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Flashback to the time of the Reformation: "the temptation to loot Church property and the habit of doing so had appeared and was growing; and this rapidly created a vested interest in promoting the change in religion. Those who attacked Catholic doctrine, as for instance, in the matters of celibacy in the monastic Orders, or of a divinely appointed Hierarchy with the Papacy at its summit, opened the door for the seizure of the enormous clerical endowments, monastic, episcopal and parochial, by the Princes of City corporations. Men already individually powerful through their wealth, especially through their ownership of land, joined the rapine. The property of convents and monasteries passed wholesale to the looters over great areas of Christendom: Scandinavia, The British Isles, the Northern Netherlands, much of the Germanies and many of the Swiss Cantons. The endowments of hospitals, colleges, schools, guilds, were largely though not wholly seized. Those of the clergy and hierarchy, the lands supporting Bishoprics and Chapters and parish clergy were robbed from seven-eights to half of their value. -- Hilaire Belloc, Characters of the Reformation