(1) To manipulate religious conviction into a political commodity is a contemporary form of simony .(2) He also outlawed simony , the practice of buying and selling church posts.(3) Selling something that belonged to God constituted the sin of simony .(4) The Council passed reforming decrees in keeping with the Cluniac reform movement, including ones concerning simony and clerical marriage.(5) Here, it was a question of uniformity of liturgical observance, of conformity to what Turgot called u2018the universal custom of holy churchu2019 rather than of Gregorian reform in the sense of attacks on simony and clerical marriage.(6) At the same time he sought to check the simoniacal practices of the apostolic chamber, and in connection with this to introduce a simpler and more economical manner of life into his court.(7) Archbishop Laud and his allies, by deciding such arrangements in the Church were simoniac , needlessly disturbed the retirement of elderly clergymen.(8) The persecution by the simoniacal archbishop of Rheims, Manasses, hastened his resolve to enter a life of solitude.(9) Clement died in 1314, and the poet predicts that he shall fall to the pocket of the simoniacal popes to cram down his predecessor Boniface VIII who came from the town of Anagni.(10) His simoniac politics and scandalous behaviour was branded by Savonarola, a Dominican friar of Florence, who during his homilies called him u2018simoniac, heretic and unfaithfulu2019.(11) We had, to some extent, diminished the simoniacal and infamous trade in masses; but unfortunately we had not destroyed it; and I know that today it has revived.(12) Dante sees there barrators, sowers of discord, counterfeiters, misusers of public funds, and simoniac popes.(13) He re-ordained many men who had been ordained by simoniacal bishops.(14) The Comedy was put on the Index in 1614, with the injunction that certain passages be expurgated, including Inferno XIX, 48-117 ( simoniac popes).(15) The validity of priestly ordinations administered by simoniac bishops proved a serious problem, because most theologians held that simony prostituted the sacrament of ordination.
