Word for the wise ©
Our journey through the alphabet has brought us as far as I and the Word for the wise © today has been determined by the goings on up in Cologne at the World Youth Day. For many fundamentalists, the scenes of all those young men and women dancing and singing and chanting "Benedetto!" is a source of great scandal and, to top it all, the Vatican announcement that indulgences would be granted to the pilgrims must have sent old Martin Luther spinning in his grave. After all, it is said that the manner in which indulgences (release from the temporal penalties for sin through the payment of money) were being sold to raise money for the building of St Peter's in Rome was the final straw that sent him nailing his 95 theses to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg in 1517.
idol may not sound incendiary to our ears today, but the Act of Supremacy (1534) in which King Henry VIII made the final break with Rome by a 'coup d'eglise' brought the fanatics out of the woodwork. In that year, John Bale published a pamphlet Yet a course at the Romyshe foxe in which he referred to Catholics as "flythye, whoremongers, murtherers, thieves, raveners, idolatours, lyars, dogges, swine ... and very devils incarnate." Another pamphleteer denounced "this mischievous idol of the mass" and "idol" became applied polemically to images of divine beings and saints: "He set vp in the same place another idol of S. Iohan Baptyst" (1545).Of the Puritan extremists who set about defacing "idolatrous" images in churches, William Dowsing was the most notorious of all. He noted his grim pleasure at the destruction he wreaked on local churches in his Suffolk Journal (1643-4): "Clare, Jan.6. We brake down 1000 Pictures superstitious; I brake down 200; 3 of God the Father, and 3 of Christ and the Holy Lamb, and 3 of the Holy Ghost like a Dove with Wings."
Next week, it's "J" and a choice between "journalism" and "junta".
