{Compassio Christi?} O figliku Mikołaja Reja {Baba, co w Pasyją płakała}
{Compassio Christi?} On the Mikołaj Rey’s epigram {Baba, co w Pasyją płakała} [{Old woman who cried during the Passion of Christ}]

Summary/Abstract: In 1520 Luther, having read Valli’s treaty on Constantine’s donation, was finally convinced that opposing the Pope meant undertaking the struggle with Antichrist rather than with mere deterioration and abuse within the Church. The struggle with the apocalyptic evil spreading from papal Rome caused Mikołaj Rey, when writing his epigram {Baba, co w Pasyją płakała} [{Old woman who cried during the Passion of Christ}], to change radically and extend the meaning of the anecdote which had earlier, as an exemplum, a fable or a jest, ridiculed the conceited clergymen by means of the ass symbolism of foolishness and musical disharmony. Rey's verse exposes, in turn, the machinations of “the jealous devil” ruling the Church, and their disastrous results for the simpletons not knowing Latin. Moreover, it seems that the epigram {Baba, co w Pasyją płakała} also challenges the Catholic directive to suffer with the tormented Christ. A peasant woman mourns not Saviour’s, but her “dear little donkey’s” death, as she listens on Good Friday to the incomprehensible story of Christ’s passion and death, sang in Latin by the priest in a voice of an ass. The viciousness of the Church of Rome makes the behaviour of the peasant woman at the celebration of the Passion hardly less than idolatry.

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