I’m talking about the really nasty ones here, like John XII. He was gifted the Papacy by his father Alberic II, the prince of Rome, who controlled the election. He was around 18 or 20 when he was made Pope in 955 and spent the next 9 years in dissolution and abandon. According to Liutprand and other historians he passed his time as Pope in plunder, murder and rapine. Female pilgrims were too scared to make the pilgrimage to Rome as the Vicar of Christ on Earth, the successor of St Peter, was renowned for raping any virgin or widow he came across.
Does the Papacy still recognize him and other badass Popes like Alexander VI as being made Pope by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and their Bulls, etc as having validity? I know that sometimes, as with the Avignon Popes, the Church rules that they were never Pope but with these guys it’s different, they had no rival Popes.
Surely there must be some method of kicking these people to the curb and striking them from the list of legitimate Popes.
Short answer: No. History is full of so-called antipopes, aka counter-popes, which are not recognised as “official” popes by the Vatican. The reason for their non-recognition is, however, not bad behaviour in office; it lies in irregularities in their election: For much of Catholic history, the process for the election of a pope was not defined in too much detail. There were various times in history when there were rivalling factions within the Church, and parts of the college of cardinals would meet in a particular place and elect someone from their faction pope. That way, you could have several people laying claim to the papacy at the same time. The Vatican maintains a list of recognised official popes, which is browsable here (conveniently sorted by century). It has been cleansed of unrecognised counterpopes, but the two you mention are listed and recogised, because their election is deemed valid, irrespective of how they behaved in office.
Interesting answers. Wow, they really did a job on Formosus even though he was dead at the time! One wonders why John and Alexander didn’t get the same treatment, unless the Popes of the the time began to realize how ludicrous the whole thing made them look.
I can see Catholic reasoning going as follows–and I use the argumentum ad Hitlorum differently than its canonic [heh] definition: just because (a) Hitler promulgated anti-smoking, built highways, etc., the decrees are not invalidated.
The Cadaver Synod was under the orders of the Holy Roman Emperor Lambert. Formosus had, reluctantly, crowned Formosus as co-Emperor with his father, but didn’t trust them, so he wrote a letter to another Carolingian prince, Arnulf of Carinthia, asking him to take the throne. Arnulf invaded, won a few battles, was crowned King of Italy, and then ran into a bunch of problems and withdrew.
Meanwhile, Lambert’s father died of a fever, and Lambert went to Rome so he could be formally crowned by the Pope. Formosus refused, and Lambert locked him up. Arnulf invaded again, took Rome, and freed Formosus, who crowned him king and announced he was the true Holy Roman Emperor. Not too long after, Arnulf had a stroke, went home, went blind, and had another stroke and died, and then, not too long after, Formosus died.
Lambert managed to get one of his people elected as Pope, and his man, Pope Stephen, held the Cadaver Synod, not really because of any depraved stuff Formosus had done as pope, but because of the stuff he had done to Lambert.
In case you’re curious, what the Cadaver Synod found Formosus guilty of was perjury, exercising the functions of the bishop as a layman, and transmigration of sees. Here’s basically what had happened there:
Formosus had been Cardinal-Bishop of Porto, near Rome. While was there, he funded a bunch of missions to convert the Bulgarians to Christianity. The Bulgarians were impressed, and asked Formosus to become archbishop of Bulgaria, but Pope Nicholas, the Pope at the time, refused the request. Nicholas dies, and then a few popes later, John VIII becomes pope. Formosus and John VIII are enemies, so Formosus flees Rome. John then, suspicious, excommunicates Formosus, saying basically, “He’s plotting to become Archbishop of Bulgaria and Pope, he’s left his diocese without permission, and he’s conspiring against me.” The excommunication got lifted, but Formosus was stripped of his title as Bishop and forced to swear an oath that he would never come back to Rome or act as a priest.
John dies, his successor comes in, who doesn’t have a problem with Formosus, names him Bishop again, invites him back to Rome, and life goes on as normal. But it was the Bulgarian affair and that incident with John that’s the core of the later cadaver synod.
Who was Pope is a matter of historical record. While the Church may decide which ones were legitimately elected and which ones were not, there’s no more a system for erasing them from the record than there is for bad Kings or Presidents.
