Bishop Schneider's False Witness Against the Reformers Isn't Backed by Evidence

He does, however, explain his claim by pointing out that in most cases at the time, a “moral corruption, i.e. a hidden or public unchaste life, was the cause which led these clergymen to intellectual corruption, since they saw in the new heretical theories a justification of their infidelity towards their promise of celibacy (as priests) or of the solemn vow of chastity (as religious).”

Schneider’s logic is clear: there is a simple correlation, if not causation, between personal moral depravity (particularly of a sexual nature) and the heretical devolution of the morally profligate individual. According to Schneider, if clerics are sexually licentious, their orthodoxy sooner or later turns into heresy.

So what do historians say about lustful, licentious, and libidinous clergy in the 16th century — the period of the Reformation? Were the Protestant Reformers among these lewd and lascivious clerics?

Let’s begin with the Nuns

In 1509, eight years before Luther’s 95 Theses would spark the Reformation, the Venetian diarist Girolamo Priuli delivered a searing indictment of Venice’s convents describing them as brothels and the nuns as whores. “There was no other remedy than to burn down the said nunneries together with the nuns for the sake of the Venetian state,” wrote Priuli.

Venetian troops had suffered a crushing defeat on May 14, 1509, at the hands of French troops in the battle of Agnadello, and Priuli interpreted the rout as a sign of God’s wrath against the endemic sexual immorality of the Catholic clergy.

Alongside Priuli’s portrait of the promiscuous convents, “equally familiar were depictions of the parish priest, living in sin with concubine and several children, or the lecherous friar molesting penitents in the confessional,” writes historian Mary Laven in her peer-reviewed article “Sex and Celibacy in Early Modern Venice.”

“On the eve of the Protestant Reformation, it seemed as though the celibate ideal, promulgated for centuries by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, had become one of the principal liabilities of the Catholic church,” Laven notes. Even priests who remained faithful to the Catholic Church like Erasmus, the nemesis of Luther, lampooned the fiasco of clerical celibacy.

“Historians like Ruth Karras and P. J. Goldberg have found that a significant segment of the prostitute population in England catered specifically to the clergy,” observes Prof. Michelle Armstrong-Partida in her study on clerical concubinage in Spain. In France, municipalities frequently issued bans prohibiting priests from entering city brothels “indicating that clergymen were frequent customers.”

What about the Popes?

Elsewhere, I’ve written about the orgy-loving Borgia pope, Alexander VI, and his “Banquet of Chestnuts” hosted at the Apostolic Palace in 1501 (less than two decades before Luther would post his theses). At the bacchanalia organised by the pope’s bastard, Cardinal Cesare Borgia, the 70-year-old pontiff and his clerics were entertained by 50 whores who were asked to disrobe and forage on the floor for the chestnuts as a prelude to a sexual binge that would make Hugh Hefner blush.

Renaissance chronicler Bishop Johann Burchard records in his Diarium Sive Rerum Urbanarum Commentarii how the winners were those “who made love with those courtesans the greatest number of times.”

Pope Julius II (1503-1513) who followed soon after Alexander VI was a reputed sodomite. Priuli attests: “He brought along with him his catamites, that is to say, some very handsome young men with whom he was publicly rumoured to have intercourse, and he was said to be the passive partner and to like this gomorrhean vice much, a thing really to abhor in anybody.”

Julius II was probably bi-sexual. He “had fathered three daughters of his own while a cardinal,” top Catholic historian Eamon Duffy points out in his book Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, describing the “utterly secular character” of this pontiff of whom “it was said that there was nothing of the priest about him but the cassock, and he did not always wear that.”

In 1511, Julius II was condemned by the Council of Pisa as “this sodomite, covered with shameful ulcers.” It is hardly worth citing Protestant writings against the sexual licentiousness of the Reformation-era popes not only because of their polemical bias but because Catholic sources more than suffice to make the case for the homophile papacy of this period.

The icing on the pontifical cake, is Leo X, the pope who excommunicated Martin Luther. The Medici pope was elected because the cardinal-electors, who wanted a short-term pope, knew he was a homosexual who might soon die as a result of an anal fistula caused by “unsafe sex.” The fistula exploded while Cardinal de’ Medici was resident in the cramped quarters with his fellow-conclavists.

