A World Lit Only by Fire

by William Manchester

It did not occur to him that his position was heretical. Nor was it—then. The pontiff, he agreed, retained the right to absolve penitents, “the power of the keys.” He simply argued that peddling pardons like Colosseum souvenirs trivialized sin by debasing the contrition. However, he then lodged an objection, one Rome could not ignore. The papal keys, he pointed out, could not reach beyond the grave, freeing an unremorseful soul from purgatory or even decreasing its term of penance there. And while he absolved the Holy See from huckstering indulgences, he added a sharp, significant observation, which, in retrospect, may be seen as the first warning flash of the fury he had bottled up within since his hideous childhood. It was, in fact, a direct criticism of the Apostolic See—breathtaking because it could only be interpreted as the premeditated act of a heresiarch, and thus, a capital offense. He wrote: “This unbridled preaching of pardons makes it no easy matter, even for learned men, to rescue the reverence due the pope from… the shrewd questionings of the laity, to wit: ‘Why does not the pope empty purgatory for the sake of holy love and of the dire need of the souls that are there, if he redeems a… number of souls for the sake of miserable money with which to build a church?’”