acknowledging that authority. In 1303, he died as a prisoner in
the Vatican.o In 1309, the French pope Clement V took up residence in
Avignon, a town in the southern region of France, beginning
what’s known as the “Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” a
period of more than a century when the popes resided outside
of Rome.o The death of Gregory XI in 1378 resulted in a divided papacy,
with Clement VII reigning at Avignon and Urban VI in Rome.
The “Great Schism” of pope and antipope continued until the
Council of Constance in 1414 and was not completely resolved
until 1417.Extreme Responses
• Such extreme circumstances generated and seemed (at least to
some) to justify extreme behavior, even beyond that generated by
the sheer need to survive in famine and plague. Christians seemed
to have lost their moral bearings.
• Until the 12th century, bishops had followed the advice of Bernard
of Clairvaux with respect to heretics: “Faith should come through
persuasion rather than force,” but that reasonable position changed
with the decree Ad abolendam of Pope Lucius III in 1184. The
initiative is all the more severe when we remember that heresy was
not nearly the threat to the church in the 14th century that it had been
in the 2nd and 3rd, when only rhetoric was used as a weapon.
o Lucius declared that bishops were to make inquisition for
heresy in their dioceses and hand heretics over to secular
authority for punishment.o When this local process proved ineffective, Pope Gregory IX
took control of the inquisition around 1233, using members
of the new mendicant orders as inquisitors. The mendicant
inquisitors were answerable only to the papacy, not to local