Woe, therefore, to the modern spiritual and secular princes who themselves practise self-indulgence, who give to their subjects a bad example and do not reprove them or, if they reprove them, do this out of avarice! Such, without doubt, are suspended from office by God, for it is written in the papal law, Decretals, 3, de vita et honestate [Friedberg, 2: 455]:[1] "We command your brotherhood that, as far as the clerics of your[2] jurisdiction are concerned, who are in the subdiaconate or the orders above it, if they have mistresses, ye should studiously take care to admonish them that they remove from themselves these women who least of all ought to have been admitted. But, if they refuse to acquiesce, ye shall suspend them from their ecclesiastical benefices until they make condign satisfaction, and if they who are suspended presume to keep these women, ye shall see to it that ye remove them permanently from those benefices." Because there is no defect in the law but in the superiors who ought to practise it, therefore, the pope in the preceding chapter says that prelates who may presume to hold on in their iniquities to such persons, especially for the sake of getting money or some other temporal good, them we wish to subject to the same punishment. And it is said by the authority of St. Gregory, Dist. 83 [Friedberg, 1: 293]: "If any bishop shall assent to the fornication of clerics for a price or at their petitions and not assail their authority, he ought to be suspended from his office."[3] And this suspen-
- ↑ The heading of the chapter in the Decretals is: "The cohabitation of clerics with women." The quotation is from Alexander III's letter to the archbishop of Canterbury. A part of the letter, not quoted by Huss, speaks "of the depraved and detestable custom which had prevailed in England for a long time, of clerics having mistresses in their houses." William the Conqueror did not enforce celibacy and a council at Winchester, 1076, allowed priests already married to retain their wives, prohibiting marriages thereafter. Councils under Anselm, 1102, 1108, ordered priests to dismiss their concubines, but Eadmer, Anselm's biographer, declares that few priests observed the chastity Anselm called for, and Pascal II, writing to Anselm, said most of the English priests were married. In Bohemia the law of celibacy was also late of enforcement.
- ↑ Huss's text wrongly has nostræ—our.
- ↑ I have restored some of the omitted words from the canon law for the sake of clearness.
