Leo X’s Corruption Was so Brazen and Cynical, it Kicked Off the Protestant Reformation
Pope Leo X (1475 – 1521) was Holy Father from 1513 until his death. A true Renaissance pope and prince, he helped transform Rome into a center of culture and the arts. However, his lavish spending on those pursuits bankrupted the Church, so he turned to the wholesale selling of indulgences to raise funds for his projects – a controversial practice that lowered his and the Church’s prestige. He was also brazen in his homosexual relationships, openly fawning upon and advancing the careers of his handsome male lovers. Between those trespasses and ignoring the backlash building against his and the Church’s corruption, Leo X contributed to the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation and the resulting dissolution of the western Church.
Born Giovanni di Lorenzo de Medici, this pope was the second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the greatest of Florence’s Medici rulers, and one of Renaissance Italy’s most powerful figures. His influential Medici connections paved the way for his rise in the Church hierarchy. He was made a lay cardinal in 1488, at age 13, and joined the College of Cardinals at age 17. Although he devoted most of time and energies to the affairs of the Medici family, whose head became after the deaths of his father and elder brother, he retained his influence in the Church. When the papal throne became vacant in 1513, he won the election and became Pope Leo X.
Lorenzo the Magnificent had been a huge patron of culture and the arts, and having grown up in his father’s court, the new pontiff was also passionate about the arts and culture. He spent lavishly as he went on a buying spree for the papal library, patronized the arts, kicked off a huge building project to beautify the Vatican, and accelerated the construction of Saint Peter’s Basilica. However, the splurging caused him to run out of money while he was in the middle of his greatest project, Saint Peter’s Basilica. To raise money, he turned to the selling of indulgences.
Indulgences were basically documents asserting that the pope would use his holy powers to get a dead person out of purgatory, or at least shorten his or her stay in that waiting room between heaven and hell. Previous popes had sold indulgences, but they had been more discreet about it, and sold them only to a select (and wealthy) few. Leo X went the Walmart route, and relying on volume to more than make up for the lowering of prices, sold indulgences at bargain basement rates that put them within the reach of the masses.
Soon, indulgence sellers were crisscrossing Christendom, hawking indulgences to all. One of the most notorious indulgence sellers was Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar who gained infamy for an oft-repeated phrase from his sales pitch: “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from Purgatory springs“. One of those upset by such cynicism was a professor of theology named Martin Luther, who wrote the Ninety Five Theses to address indulgences and other corrupt Church practices. Leo X however failed to take such criticisms seriously, thus contributing to the rise of Protestantism and the dissolution of the western church.