Unbelievable? Not at all, provided that they “invented” also “the Absolution certificates” to deceive the “naïve, uneducated, petty women, children and slaves in despair” (Tertullian) and to get richer! In this article, we read that Catholic monks in the Middle Ages ran brothels and were paid to pray as representatives of wealthy sinners!
Actually, the whole fraud was originally led by a monk named Benedict, who decided to live as a hermit. As his example was followed by many others, he had to find more monasteries to house them since to the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages, prayer was the key to the door of Heaven and to achieve this, one had to glorify God with prayers.
The “philosophy” of that fraud, was to establish a system of exchanging money for prayers. Those who could afford it, could buy a place in Heaven by paying the monks to pray for their own sins. However, that posed some problems, mainly to those who violated the commandment “do not kill”, like the soldiers, commanders, emperors or kings who were responsible for massacres.
For example, William the Conqueror, who conquered England in 1066 was responsible of the death of more than 10,000 people. The church’s verdict was that in order to atone he had to pray for 120 days for each dead person and William would have to pray for 3,300 years.
William found the solution by founding dozens of monasteries throughout England and staffed them with monks, whose sole occupation was to pray for his soul! This trend was followed by many other naïve “sinful people” resulting, monasteries to amass untold wealth and turned into centers of power.
The abbots ended up having their own army and brothels that were a “golden business” in the 15th and 16th centuries and many of them belonged to the church. Many of the clergy were even regular patrons. Ruth Mazo Karas, a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, in her book, “Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in medieval England,” mentions that Bishops ran brothels in London and Westminster and comments that according to the lists, clergy made up 20% of the customers! In 13th-century France, the church accepted alms for prostitutes, because it recognized that they chose the profession out of necessity. To justify their stance, they used Mary Magdalene as a symbol.
Any comment on the “benevolent” fraud of the RCC and not only?
R&I ~ MJM
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