Doctor Faustus Religion Quotes Page 3

Here, Pope Adrian charges his cardinals with determining a punishment for Bruno, a Saxon man who has been declared pope by the German emperor. The Council of Trent was a meeting of bishops and cardinals that occurred every once in a while between 1545 and 1563 as a response to the challenges of the Reformation. Throughout the medieval period, the Catholic Church had all kinds of problems, the most common of which were divisions within the Church that occurred when people couldn't agree upon a Pope. The character of Bruno is supposed to be the product of one such a division.

Bruno has claimed that one of Pope Adrian's predecessors, Julius, recognized the Holy Roman Emperor as his lord, which is so not cool in Adrian's book. But in his response, Adrian contradicts himself, which doesn't make his argument look so sound. First, he says that Julius's decrees were invalid because he gave the Church too much power. Then he's all, "the papal office is infallible" (unable to make a mistake). But wait—if the papal office is infallible, how could Pope Julius's decrees have been invalid? This guy, like Faustus, could have used a logic class or two.

Pope Adrian's Catholic Church believed that Jesus gave the Pope the power to save and condemn souls. That means that, when it comes down to it, the decision to either forgive a sinner or kick him out of the Church altogether (a practice called excommunication) was with the Pope. To gain the Pope's forgiveness, folks would buy indulgences, or forgiveness for sins. Many folks felt that this practice amounted to nothing more than people buying their tickets to heaven, to put it bluntly, and this practice was one of the main things that members of the Protestant Reformation objected to when it came to the Catholic Church. This passage shows the Pope using the power to save or condemn souls in just the way the Reformation claimed it did—to gain power, and make all the world "stoop."