John Wycliffe

“Oh, Mom, look!”

Cindy pointed towards the road. A few monks in their long, brown garb were standing by the gate, and they looked at the house.

“Oh, no! Not again!” Cindy heard her mother sigh.

She looked curiously at her mother. Why not? Those were holy men. They always gave a blessing when they saw you, and when you gave them something, they offered to pray for you.

Mother kept on hoeing between the vegetables. In the meantime she watched out of the corner of her eye to see if the men were coming to her house.

Surely enough! They were coming.

With a deep sigh she straightened up and waited for them.

“Good morning, ma’am. May the Lord bless you. And you are blessed, for you have a beautiful garden, and we beg you to give some for God’s humble servants.”

One of the monks looked over the rows of vegetables and nodded. Cindy could hardly see his eyes, his cheeks were so fat. His neck bulged above his collar. He had his hands folded in his cloak. Then he started to speak, too.

“We also come to beg for the taxes for our holy Father, the Pope. We collect the money every half year.”

Mother looked scared. “We don’t have money,” she said, and she thought about the little money they were saving for bread and for winter clothes. She couldn’t give that, could she?

“We will pray for you, ma’am, and if you will give us the money now, we will make sure that your sins of this month will be forgiven. The holy Father in Rome has signed this paper, which states that they will be forgiven. So if you have some money, you would be better off to give it now. Our poor brothers in the monastery also have to live while they are praying for the people.”

Cindy watched her mother walk into the house. The two monks looked at each other. Were they laughing? Cindy looked at them again. No, now they seemed very reverent again, and one of them laid his fat hand on her head.

“May the Lord bless you, too, my child.”

That felt good, Cindy thought. Oh, mother would have some money! See? There she came. Wasn’t that nice that now her sins would be forgiven? Now, for sure, she would go to heaven.

She watched the two monks going away. They could not walk very fast because they were wearing their heavy cloaks, and in those cloaks were their heavy bodies.

“You gave them the money? You should not have done that! Every day some of those men come here. They ask and ask. Now we don’t even have money to buy bread! It is a shame! And the children need warm clothes for the winter! We can’t buy those, either!” Father was very upset. Cindy could see it. She also saw the tears in her mother’s eyes.

Cindy started crying, too, and she pulled her father’s arm. “Those are holy men, Dad! They said so. And now they pray for us, and all our sins are forgiven.”

“Ah, child, I know, I know. You don’t know any better. That is what I always thought, too.”

Her father stopped and gave a deep sigh.

“We have to talk,” he said. “There are many things going on, and you should know about them. Call Janies. He will be finished with the chores by now.”

When James also was sitting at the table, Father started to talk. “I know that we are supposed to be reverent to the monks and the priests. There were a few in the past who really helped the people when they were sick, and they were respected. Many years ago our King John was so afraid of the Pope that he gave our country to him as a vassal state. So he acknowledged that the Pope was the supreme ruler in England. We had to pay a lot of money to the Pope, and he sent us thousands of monks, all strangers. Well, if they would have been truly holy men, it would have been good for our country, but, on the contrary, they were lazy men who only begged and robbed the people of their bread and money. You have seen it today.

“How do I know all these things? Well, I read a little pamphlet written by a man in Oxford. He is a professor there. His name is John Wycliffe, and he writes about all those monks. It is like a horde of locusts, he writes, they are parasites, who are too lazy to work. They are strangers from another country, and they undermine our English nation. And besides that, they hold all kinds of doctrines which are not in the Word of God. Forgiveness of sins belongs to God alone. Listen to what he writes: ‘Though you have priests and friars to sing for you, and though you each day hear many masses and go on pilgrimages all your life and give all your money to the priests, it shall not bring your soul to heaven.’ I’m sorry, Mother, but I think he is right.”

Father looked at Mother.

“I was so afraid of them,” she said softly.

“What would have happened if you would have refused?” Father asked.

“Oh, I think they would have cursed us.”

“They cannot do anything,” Father said grimly. “But that John Wycliffe, he is a friend of our new King Edward III. The Pope wanted to have even more taxes than in previous years, I heard, but when the king asked the noblemen, they refused. This king is not afraid of the Pope, and he said that King John did not have the right to give our nation to the Pope. England is an independent country, and we are not going to pay taxes to the Pope. So we don’t have to pay all those monks he sent here, either.”

Now James looked at his father. “Then we better throw all those monks into the sea,” he said with a mischievous smile.

“James!” Mother exclaimed, horrified.

“Oh, Mom, it’s just a joke,” James grinned.

“But how do we know that Professor Wycliffe is right?” Mother asked. Her voice trembled. “We don’t know what is in the Bible. We are not allowed to read it. The priests read the holy book for us, and they explain it.”

“I will find out more about it,” Father said.

— to be continued —

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