The Godfather And The Priest

The Godfather and the Priest

She was the crown jewel of Europe and the birthplace of the Renaissance. In this magical city, banking families controlled the wealth of the world, Michelangelo created his art, Galileo pondered the movements of the solar system, Dante studied poetry, and Machiavelli tutored princes on how to wield power. Surely, Florence stood at the crossroads of history.

Yet behind the scenes, a puppet master pulled the strings. He was the boss of bosses, the godfather of Florence—Lorenzo the Magnificent, patriarch of the Medici banking cartel and the richest man in Europe. In public, he was a great patron of the arts and church. Because of his largesse, artists like Michelangelo, Botticelli, and Leonardo da Vinci were able to make the world more beautiful. He also bankrolled the soaring cathedrals that made Florence the envy of Christendom.

But anyone who scratched beneath the thin veneer of Renaissance beauty would find Lorenzo’s Florence to be a Hollywood spectacular of decadence and drag, prostitutes and political graft, where nothing and nobody could be trusted. Lorenzo supported an unspeakably corrupt pope in order to elevate his own nephew, Giulio, to the papacy. At Lorenzo’s insistence, the pope made fourteen-year-old Giulio a cardinal. When Giulio later became pope, he would fill offices of the church with hoodlums from the Medici family and would make the Vatican treasury his personal piggy bank.

Yet during Lorenzo’s age of gilded decadence, a reformer rose in Florence—the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola. This firebrand thundered against the worldliness of Florentine Christians and exposed church corruption. Some fifteen thousand people regularly packed the great cathedral in Florence to hear him preach. Repentant people brought their opulence to the city square to be burned in what Savonarola called “the bonfires of the vanities.” This Renaissance “John the Baptist” called for Lorenzo to repent and the Borgia pope, Alexander, to step down.

The Borgias reacted with fury. Pope Alexander excommunicated Savonarola. His son, Cesare, rushed to Florence to orchestrate the friar’s burning at the stake. Shortly before his martyrdom, Savonarola gave an amazing prophecy: “It matters little what you do to me today. Within forty years a man will rise up in the north to bring a reformation that can’t be stopped.” Some twenty years later, during the papacy of Lorenzo’s son, Martin Luther rose in the north country of Germany to spark a reformation that couldn’t be stopped. Today Lorenzo the Magnificent lies forgotten in an ornate tomb while simple friars and monks like Savonarola and Luther are celebrated. Not far from Lorenzo’s mausoleum, a vendor sells a T-shirt that the godfather of Florence, the Borgia gang, and the corrupt popes would despise. But Savonarola and Luther would probably buy and wear the shirt with this slogan:

Your ego is not your amigo.

When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.

Acts 4:13, NIV