What the medieval church got wrong
An honest reckoning
The medieval church built Chartres and burned Jan Hus. It produced Thomas Aquinas and the Albigensian Crusade. It gave the world Julian of Norwich and the bonfire of the vanities. Francis of Assisi and the Inquisition lived in the same century, in the same institution, answering to the same papacy.
An honest account of the medieval church requires holding all of it.
What it got wrong:
It confused institutional power with spiritual authority, treating the papacy's claim to universal temporal jurisdiction as a theological given rather than a historically developed claim. It used violence against theological dissent — burning Hus, launching crusades, establishing inquisitions — in ways that contradict the example of the one it claimed to represent. It restricted access to scripture in ways that served institutional control rather than the spiritual formation of ordinary believers. It accumulated wealth on a scale that made Dominic's critique perpetually relevant and the church's witness to the poor perpetually compromised. It tolerated and sometimes participated in the persecution of Jews in ways that should produce permanent grief.
These are not peripheral failures. They are central ones. They are the reasons the Reformation happened and why it needed to happen.
The church that produced Aquinas and Julian also produced the conditions that made Luther necessary. Both things are true.
“Lord, have mercy on this church which has strayed so far from your way.”
— A prayer for the church, medieval
“For the time has come for judgment to begin at the house of God. If it begins first at us, what will happen to those who don't obey the gospel of God?”
Judgment begins at the household of God. The church is not exempt from honest assessment of its failures — it is more obligated to it than any other institution, because it claims to represent the one who is Truth.
The honest reckoning with the medieval church's failures is not an attack on the faith. It is an expression of it — the conviction that the truth matters enough to be told even about the institution that bears it.
The church that cannot acknowledge its own failures is the church that is most at risk of repeating them. The church that confesses them — naming specifically what was wrong and why — is the church that has learned something.
What are the specific failures of the church in your own generation that you are positioned to name honestly? And does your community have the courage to name them before history names them for you?