The centuries of the Church’s history are so filled with all sorts of human failure that we can quite understand Dante’s ghastly vision of the Babylonian whore sitting in the Church’s chariot; and the dreadful words of William of Auvergne, Bishop of Paris in the thirteenth century, seem perfectly comprehensible. William said that the barbarism of the Church had to make everyone who saw it go rigid with horror: “We are no longer dealing with a bride but with a monster of terrible deformity and ferocity.”
