What are Christians to make of corruption in the history of the Church? There are two common approaches. The first we can dismiss without much consideration. This is the tack taken by those conservative apologists who more or less deny that the Church is ever corrupt. The Inquisition, for example, wasn’t corrupt, because it was the secular princes who actually executed heretics. Charlemagne wasn’t corrupt when he forcibly baptized the Saxons, because this was the way things were done back then. The late medieval practices surrounding indulgences weren’t corrupt, because the theology of indulgences is sound. And so on. Such writers, of course, usually allow a bit of corruption into their story, but it is always minimal, always in nonessentials, always found where the Church’s true nature isn’t implicated. The Church, after all, is holy. I am sympathetic to this approach because those who advance it clearly love the Church and want to protect her. I often find myself falling into this way of thinking. But though this approach is pious, it is simplistic and clearly wrong. Church history is full of corruption.
