Probably the most necessary homilies preached in regards to the shopping for and promoting of sacred issues was written by Pope Gregory within the late sixth century.2 In a textual content that weaves collectively a number of New Testomony passages—together with each Matthew 10:8 and Jesus’ cleaning of the temple within the Gospel of John—Gregory recalled how Jesus used a whip of cords to drive out these shopping for and promoting doves.3 Because the dove symbolized the Holy Spirit, Gregory argued, the Church should likewise drive out monetary transactions surrounding the sacraments, which had been freely given and due to this fact have to be freely provided. Of explicit concern for him was the shopping for and promoting of ordinations to the priesthood.
Regardless that this homily is among the many first full-throated critiques of simony, his argument drew on earlier foundations.
The primary recorded Christian confrontation with this situation seems within the Acts of the Apostles. There we hear of the entrepreneurial magician Simon Magus, who was so impressed by the apostles conferring the Holy Spirit via the laying on of arms that he provided to buy this energy from them (Acts 8:18–24). Saint Peter replies: “Could your silver perish with you, since you thought you can get hold of God’s present with cash! You don’t have any half or share on this, on your coronary heart will not be proper earlier than God” (Acts 8:20).
Although Simon repents, his therapy of grace as a commodity would give its identify to this persistent tendency in Christian historical past. Simony, due to this fact, refers back to the buy and sale of religious issues.4
Because the Church grew in wealth and energy over the following few centuries, simony proliferated.5 Proof of this may be seen within the earliest conciliar paperwork. Canon 48 of the Council of Elvira (c. 309 CE) prohibited inserting cash within the baptismal shell “in order that the priest doesn’t appear to promote for cash what he has acquired freely.”6 Likewise, Canon 2 of the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE) condemned bishops who ordained for cash as placing “to sale a grace which can’t be bought.”7 But the recurrence of those prohibitions factors to the ubiquity of such gross sales.
Seeing that the Church had develop into, in his phrases, “a market” and “a den of thieves,” Gregory’s homily in 590 denounced this peculiar type of ecclesiastical entrepreneurialism. Much more hanging, nevertheless, is Gregory’s declare that simony will not be merely a sin however a heresy. In describing the “simoniacal heresy,” Gregory means that the transactions signify false educating—for they counsel that God’s grace could be commodified and that the Church’s function is to behave as a dealer of divine favor.
Returning to the query of what’s the hurt, actually, of promoting a ticket to the Eucharist – this begins to level towards a solution. When the church sells tickets to a Eucharist, expenses membership charges for entry to the sacraments, or requires fee for reconciliation, it not solely violates Jesus’ educating that his disciples should give freely what has been acquired as grace by God. It additionally falsely teaches that God’s grace could be commodified and that the church is its dealer.
