April 2005 Christian Spirituality      Continued from previous issue By George A Lane SJ

Continue from ...... RELIGIOUS CLIMATE OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES There was constant warning by perceptive Church leaders at this time that the Church was being overloaded. A position paper prepared for the Council of Constance in 1414 pointed this out. It showed that with this type of spirituality, the mind eventually gets so flooded with religious images that normal and balanced life is upset. There is too much quantity without quality. Another problem with this effort is that the legitimately sacred things which should be given reverence get lost in the confusion. The veneration of relics, for example, became mixed with crude primitive ideas and superstitions. The monks at Fossanuova, for instance, for fear of losing the body of Thomas Aquinas, decapitated it, boiled and preserved it. There was also a great multiplication of saints and saint legends in this period. There was a saint for every conceivable occupation, every town, every house, and literally for everything. There was a saint for preservation from every possible disease and calamity. Masses were multiplied at a great rate; one was developed for every possible title of our Lord and every title of Mary. The idea of what constituted sanctity gives a further insight into the popular spirituality of the late Middle Ages. Luxembourg would have been canonized by popular acclaim. He was made bishop of Metz at the age of fifteen and became a cardinal a year later. He carried out a total chastisement of his body denying himself food and every possible convenience. During the last years of his life he always kept his confessor at his side and used to wake up at night in order to go to confession. At his death numerous little slips of paper were found on which Peter had noted down his various faults; he used these in preparation for confession and for meditation on his own unworthiness and sinfulness. He died at the age of eighteen. The cause of his canonization was immediately introduced by no fewer than three kings and the faculty of the University of Paris. Why did the religious imagination of this period tend to develop such extremes? There was insufficient nourishment for it. Despite the corrective legislation of councils and synods, preaching in general remained relatively poor, except during the first fervor of the friars; vernacular translations of the Bible were often suspect, if not forbidden; and the Mass itself became increasingly distant and unintelligible. The mystics may also have contributed to the problem. Some of the visionaries fed popular imagination and practice with extravagances at best peripheral to the economy of salvation. It would be dangerous to claim that the people of the later Middle Ages were morally worse or less religious than those of other ages. The evidence actually indicates the opposite - an enormous amount of religious energy. But it was an energy too often unbridled, as sane leaders like Gerson did not cease to warn. Only a few short years later revolution broke out in the Church - a revolution which was in significant measure an attack on the kind of distortions we have been describing. The Catholic answer to all this was the great Council of Trent. Yet it is legitimate to ask whether this Council was more concerned in some areas with symptoms than with underlying causes. At the level of doctrinal theology, it produced some remarkable decrees; and it succeeded in inaugurating a comprehensive system of moral and doctrinal training for the clergy. But the Council Fathers did not heed legitimate concerns of the Reformers, such as their call for a vernacular liturgy. Thus did the Fathers pass over a basic source of nourishment and a remedy for the unhealthy tendencies of the religious imagination which, some would feel, has remained unreformed even to our own times.

- To Be Continued -