We have in a previous chapter briefly reviewed the Popes that were contemporaries of Luther.  Their character was stamped on the life of the Holy City:  The Popes and their following gave Rome its moral, or immoral, face.  The chroniclers of those days have described the existing conditions.  Luther need not have said one word about what wicked things he had seen and heard at Rome, either ten years, or twenty years, or thirty years after he had been there, and the world would still know the record of the residence of the Popes.  Luther really saw very little of what he might have seen, and it is probable that he has told less.  But what he did see and hear are facts.  He did not grasp their full meaning nor see their true bearing at the time.  The real import of his Roman experiences dawned on him at a later period.  He spoke as a man of things that he had seen as a child.  But that does not alter the facts.

Luther was shocked at the levity of Italian monks who were babbling faulty Latin prayers which they did not understand and remarked laughing to him:  “Never mind; the Holy Ghost understands us, and the devil flees apace.”

Luther’s confidence in the boasted unity of the Roman Church was somewhat shaken when he discovered that he could not read mass in any church in the territory at Milan, because there the Ambrosian form of service was prescribed while he had been trained to the Gregorian.

Luther shook his head at the freedom of certain public manners of the Italians which reminded him of dogs and of what he had read about Kerkyra.

Luther heard of a Lenten collation, probably at the abbey of San Benedetto de Larione, where the word “fast” had to be spelled with an e as the second letter.

The loquaciousness, spicy talk, blasphemy, dishonesty, treachery, quarrelsomeness, and deadly animosities of the Italians, Luther regards as strange, considering that they live so near to the Holy City.

He wondered why the Italians do not permit their women to go out of their houses except deeply veiled.

He finds that the Italians show no respect for their beautiful churches and the divine service conducted in them.  Even on great festivals the magnificent cathedrals are almost empty, the worshipers are chatting with one another while the service is in progress.  Even quarrels are settled at these holy places, sometimes with the knife.  When there is a burial, they hurry the corpse to the grave, not even the relatives being in attendance.

He is grieved at the irreligious manner in which the priests at Rome read mass.  They hurry through the performance with incredible rapidity.  They crowd each other away from the altar in their haste to get their performance finished.  “Hurry, hurry!  Begone!  Come away!” he hears them calling to one-another.  Sometimes two priests are reading mass at one altar at the same time.  They had finished the whole mass before Luther had reached the Gospel in the service of the mass.  And then they would receive money from the bystanders who had come in and had watched them.  In a half hour a priest could get a handful of silver.  Luther refused such gifts.