Corruption In Gregory Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales

Gregory Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales was a satire on the corruption of the Catholic Church in the medieval period. The story is centered on the trip of pilgrims going towards St. Thomas Becket's shrine each member of the group telling stories along the way. Each of the characters, excluding the parson, the knight, the plower, and some less important characters, have some form of religious or moral corruption displayed in their introduction and in the story they tell. An argument can be made that the pardoner is the most corrupt out of all of them. The pardoner, a thin, wax-haired man, is a church member who can remove or relieve a man of sin, but abuses this to earn wealth for himself, and could very well not be a licensed pardoner at all.
The Pardoner is a man of the church who gives pardons, or indulgences, to those who confess their sins to him and give a fee. These indulgences are highly opinionated to be the greatest corruption the Catholic Church had during this time period, as Martin Luther stated in his 95 Theses. A man of wealth could cleanse off their sin by simply paying off the church, therefore the rich were guaranteed a …show more content…
The pardoner will use this story to persuade a small quantity of the other pilgrims to hand over money for his services. The irony of this tale is that he is using greed as the source of all evil in his tale when he is avaricious, as he stated himself. “And thus I preach against the very vice / I make my living out of-avarice. / And yet however guilty of that sin / Myself, with others I have the power to win / Them from it, I can bring them repent” (Chaucer CR ll. 23-27). He openly admits his avarice to others because he understands that it will gain their trust and guarantee him a multitude more pay. What they do not realize is that a man guilty of a sin of avarice should not be trusted as one buys goods from