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Church Corruption In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales

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In “The Canterbury Tales” Chaucer illustrates the corruption of the church through the religious characters in both the tales and the prologue and their obsession with money. Illustrating the fact that medieval England, the church had a big impact on the lives of people due to them being able to “read” the bible. In many cases, this was uses to manipulate people into giving their money to church. Throughout the tales, people are shown to stand up to the church and beat them at their own game and this provides the ideal response to church corruption. In the story, both the characters on the pilgrimage and the characters within the stories themselves display elements of church corruption. Out of all the characters on the journey, the Pardoner is the most obvious case of a corrupt member of the church. The prologue of the Pardoner illustrates his obsession with material wealth and the hypocrisy of his job. During this drunken state, he rants to the company that “Covetousness is both the root and stuff of all I preach” (p. 243) this oxymoronic phrase illustrates his corruption. Covetousness refers to one of the ten commandments; You shall not covet your neighbors …show more content…

The Friar ends by telling the Summoner that he should turn back to Jesus who will be “your champion and your knight”, this military metaphor refers to Jesus’s ability to protect one’s soul from temptation, like a chivalrous knight follows the code and protects the weak. This implies that the easily corrupted Summoner’s need Jesus’s protection and help to stop giving in to the temptation of corruption. Furthermore, the Friar also warns the Summoner what will happen if he continues down the road stating “learn repentance ere the devil get you.” representing Chaucer’s belief that if the church does not change, it will be punished by

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This quote reflects the greed of the Pardoner and his hypocrisy. The Pardoner is a human representation of greed. He works by abusing the people’s trust in church officials by selling false relics at outrageous prices. The Pardoner openly states that he only works for his own gain, not to help the Church. The Pardoner’s tale follows three travelers betraying each other to get as much wealth that they can.

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The Pardoner as viewed by most is a greedy man. He is considered by some the epitome of greedy and a mal-intent. When he is telling his story of the three men who vowed one day to kill Death, and ended up killing each other over money, the Pardoner is inadvertently giving the audience a description of himself. The Pardoner is telling the audience that he is a man driven by greed, but a pure greed he is fearful of turning malicious. The pardoner begins by saying “I preach nothing but for greed of gain and use the same old text, as bold as brass, Radix malorum est cupiditas and thus I preach every vice I make a living out of- avarice…

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The Pardoner also uses his sermons to deliver the hypocritical message of greed being the root of all evil to bolster “his phony showmanship as a Christian” (Sparkes) and gain more money. Both of them do not care about exploiting other people’s beliefs in order to acquire monetary gain and both “represent the wider extent and abuse of ecclesiastical power and influence” (Thompson), which most characters in The Canterbury Tales

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A pardoner is a man who sells religious relics of forgiveness to sinners. However, Chaucer’s Pardoner is an untrustworthy character who sells fake tokens for a profit. He boasts of his great ability to preach, and ironically, his favorite topic is greed. “

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Chaucer wrote the book: The Canterbury Tales, in which a group of men going on a journey all tell a tale. Within each tale is a moral lesson as well as each tale consists of a corrupt action committed within the church and is conveyed by those kind of characters within the story. One of the tales that Chaucer tells in his book is called: The pardoner 's tale. Within this tale the pardoner (who is telling the tale) is a preacher who often gives sermons but admits that he does is solely for money and not to condemn people of their sins. (Greed)

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He uses relics that forgive and remove a person's sins, but for a large price. This is another time where the church is failing. Chaucer cant expose how unethical they are being. They are selling the people of the catholic church relics that make them believe they will be better for it. “People do bad things in their lives.

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The reader should now know Geoffrey Chaucer disapproves of the Church and deems it to almost only be full of hypocrites because of people such as the Friar and the Pardoner being a part of it and doing what sinful deeds they do against God and the followers who they are supposed to be protecting and taking care of. If it was not for the Parson existing, or even clergy members, then the generalization of him believing the entire Catholic Church was a hypocrisy would be entirely true, but that is not the case. Still, maybe Chaucer made such an implication because he had a bad past with the Church, but then again in the story he was traveling to a religious shrine, so he must not have such a bad past when it comes to Catholicism. There must have been a root to his disdain towards the Church as in, he was conned by a pardoner or a friar or even grew up seeing only hypocrisy from the Catholic Church, which could have molded his opinion of it. Instead of making, The Canterbury Tales, a full on attack against the Church, he decided to make it a comical, satirical piece, which was a very intelligent move by him.

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Historically, the church in the medieval ages was corrupt and money hungry. Geoffrey Chaucer depicts this corruption through The Pardoner’s Tale. Specifically, the Pardoner was a prime example of abusing the power of the church, “I preach, as you have heard me say before/And tell a hundred lyin mockeries more”(Chaucer 142). The Pardoner admits that he follows the narrative of corruption in the

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