I will try to tell what I understood of these matters, even if I am not sure I can explain them properly. My masters at Melk had often told me that it is very difficult for a Northerner to form any clear idea of the religious and political vicissitudes of Italy.
The peninsula, where the power of the clergy was more evident than in any other country, and where more than in any other country the clergy made a display of power and wealth, for at least two centuries had generated movements of men bent on a poorer life, in protest against the corrupt priests, from whom they even refused the sacraments. They gathered in independent communities, hated equally by the feudal lords, the empire, and the city magistrates.Nike Shox Turob - 07 Nike Shox Turob – 07RRP: $78.73 $48.30

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Finally Saint Francis had appeared, spreading a love of poverty that did not contradict the precepts of the church; and after his efforts the church had accepted the summons to severe behavior of those older move?ments and had purified them of the elements of disrup?tion that lurked in them. There should have followed a period of meekness and holiness, but as the Franciscan order grew and attracted the finest men,

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    • it became too powerful, too bound to earthly matters, and many Franciscans wanted to restore it to its early purity. A very difficult matter for an order that at the time when I was at the abbey already numbered more than thirty thousand members scattered throughout the whole world. But so it was, and many of those monks of Saint Francis were opposed to the Rule that the order had established, and they said the order had by now assumed the character of those ecclesiastical institutions it had come into the world to reform. And this, they said, had already happened in the days when Saint Francis was alive, and his words and his aims had been betrayed. Many of them rediscovered then a book written at the beginning of the twelfth century of our era, by a Cistercian monk named Joachim, to whom the spirit of prophecy was attributed. He had in fact foreseen the advent of a new age, in which the spirit of Christ, long corrupted through the actions of his false apostles, would again be achieved on earth. And he had an?nounced certain future events in a way that made it seem clear to all that, unawares, he was speaking of the Franciscan order. And therefore many Franciscans had greatly rejoiced, even excessively, it seems, because then, around the middle of the century, the doctors of the Sorbonne condemned the teachings of that abbot Joachim. Apparently they did so because the Franciscans (and the Dominicans) were becoming too powerful, too learned, at the University of Paris; and those Sorbonne doctors wanted to eliminate them as heretics. But this scheme was not carried out, happily for the church, which then allowed the dissemination of the works of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, cer?tainly not heretics. Whence it is clear that in Paris, too, there was a confusion of ideas or someone who wished to confuse them for his own purposes. And this is the evil that heresy inflicts on the Christian people, obfus?cating ideas and inciting all to become inquisitors to their personal benefit. For what I saw at the abbey then (and will now recount) caused me to think that often inquisitors create heretics. And not only in the sense that they imagine heretics-where these do not exist, but also that inquisitors repress the heretical putrefaction so vehemently that many are driven, to share in it, in their hatred for the judges. Truly, a circle conceived by the Devil. God preserve us.

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