With power comes corruption

Dear Editor, Your editorial (“One Church but a very different Catholicism”, IC 08/01/2015) was an important event. To read in a Catholic paper that “History proves that, when the Church lusts after political and secular power, the Gospel is soon relegated”, is to pinpoint the dilemma upon whose horns the Church has been impaled ever since Constantine. I’m sure historians amongst your readers can cite earlier examples, but compare this from the late 14th Century, by the English poet William Langland:

“When the kindness of Constantine

gave the Holy Church endowments

in lands and leases, lordships and servants,

the Romans heard an angel cry on high above them,

This day dos ecclesiae has drunk venom

and all who have Peter’s power are poisoned forever.”

(The Vision of Piers Plowman, Passus XV, modern translation)

Perhaps some of your columnists could explore this theme, which deserves to be examined at length.

Yours etc.,

Peter Household,

Mitchelstown, Co. Cork.