The Italian bishop, physician and historian, Paolo Giovio (1483-1552), in his biography of Leo X, De vita Leonis decimi, located the fistula on the papal posterior, adding with a touch of irony, that this “does not necessitate the presumption of a disgraceful cause.”

Leo X “did not escape the accusation of infamy, for the love he showed several of his [male] chamberlains — among the most high-born of Italy — smacked of scandal in its playful liberality,” Giovio records, while simultaneously praising Leo as a great leader.” Historian Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540) notes how Leo X was “was excessively addicted, and every day more shamelessly, to those pleasures which cannot be honestly named.”

Let’s not forget Pope Julius III (1550-1555) who, just four months after he became pontiff, named as cardinal his 17-year-old lover, Innocenzo Del Monte. Commenting on the story, the distinguished Italian historian Onofrio Panvinio characterised the pontiff as “puerorum amoribus implicitus” [entangled in love for boys].

Catholic Prelates Warned Against Mandatory Celibacy

Unsurprisingly, such rank sexual debauchery in the clergy was one of the key triggers for the Reformation. “Rome was a moral pig-sty, where everything, including the sacraments, was for sale,” Duffy remarks.

While Schneider posits a scurrilous correlation between clerical depravity and the Protestant Reformation, historians who have examined primary sources from periods when celibacy was made mandatory have produced a truckload of scholarship on the unholy trinity of clerical concubinage, pederasty, and sodomy. Their research points to a staggering correlation between the imposition of mandatory celibacy and priestly sexual profligacy.

Doesn’t Schneider know that it wasn’t just the Reformers who had protested against the forced and unbiblical mandate of clerical celibacy? It is fascinating to uncover the contentious debate that preceded the imposition of universal clerical celibacy on the Latin-rite clergy of the Roman Church at the Second Lateran Council in 1139.

Around 1060 AD, bishop Ulric of Imola urged Pope Nicolas II not to prohibit marriage for clergy, emphasising the biblical injunction for bishops, priests, and deacons to “be the husband of one wife” (1 Timothy 3, Titus 1). Since not all men called to the priesthood have the gift of celibacy, some will seek sexual release by “forcing themselves on their fathers’ wives, not abhorring the embraces of other men or even of animals,” Ulric warned.

A Treatise on Grace (ca. 1075 AD) predicted that by forbidding the “naturalness of marriage to one woman,” priests will be tempted to engage in “unnatural” (contra naturam) practices, including “cursed sodomitical fornication” (execrabilis sodomitica fornicatio). Serlo of Bayeux’s Defensio pro filiis presbyterorum complained that the “men who live the shameful, obscene lives of sodomites” invent laws against clerical marriage.

Reformation or Deformation?

These were not Protestant Reformers. Indeed, they preceded the Reformation by at least half a millennium. But Schneider, upset by Vatican II’s rebranding of Protestant “heretics” as “separated brethren” insists that the Reformers were “deformers.”

Schneider does name King Henry VIII, who, he says, “took mistresses” and married four women after his “legal marriage to Anne Boleyn,” but doesn’t mention that the English king, far from buying into the Protestant “heresy,” remained “ardently orthodox” as a Catholic and “had rapidly mobilised the best theologians in England to confute Luther and his associates,” as Duffy observes.

In the light of historical facts, Schneider’s logic ends up being pretty devastating for Catholicism. Given the endemic sexual promiscuity among popes, prelates, priests (and even nuns), Protestants might well turn around and ask Schneider if it was the development of post-Tridentine Catholic doctrine that was indeed heretical, given the near-total disregard of the Catholic clergy for their vow of celibacy.

Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.

Bishop Schneider’s False Witness Against the Reformers Isn’t Backed by Evidence

By Jules Gomes
Special to VIRTUEONLINE
August 29, 2024

Sexual immorality among the papacy and Catholic clergy was endemic during Luther’s Reformation.

“The Protestant revolution in Europe in the 16th century was almost entirely carried out by morally corrupt clergymen,” declares Bishop Athanasius Schneider, in a recent interview promoting his latest book Flee from Heresy: A Catholic Guide to Ancient and Modern Errors.

Bishop Schneider, who is one of the most respected figures in the world of Catholic traditionalism, does not offer a speck of evidence to substantiate his damning indictment of the Reformers. He does not name even one of these degenerate clerics. Is he thinking of Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Melanchthon?