Sometimes, the best way to appreciate the history of the Church is to remember that the Church didn’t exist in a vacuum. It was part and parcel of everyday life. It no longer is, for many people, especially outside the South. Modern realities are no fit guide for thinking about life at the end of the Middle Ages, though.
Think about it: What would life be like if, right here in Marshall County and every county around us we had been engulfed in bitter, bloody warfare for the past 100 years? That is, since the Court House burned in 1915? The Depression, the growth of public schools, the building of the “new” courthouse, WW II, Korea, Viet Nam, radio, television: all these things mark the past 100 years. Try to imagine what it would have been like if none of that had happened. If there was no news except the War. If you can, then you will be able to get an idea of what life was like in Europe between 1337 and 1453. All war, all the time.
Then imagine if, at the same time, during almost the exact same Century, wave after wave of deadly infectious disease swept across the same landmass. “The plague” was actually a series of plagues; essentially three distinct diseases, bubonic, bubuleic and pneumonic plague, each and all as deadly as ebola is, today, and against which there was no treatment. If you caught it, you died. Virtually every village and town, and even isolated farms seemed to fall victim to it. As many as half the population of many localities died from it. Just burying the dead was a horrendous job. For a hundred years. Now, imagine both of these happening at the same time!
The only respite; the only solace most people had was the Church. Even though soldiers might often attack people at prayer, and even though Church may well have been where many people caught the plague, there was nowhere else to turn, and so the entire West became “Christendom”. There were few if any doctors outside the Clergy. There was little chance of escaping the armies, but what little there was, lay with the devoted local churchmen.
Then, imagine how it must have felt between 1307 and 1377 when the Pope, the highest clergyman of all, was forced to leave Rome and take up residency in France. During the next 70 years, seven successive popes lived there. Then, when the last of these moved back to Rome, a competing line of Avignon Popes was elected, so there were two, competing Popes, and for a time, there was even a third, compromise Pope elected. Only in 1417 was the Church able to get the Papal office settled down and back to functioning as the head of the Church.
So: for a hundred years, there’s a war going on right outside your door, waves of deadly disease are killing more than a third of the population every few years, and your Church is being torn apart by conflicts in leadership at the highest levels. Hmnnn. Sounds a lot like today, doesn’t it?