The Divine Comedy

Mind you, the Church was doing some seedy things at the time, if I remember correctly.

The medieval Catholic Church was full of corrupt shitbags that were anything but holy.

Bias/10

It would be easier for us to understand what you meant if you used full sentences (or sentences at all, really).

Not every single priest, of course, but the institution in general and its high-ranking members (bishops, cardinals and the Pope himself) were filthy rich and extremely corrupt in the period between the Crusades and the Reformation.

Yeah, Simonists get their own pocket in the Malebolge.

Indeed, much of Comedy is satire.

Yeah, the medieval Catholic Church was not a pretty thing.

Then again, pretty much everything sucked back then, comparatively...

Hence the "Dark Ages" title.

I thought the Church being extremely corrupt at the time was common knowledge.

Ah, well. ***THE MORE YOU KNOW***

Of course, it's not like the Church has changed.

@Firebert: Dude, Petrarch coined the term "Dark Ages" to describe how people of the last thousand years hadn't written nice Latin. It went on to mutate to mean holding medieval times in contempt for whatever the speaker feels like a snob about. Thus historians have abandoned it even for the period from the last Western Emperor to Otto I and Hugh Capet, let alone the age of Dante, Scholasticism, and Gothic cathedrals.

Dammit, Rott, I was just making a joke, no need to bring out your literary expertise. It has no place in a thread about a classical work of literature!

@Milos: Like Catholic church had changed during the centuries.

@ten: As a Catholic, I'm going to just ignore thy trollage there.

I KNOW ALL ABOUT THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

I'VE SEEN DOUBT!

I'll say this, while the cases of molestation are certainly an unfortunate reality that I'm not even going to try to keep as part of the topic here but will acknowledge as something that's happened among some priests who obviously weren't practicing what they preach, the Hollywood Nuns stereotype is so outdated it's not even funny. Yeah, that was around in my dad's day (and he indeed has told me plenty of stories of harsh nuns he had as teachers), but if there are any like that around anymore, they're certainly pretty rare these days. Hell, even nuns as teachers aren't as common, at least in my experience. In my Catholic high school there were all of two nuns, one of which was the school's founder and the other of which was a Spanish teacher.

I was just joking about Doubt, dude.

Oh, no, I realized that. I just felt like soapboxing there.

Excuse me, but... does anyone of you above live in Italy? Do you always have to read every fine print while filling your tax modules to avoid the littlest cent of yours to go to an institution that keeps blocking scientific development and 70 years ago supported the Fascist dictatorship without even paying for it? Have your parents been slapped because they were left-handed? I don't think so.

And then the thread blew up.

And then we all went to Hell. Which, however, is the cantica with the most interesting characters, so...

edited 19th Dec '11 11:03:18 AM by Belfagor

The Divine Comedy's hell or Dante's Inferno's hell?

Because the second one has room for ass-kicking.

The Divine Comedy itself contains enough badassery. Also, Limbo isn't that bad. I'd stick with the original.

I think Limbo just might be the most horrifying of the Circles, merely by its implications. I mean, most of the Circles at least have something vaguely bad to justify their existence. Limbo just has good people who weren't Christians and babies.

~shakes head~