The Church on one hand venerated people like St Francis and produced mendicant orders whose members vowed to live lives of poverty and on the other had bishops who were often indistinguishable from secular princes and opulent monasteries who amassed wealth and collected rents. Was an intellectual effort made at some point by Church thinkers to justify what must have sometimes looked like a contradiction? If not, was this state of affairs simply accepted so that there was no need to defend and explain it?
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