Quote Originally Posted by Bruno View Post
I don't know the specifics, but land ownership does not automatically mean culpability.

If someone owns an apartment complex in which a number of tenants run a brothel, that does not make him complicit.
Owning large pieces of estate means that there's always someone committing some crime or other on your properties. And if those properties are rented, you profit from the crime, but as I said, it des not make one a criminal.
There was nothing at all criminal in that case. It is just something that tends to strike modern readers as odd. The bishops profitted directly from the brothels, but it was their right to do so. Any sense of outrage or shock about the situation is the result of us imposing our contemporary morality on past society. To contemporaries it was just how things were.