The break-up of the Papal Church

The gradual transformation of the feudal into the capitalist mode of production had a profound effect upon the most dominant power of the Middle Ages, the Church. Above all this affected the universal domination of the papacy, which had arisen as the leadership of the Christian peoples against foreign enemies and which had reached its peak in the crusades. But those very crusades had become a mighty lever to encourage trade with the Orient and develop the element that was to destroy the feudal world and its monarch the Pope, that is, capital.

As the biggest property owners of the Middle Ages the Church underwent the same process as the rest of the landed proprietors. In order to use agricultural production as a source of money they ruined the peasant class, seized their common woods and meadows for themselves, and either drove the peasants from the land or squeezed them in the most pitiless manner. Life was no longer easy under the crozier. The growing lust for property led the Church to limit their alms to the poor. Their income in kind, the surplus of which they had earlier gladly given away as they could not consume it themselves, had now become saleable commodities, and the greed for profits that this aroused seized the Church too.

If this made the Church more and more hated by the peasant class, it also failed to win the friendship of the rising bourgeoisie. However much it neglected the care of the poor, it could not give it up entirely without losing its last hold on the masses. To a certain extent it still formed a line of defence against the impoverishment of the masses, whose proletarianization could not be carried through quickly enough as far as capital was concerned. The propertyless were still not delivered bound hand and foot to capitalist exploitation as long as they received alms, however miserable, from the Church. Moreover the religious holidays were a thorn in the flesh of the burgeoning towns. The more numerous they grew, the more they contradicted the capitalist wisdom according to which the worker does not work to live but lives to work.

But above all the capitalist mode of production had no further need of the Church as a teacher and leader. It created its own education and science. It created also its own administrative organs. Only in the countryside did the pastoral clergy remain irreplaceable, just as today in backward countries it has to carry out certain official functions such as those of the registry office. In the 16th century the pastoral clergy was still economically necessary and nobody thought of suppressing it. Growing capital moved all the more sharply against two other arms of the Church that were becoming more and superfluous and therefore damaging to the new mode of production – the monasteries and the Papacy.

The monasteries had become superfluous as agricultural models, as teachers of the populace, as protectors of the poor and as preservers of art and science. They fed thousands of idle monks instead of throwing them out onto the streets to be placed at the disposal of capital as wage slaves. Lacking any function in the state and in society, rude, lazy, ignorant and still immeasurably rich, the monks sank ever deeper into baseness, immorality and every conceivable vice. They became the objects of universal contempt.

The Papacy was as superfluous as the monasteries. It had fulfilled its historical mission with the defence of the Christian peoples against the heathens and the infidels. Since the crusades there had no longer been any threat of danger from Asia. True, a new Oriental power arose in the shape of the Ottomans, the Turks, who conquered Constantinople in 1453 and from there threatened Christian Europe. But this attack came from the East, not the South. Its rage was directed not against Italy but the countries along the Danube, particularly Hungary, and then South Germany and Poland. Thus the struggle against the Turks ceased to be the concern of the whole of Christendom, but merely occupied its Eastern bulwarks.

The danger from the Turks contributed considerably towards welding the Hungarians, Czechs and South Germans together into the Habsburg monarchy and preserving in it the German Imperial crown. But the Turkish danger was of no direct interest to the Papacy. Even if Popes continued to collect funds for the fight against the Turks, they soon began to turn these funds to their own uses. The power of the Papacy and the belief in its world-historical mission, which had, until the 12th century, been a means of saving the Christian peoples, became in the 14th century a means of exploiting them.

This exploitation increased with the development of commodity production. Even the Roman Curia was seized by the lust for money. The direct taxes that the Papacy raised from the faithful, the so called Peter’s Pence, were relatively insignificant, but in finding indirect taxes the Popes of the 15th and 16th centuries were as inventive as modern financiers. In the age of merchant capital they correctly recognized that trade was the most respectable way of fleecing people and quickly amassing great fortunes. Therefore they began to peddle church offices, and particularly the remission of sins for cash, the so-called indulgences which became more and more shameless as the years passed. In this way the organization of the Roman Church became just as big and just as tireless a machine for exploitation as once the Roman Empire had been.

