Sex, crime and corruption: murky history of past popes
Pastor Dale Morgan
Agence France-Presse
Vatican City,
They've plotted and deceived, they've been warlike, corrupt and
power-hungry and they've sired children they shamelessly promoted: the
history of popes, as cardinals mull who will succeed John Paul II, is
decidedly murky.
Such accusations can in no way be levelled at John Paul II, who died on
April 2 after a 26-year pontificate that inspired and enthralled many.
But it was not always so.
"The history of the papacy is the history of one of the most momentous
and extraordinary institutions in the history of the world," says Eamon
Duffy in a study of popes entitled "Saints and Sinners."
As cardinals go into seclusion from April 18 to elect the next head of
the Roman Catholic Church, they have a rich history of sinning popes to
look back on.
In the early centuries of Christianity, popes struggled to establish
their grip in an age when the Roman Empire was collapsing and threats
abounded from other cultures and religions.
They assumed more and more temporal authority as the papacy developed
into a major secular power, at the cost of plunging to a level of
corruption that left it morally bankrupt.
Pontiffs became absolute monarchs, with their own army, administration
and lands, until other European kings re-asserted their own rights,
shrinking the papacy's power and forcing it to revert to its age-old
spiritual role.
One of the most notorious popes was Alexander VI, from the scheming
Borgia dynasty, who was both intensely ambitious and wealthy.
During the 1492 conclave that elected him the successor to Innocent
VIII, "money fell like rain," according to Peter Maxwell-Stuart of the
University of Aberdeen, Scotland. "The papacy had been bought."
Alexander VI had six sons and three daughters by several women and
placed all his offspring into high positions.
His successor in 1503, Julius II, had three daughters while a cardinal
and was a fierce warrior, leading his men into battle in silver armour
against any who defied his authority.
Under Leo X, rampant corruption such as the selling of spiritual
blessings in return for money led Martin Luther to start the Reformation.
Popes were kingmakers too, although not always successfully.
In the turmoil after the collapse of the Roman empire people looked to
the papacy for leadership, but as proper nation states developed, popes
resorted -- like everyone else -- to scheming and plotting and ad-hoc
alliances in the myriad kingdoms and rival loyalties of Middle Age and
Renaissance Europe.
Picking the wrong friends cost lives. Back in 882, John VIII was
poisoned and clubbed to death, the first pope to be murdered.
A few years later, Pope Stephen VIII had a close predecessor, Formosus,
dug up, dressed in pontifical garb and put on trial posthumously.
Stephen himself was later imprisoned and strangled.
Meanwhile Pope Sixtus IV was implicated in an inter-factional plot in
1478 that led to the murder of a leading member of the powerful Medici
family.
According to Maxwell-Stuart, five pontiffs have been jailed, four
murdered, one openly assassinated, one deposed and one publicly flogged.
One died of wounds in battle, another when a ceiling fell on top of him.
Pope Urban VIII, a prodigious nepotist who reigned from 1623 to 1644,
had astrologers draw up horoscopes of cardinals in Rome to learn when
they would die because he was suspicious of them.
He also ordered a Dominican monk recently released from jail for heresy
to perform a magical ceremony to ward off any nasty effects of an
imminent lunar eclipse.
An enduring myth, which neither Maxwell-Stuart nor Duffy believe, is
that of a pope named Joan in the ninth or 11th century -- depending
which medieval account you believe -- who was only found out when she
gave birth.
Still, as the authors argue, in 2,000 years of Christianity and 264
popes there are bound to have been a few rotten apples.
"For all its sins the papacy does seem to have been on balance a force
for human freedom and largeness of spirit," says Duffy.