I'm reading Gordon Leff's Heresy in the Later Middle Ages. The phenomena described are terrifyingly familiar - the malaise which affects so many academics, so many writers, seems to arise from very similar developments. It is as if one were a Franciscan, drawn to a life of poverty and prayer, and put suddenly in charge of the inquisition...
In 1227 cardinal Ugolino, protector of the Franciscan order, became
pope Gregory IX and within five years he had entrusted the Dominicans
and Franciscans with the working of the papal inquisition. These
responsibilities, and sheer numbers, transformed the mendicants from
wandering bands of preachers into highly organized orders extending over
Christendom: mendicant poverty gave way to property and buildings,
libraries, study, and the paraphernalia of government. It was their
revulsion at the change which led the Franciscan Spirituals to demand a
return to the simple apostolic precepts of their founder; but, as we
shall see, in vain. To have done so would have been to dismantle what
had become an indispensable part of the church. Here we come upon one of
the constant factors in the tension between the demands of Christian
first principles and institutional responsibility. It was not that the
Franciscans and Dominicans, any more than the church as a whole, became
morally degenerate in abandoning their early rigours. They had taken on a
new role. They had now to fulfil an office and no longer merely to
observe their own practice. The majority continued to preach and when
necessary to beg; but they did so by the second half of the thirteenth
century as some activities among many rather than as a way of life. (16)
...
It was the gradual constitution of the two mendicant orders into regular full-time inquisitors which marked the full-fledged emergence of the papal inquisition. (!!!!!) (43)
Judaism has the institution of the bar or bat mitzvah, which marks the passage to adulthood, often accompanied by a party and lots of presents. If some such ritual were the norm for all children around the age of 13, I would want every person leaving childhood to be given a copy of Leff, a copy of Patterson's Slavery and Social Death, and a copy of Goffman's Asylums.