Satirical Dialogue on the Dutch Pope Adrian VI, 1522
“So, a cardinal, a priest, and a Swiss Guard meet on the side of the road . . .” This is one of six separate printings of this popular satirical “conversation piece,” depicted as a dialogue between an abbot of Trier, a papal courtier, and a suspicious-looking monk. Their imagined conversation took place on August 28, 1522, just one day before the new Dutch pope-elect, Adrian VI, deeply unpopular in Italy (though not in German lands to the north), was to enter Rome and be crowned the last non-Italian pope before John Paul II.
In the pamphlet the weird-looking, in truth diabolical and claw-footed, monk taunts supporters of both the old medieval Roman Catholic Church and the newly inaugurated Lutheran faith in equal measure. It castigates the shameful mores of the Roman court under all of the three preceding popes, most energetically the lavish and extravagant lifestyle of Adrian’s immediate forbear, the notorious Medici pope Leo X. The hero of the story is actually Pope Adrian VI himself, whose subsequent attempts to reform the papal court elicit complaints from the abbott and the papal courtier. The author Gengenbach was an equal-opportunity satirist, however, for he inveighed against Martin Luther with equal derision for his apparent lack of both Christian humility and charity. Because of the misunderstanding, widespread among the common peoples of northern Europe at the time, inspired by his novel and often complex and contradictory writings, Luther had emerged in the eyes of many as none other than a servant of the devil—a sower of heresy set upon imperiling the salvation of the unlettered.
Although Adrian’s papacy lasted only eighteen months and was marked by few successes, his pontificate was nonetheless of great historical significance because of its departure from the secular and worldly paths followed by the office’s recent past incumbents. Adrian also embarked on a program of church reform, seeking advice from humanists (most notably his friend and countryman, the arch-humanist Desiderius Erasmus) and churchmen. Rather than calling for an ecumenical council to effect major change, Adrian chose to reform the church by applying an executive, top-down policy that, in the end, proved to be an impossible task for the sixty-three-year-old pope. In his attempts to reform the abuses of the church—in particular the still lucrative trade in indulgences that Luther had so vociferously condemned—Adrian was repeatedly hampered by the very entrenched, profit-minded cardinals who had elected him in the first place. And, while he acknowledged that the nascent Reformation was, in part, a symptom of corruption within the Roman Catholic hierarchy, he still treated Protestant reformers as heretics seeking to destroy the unity of the Mother Church. His efforts to unify Catholic princes behind a massive military confrontation with the Muslim Turks also failed, as when the citadel of the Knights of Rhodes fell to a Muslim siege in 1522.
Romans rarely took to a foreign-born pope, least of all to a Dutchman who had been the one-time tutor to the Hapsburg emperor Charles V and thus was tainted with suspicion of Spanish sympathies. The present satire demonstrates just how divided and, in ways, ripe for caricature the confessional scene had become within five years of Luther’s momentous publication of his antipapal “95 Theses” nailed on the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
D.M. van Abbé, “Development of Dramatic Form in Pamphilus Gengenbach,” The Modern Language Review 45, no.1 (January 1950), 46-62; Wim Decock, “Adrian of Utrecht (1459-1523) at the crossroads of law and morality: conscience, equity, and the legal nature of Early Modern practical theology,” The Legal History Revie, 81 (2013), 573-93; Han Hulscher, “The Pontificate of Adrian VI (9 January 1522-14 September 1523),” Fragmenta, vol.4 (2010), 47-66; M.W.F. Stone, “Adrian of Utrecht and the University of Louvain: Theology and the Discussion of Moral Problems in the Late Fifteenth Century,” Traditio 61 (2006), 247-87.
