In one instance, not fewer than five hundred benefices were held by one of them; their friends and retainers must be supplied, their families enriched.  It was affirmed that the whole revenues of France were insufficient to meet their expenditures.  In their rivalries it sometimes happened that no pope was elected for several years.  It seemed as if they wanted to show how easily the Church could get on without the Vicar of Christ.

Toward the close of the eleventh century the Roman Church became the Roman court.  In place of the Christian sheep gently following their shepherd in the holy precincts of the city, there had arisen a chancery of writers, notaries, tax-gatherers, where transactions about privileges, dispensations, exemptions, were carried on; and suitors went with petitions from door to door.  Rome was a rallying-point for place-hunters of every nation.  In presence of the enormous mass of business-processes, graces, indulgences, absolutions, commands, and decisions, addressed to all parts of Europe and Asia, the functions of the local church sank into insignificance.  Several hundred persons, whose home was the Curia, were required.  Their aim was to rise in it by enlarging the profits of the papal treasury.  The whole Christian world had become tributary to it.  Here every vestige of religion had disappeared; its members were busy with politics, litigations, and processes; not a word could be heard about spiritual concerns.  Every stroke of the pen had its price.  Benefices, dispensations, licenses, absolutions, indulgences, privileges, were bought and sold like merchandise.  The suitor had to bribe every one, from the doorkeeper to the pope, or his case was lost.  Poor men could neither attain preferment, nor hope for it; and the result was, that every cleric felt he had a right to follow the example he had seen at Rome, and that he might make profits out of his spiritual ministries and sacraments, having bought the right to do so at Rome, and having no other way to pay off his debt.  The transference of power from Italians to Frenchmen, through the removal of the Curia to Avignon, produced no change—­only the Italians felt that the enrichment of Italian families had slipped out of their grasp.  They had learned to consider the papacy as their appanage, and that they, under the Christian dispensation, were God’s chosen people, as the Jews had been under the Mosaic.

At the end of the thirteenth century a new kingdom was discovered, capable of yielding immense revenues.  This was Purgatory.  It was shown that the pope could empty it by his indulgences.  In this there was no need of hypocrisy.  Things were done openly.  The original germ of the apostolic primacy had now expanded into a colossal monarchy.