Middle Ages was undoubtedly corrupt. All human institutions are corrupt. Every system of government ever devised has ended up being corrupt. Until we can change human nature we will always have corruption. And the reformed churches (both the Protestant churches and the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church) have over the years been involved in some pretty shady financial dealings. They get away with it because no-one really wants to take the political risks involved in taking a really close look at the financial affairs of churches.

Some of the doctrines of the mediæval Catholic Church may have been a trifle dubious but most churches subscribe to at least some doctrines that are a trifle dubious. Scripture can be made to mean many things that the original authors certainly never intended and tradition teachings can be interpreted imaginatively.

Was the Church in the Middle Ages morally lax? Or was it simply realistic about the limits of human perfectibility? Priests certainly cohabited with women and popes and cardinals had mistresses but the Church didn’t worry too much about these things because while God is perfect (and some saints may go close to perfection) ordinary men and women are far from perfect. Ordinary men and women sometimes succumb to the temptations of the flesh because ordinary men and women are just human. If the local priest hasn’t been able to stick to celibacy and he’s shacked up with his female housekeeper, if the local bishop keeps a mistress, is that something to get all bent out of shape about? If some of the nuns in the local nunnery get up to a few sexual shenanigans with priests (or even with each other) is it the end of the world? The mediæval Church tended to take the view that it wasn’t the end of the world.

And maybe tolerating lapses in clerical celibacy is preferable to sending priests slowly mad trying to keep to vows of celibacy that are just too much for some imperfect human beings.

Maybe the mediæval Church was an imperfect institution that was also relatively humane and tolerant.

Reformers, whether they’re religious, political, economic, social or moral reformers, are always looking for institutions to reform. What they invariably end up doing is taking an imperfect institution that basically works and smashing it. It then gets replaced with a new institution which usually ends up being nastier and more oppressive than the old one.

To someone with a reformer mindset everything needs reforming but in fact the world is full of things that are better left alone.