Medieval Vs Renaissance: Corruption In The Church.

645 words - 3 pages

The Medieval times and the Renaissance each had their separate views of humanism. The Renaissance rejected all beliefs and ideas that the Medieval times had developed. Medieval times thought that the human body and individualism were sinful while Renaissance thinkers said that individualism should be glorified. The main complaints made against the church were corruption and hypocrisy within the clergy. These complaints reflected the Renaissance ideas of individualism in that the clergy thought that it was ok to use explore the attributes of the human mind. Individual power and accomplishment was enjoyed and seen as good. Members of the Catholic clergy were financially, politically and socially corrupt. The abuses of clerical power and privileges by the clergy spanned all parts of their daily lives. The daily lives of the Catholic clergy were filled with intemperance and overindulgence. Their financial, political and social corruptions made it practically impossible to serve their positions truly. In essence, the clergy almost wasn't even really clergy at all. They were just ordinary people in religious clothing.
Perhaps the most interesting of the clerical corruptions are the social ones. It has already been addressed that the vow of poverty had been broken in half, smashed and ground into the dirt. People were refused a stately funeral and sometimes denied burial on account of their poverty level (Rogers pg 380). The status of their vow of chastity was in even worse condition. The clergy's social corruption was that it was too social. Clerics focused more on their public status than on their congregations which goes back to the Renaissance idea of individual glory. They openly drank, owned private property, slept in, slept around and pretty much ignored their religious obligations. Medieval beliefs about the human body were that the flesh is sinful and should not be seen or touched. The clergy obviously thought differently about the human body and...

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