In the process the wearers of the triple crown made themselves more and more contemptible to the people of Christendom. They were not only princes of the Church, ruling over the whole of Christendom and interested in the maintenance of the feudal mode of production, they were also the secular princes of more or less the major portion of Italy and as such interested in the development of the capitalist mode of production. So in them juvenile audacity went hand-in-hand with grey-haired lasciviousness; revolutionary contempt for tradition that is proper in a rising class with the unnatural addiction to pleasure of an exploiting class that is rushing towards destruction. The Popes led a dissolute life, which was not a small factor in destroying their standing in the eyes of the Christian peoples, who took all the more exception to it the deeper they were still sunk in feudal patriarchal attitudes and thus steeped in the holiness of the Papacy. In order to maintain belief in itself at least, as the only support left to it as the revolution in society cut the ground from beneath its feet, the Papacy turned to every resource of deception and lies. It became as great a machine for damning people as it was for exploiting them.

So the Papacy lay like a suffocating incubus over all the Christian peoples, and they all had an urgent need to liberate themselves from it. But they did not all have an equal need to tear themselves free from it. It was precisely the economically most developed countries that felt this consciousness least. The Italians became all the more Papist the more commodity production developed, since the domination of the Papacy meant the domination of Italy over Christendom. France and Spain, too, had no intention of splitting from the Papacy. In both countries modern absolutism came to power early. As early as the 15th century the Kings of France succeeded in making the French clergy largely independent of Rome and subordinate to themselves. The King had a decisive say in the appointments to important clerical offices. The raising of taxes for the Pope without the agreement of the King was forbidden in France as it was in Spain, where the Holy Inquisition even became a police tool of the Royal power. These countries had, therefore, freed themselves from Papal exploitation and were all the less prepared to break away entirely from the Papacy in that they were now able to consider making the Pope into their tool and ruling the whole of Christianity through him. They wanted to exploit the Christian peoples as the rulers of the Pope.

It was for these reasons that Italy, France and Spain remained Catholic and not, as we read in the bourgeois Protestant history books, because of their spiritual backwardness. It is completely wrong to grasp the Reformation, which aimed at a complete break with Rome, as a phenomenon of an essentially spiritual nature, a struggle of the higher Protestant against the lower Catholic culture. Since Italy, France and Spain were the economically most developed countries they were also the culturally most developed. Nowhere was the purely secular culture of the time as high as it was there, especially in Italy. But this culture remained ardently Catholic, for the same reasons as the countries themselves.

Secular culture originated in Italy in the following manner: the new mode of production did not need to create for itself an entirely new outlook, a new art and a new science, but found the forms of thought appropriate to its needs in the ancient literature whose heritage had never been extinguished in Italy and all the Mediterranean countries. The study of the old authors was begun as a means of understanding the present and delivering the death-blow to the dying remnants of the feudal outlook. The intellectual tendency that developed under the influence of this study bore the title of Renaissance (rebirth, that is to say, of antiquity) or Humanism (the striving for a purely human culture in contrast with the scholastic theology that was concerned with divine affairs). If ideas really do create material conditions, as the bourgeois historians maintain, then a revival of ancient society would have had to follow from the revival of ancient ideas. In fact, however, the ideas of the Humanists had to accommodate themselves to economic conditions. However enthusiastic they were about the republican writers of antiquity, they still became the advance guard of modern absolutism, recognizing quite correctly that therein was the driving force of historical progress. However much their ancient culture set them at loggerheads with the Christian Church, however impregnated they were with the heathen outlook, however bitterly they attacked monasticism and the Papacy, they still remained determined Catholics, recognizing quite correctly that a complete break with the Papacy would also isolate them from the economically and culturally most developed countries.

The German humanists indeed saw the beginnings of the reform movement in Germany with great satisfaction and encouraged it with all their power. But as soon as it became clear that the German Reformation meant the complete detachment of Germany from Rome almost all of them returned to the bosom of the Catholic Church.