Roman Catholic Church

The Roman Catholic Church is represented in the tales not as a single acting body but through the people and practices by which its authority reaches everyday life: the pope’s decisions, abbots and friars, convent communities, church burial, and the devotions of ordinary believers. These episodes make the distinction between institutional authority and popular religious belief especially vivid. Clerics may direct the rituals through which reputations are made, yet those rituals do not necessarily establish the truth of what the crowd believes.

Offices and Authority

The pope stands at the institutional center of the episode of Ghino di Tacco and the Abbot of Cluny. The abbot, one of the richest prelates in the world, is travelling with an imposing household to seek treatment at the baths of Siena when Ghino captures him and his retinue. The abbot initially resists, but eventually submits to the journey to Ghino’s castle. After Ghino treats him generously, the abbot returns to Rome and asks Pope Boniface VIII to restore Ghino to papal favour. The pope agrees to receive him securely; he later makes Ghino a knight of the Knights Hospitaller and grants him a grand priory. The episode presents papal power as capable of converting an outlaw’s standing into an accepted religious office, with the abbot’s testimony and intervention prompting that change.

The encounter also turns on an explicit contrast between formal authority and conduct. Ghino is a robber who has raised Radicofani against the Roman Church, while the abbot is a powerful prelate; nevertheless, the abbot comes to judge Ghino by his generosity rather than by his reputation alone. He leaves most of his goods behind and uses his access to the pope to secure Ghino’s restoration. In the tale’s framing, the churchman’s magnanimity is remarkable precisely because it answers an affront with advocacy rather than vengeance.

Clerics, Ritual, and Popular Devotion

The story of Ser Ciappelletto shows how clerical testimony can shape a public reputation after death. Having heard Ser Ciappelletto’s self-serving confession, the friar who shrives him tells the convent’s prior and assembled brethren that the dead man was holy. The friars accept his judgment, hold a solemn vigil, and carry the body to their church in a formal procession, with crosses, books, and chanting. Their ceremony helps transform a private false confession into a public claim of sanctity.

The congregation then makes that claim its own. After the service, people crowd forward to kiss Ser Ciappelletto’s hands and feet, tear pieces from his clothing, and keep the body on display so that others may visit it. Following his burial in a marble tomb in a chapel, they bring candles, offer prayers and vows, and hang wax images at the shrine. His reputation grows until people in adversity turn to him rather than to other saints; they call him Saint Ciappelletto and credit him with miracles. The account describes this as popular devotion taking shape through preaching, burial, pilgrimage-like visits, offerings, and reported wonders; it does not describe a formal church process that establishes his sainthood.

The tale preserves a pointed difference between what the people believe and what the narrator can know. Ser Ciappelletto’s life was wicked, yet the possibility remains that genuine contrition at death brought him divine mercy. The narrator refuses to claim knowledge of that hidden judgment and instead stresses that God may hear the faithful even when they mistakenly choose an unworthy intermediary. The episode therefore separates the crowd’s confident veneration from certainty about the dead man’s spiritual fate.

Monastic Influence and Religious Deception

The Church’s religious language and customs also provide cover for deception. In the story of Ferondo, an abbot drugs him and keeps him hidden while making him believe that he has died and is suffering in purgatory. When Ferondo emerges after ten months, the monks who recognize his voice flee in alarm. The abbot then directs them to take a cross and holy water and leads them back, presenting the event as a manifestation of divine power. Left alone with the monks, he makes a show of wonder and orders a devotional response.

Ferondo returns to his village convinced that the abbot’s prayers, those of Saint Benedict, and his wife’s prayers have delivered him from purgatory and restored him to life. He recounts supposed revelations about the dead, inventing elaborate accounts of purgatory for his listeners. The episode makes the abbot’s authority central to the fraud: the staged return is given religious credibility through the language and gestures of monastic practice, while the community receives Ferondo’s account as an apparent miracle. The tale does not suggest that the wider Church knows of or approves the deception.

Institutional Religion and the Tales’ Distinctions

Across these episodes, religious institutions provide both structures of authority and settings for acts whose truth must be judged separately. A pope can receive and rehabilitate Ghino; friars can give a dead man’s reputation the force of solemn public rites; monks can be drawn into an abbot’s staged miracle. Yet the stories do not treat clerical participation as automatic proof of holiness or divine intervention. In Ser Ciappelletto’s case, the distinction is between the crowd’s devotion and the unknowable judgment of God; in Ferondo’s, between outwardly religious ceremony and a concealed human contrivance.

The Roman Catholic Church’s narrative significance thus lies in the space between religious authority, clerical conduct, and popular belief. Its offices and rituals can confer public standing and shape communal understanding, but the tales repeatedly require readers to look beyond those visible signs—to the conduct that produced them and to the uncertainty that remains beyond human judgment.