That damnatio memoriae was contemporary, i.e., pushed for by his immediate successor. The present-day Catholic Church recognises Formosus as a pope and lists him in the official papacy lists.
Right. Just like the USA does with bad Presidents. It’s historical fact that George W Bush was President, so he’s included in the lists of Presidents, regardless of his performance in office.
De-recognising a particular pope might, by the way, have ramifications for his successors. For instance, popes typically appoint new cardinals to the college of cardinals which elects the next pope. If you delegitimise one office holder and the acts he performed in office, then that could be seen as invalidating the next papal election in which his appointees as cardinals participated, thereby casting doubt on the legitimacy of the successor. And the same logic would apply again at the next step.
The sedevacantists take the position that Pius XII was the last legitimate pope and that John XXIII was not duly elected. They believe that the conclave after Pius’s death originally elected a much more conservative cardinal as Pope, but liberals cardinals and the Curia suppressed that election and made John XXIII the apparent pope.
Since John XXIII was not truly pope, all of his actions were illegitimate.
Vatican II, convened by John, was heretical and pulled the church away from the true faith. All of the Council’s “reforms” were therefore heretical.
All the cardinals supposedly appointed by John, including cardinal Montini, were also illegitimate, since John was not truly Pope.
Therefore Cardinal Montini was not a true cardinal and should not have been “elected” by the conclave after John died.
Therefore all cardinals that Montini appointed when he was said to be Pope Paul VI were also illegitimate.
Therefore all subsequent conclaves, composed primarily of cardinals appointed by John and Paul, were without authority.
Therefore John Paul I, John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis were not duly elected ed and were all heretics and not pope.
Thanks for that link. As a heathen I don’t follow RCC internal politics even a little bit; there’s more than enough secular politics for all of us here on Earth just now.
My thoughts:
Wow. The interesting thing about that … novel … line of thinking is how the tree inevitably grows over time.
Within a couple cycles of Pope there is figuratively nobody left who’s pure. Within 5 cycles it’s literally over; the pre-sedevacantist version of Catholicism is dead forever, never to be revivable.
Without going to the trouble of making an actual census of the doctrinal lineage of all the priests & higher officials worldwide it’s hard to know how far down that path the RCC is today. But if the pre-sedevacantist Church is still alive at all, it’s feeling very sickly just now.
It was also interesting to read of all the other minor schisms going on even in recent times. It takes a particular form of historical and current-events ignorance to hand-wave away all the controversy over all the ages while insisting this one controversy is the only meaningful one. The RCC survived all the others without the slightest scratch and yet is mortally wounded by this one. Seems to reflect a rather … brittle … view of one’s church. One not real compatible with its multi-millennium lifespan to date.
It should be noted that the sedevacantists (and their close cousins, the Lefebvre-ists, and all the other “radical traditionalists”) are a tiny, tiny minority of crackpots, and not taken seriously by anyone.*
*I guess the Society of St. Pius X (the above-mentioned Lefebvre-ists) is taken seriously enough by the Vatican that there have been efforts to bring them back into the fold, but rank-and-file Catholics not only pay them no attention at all, but are generally unaware of their existence.
The Siri theory was promoted by one Malachi Martin, a lunatic ex-priest who published a number of books, both fiction and (supposedly) non-fiction, about all kinds of conspiracy nonsense going on in the Vatican.
The Siri theory might be taken seriously by as many as a couple of dozen people in the whole Catholic world.
Cardinal Siri - right! I was trying to remember his name but couldn’t.
Supposedly, he lived under death threats from the 1958 conclave until his death from natural causes in 1989.
I must say, that strikes me as awful timourous for a prince of the church - to put his own life ahead of the health of the Holy Church, letting it be dragged into heresy for more than three decades, not lifting a finger to save it, and letting a billion Catholics to be led into heresy.
Hardly the example of the Good Shepard who is willing to lay down his life for his sheep (John 10:14).
A simpler answer, of course, is that Siri was not elected, John was, and Siri spent the next three decades as a loyal cardinal who dissented from the path the Church was taking, but obeyed the Popes.