Tag Archives: Gregory VII

2003-? The Papacy Project

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Obsession about papal history. Continue reading →

Scott Simon.

On Saturday, January 25, 2003, a momentous event occurred in my life. I was, as usual, working in my office at TSI in East Windsor. My Bose radio was tuned to the local NPR station. I don’t remember what I was working on, but I do remember Scott Simon’s interview of A. J. Jacobs on Weekend Edition about his quest to become the smartest person in the world by reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from beginning to end. On that show he reported that he had just finished reading the letter H. To my surprise and delight the entire interview has been posted here.

A. J. Jacobs.

Most of the conversation concerned the account that he read in the F volume concerning the corpse of the ninth-century Pope Formosus, which was disinterred and put on trial in January of 897 by a subsequent pope named Stephen1. Jacobs described the occasion as it was depicted in 1870 in a famous painting by Jean-Paul Laurens called The Cadaver Synod. Having been found guilty, Pope F was excommunicated and defrocked. The thumb and forefinger that he used for consecrating the host were broken off. His skeleton was dumped in the Tiber. All of Pope F’s decrees and investitures were declared invalid.

That is all that Jacobs mentioned, but it was not, as I soon discovered, the end of the affair. The rest of the shocking story has been related in Chapter 5 of my book Stupid Pope Tricks, which can be read here.This radio show had a startling impact upon my life. Although I had attended Catholic schools for twelve years, I suddenly realized that I knew embarrassingly little about Church history. I could name all of the popes of my lifetime, and I knew that the first one was St. Peter himself. In between was a large blank slate. I had never heard of Formosus or Stephen, and I wondered if perhaps A. J. Jacobs had not gotten the story quite right.

U-M has many libraries. This one is the largest.

So, I got no more work done that day or the next. I was too busy googling and reading. I soon discovered that an enormous number of entire books had been scanned by Google in a project that defied belief. At the time the company had nearly finished scanning all the books at the University of Michigan’s enormous library2. The ones that were in the public domain were available online in toto and free. Almost every work in which I was interested was available at my fingertips. If I googled “Formosus”, every reference in every one of these books showed up, and, best of all, there were no ads cluttering up the search because no one had named a product or company after the poor fellow.

I started with Pope Formosus and worked backwards and forwards. I eventually realized that all written records of that period were quite suspect, but what Jacobs reported seemed to be pretty accurate, at least as far as anyone knew. One of the first additional things that I discovered was that shortly after the notorious incident Pope Stephen VI was strangled by a mob of the supporters of Pope F. Jacobs did not mention that both of the principals in the story were pontiffs in the first century of the era that lasted for more than a thousand years in which the pope was the ruler of a strip of land in central Italy that stretched from coast to coast. Their conflict was more political than theological.

The catechism that we used in parochial school promulgated the idea that the papacy had been an unbroken chain of successors to St. Peter. That notion did not survive the weekend in my new level of understanding. Duplications—when two or more men claimed to be pope at the same time—and gaps of several years when no one was recognized as pope were evident. The pope is, by definition, the Bishop of Rome, but for seventy years in the fourteenth century no pope ever set foot in Rome. They lived in Avignon in France and were absentee landlords for tens of thousands of Italians. I was also astonished to learn than during the first millennium of the papacy there wasn’t even agreement upon how the successor to a dead pope should be chosen. Some were appointed by kings or emperors.

I had previously assumed that most popes had been saints. The official Church position has always been that the Holy Spirit has inerrantly guided the cardinals (or whoever) who elected or appointed them. The popes at the top of the chronological list (about whom almost nothing is known beyond names and dates because all records were destroyed at the beginning of the fourth century) were considered saints, but at the time that I began my research only three popes3 had been canonized in the last one thousand years! One pope, John XII, was apparently not even a teenager yet when he became Supreme Pontiff, and once he became pope he was, according to all accounts, pretty much out of control.

I discovered so much remarkable material during those first few days that I struggled to make any sense of it. I searched diligently to find a book that put the various anecdotes together in a comprehensive way that explained the evolution of the office in a way that an outsider could understand. Everything that I found was severely lacking. Some simply parroted the “unbroken chain” line or just emphasized what churches were constructed during their reigns. Others were diatribes against specific popes.

Reluctantly I began putting together a timeline of my own and tried to compile the materials so that I could make sense of the big picture.

I decided to assemble and write what I had learned, starting with a two-thousand-year timeline. It was an extremely long project, but I judged that it would be interesting to others. After all, there were approximately a billion Catholics in the world. Most of them were surely as ignorant of papal history as I had been. The spiritual lives of all of them were ruled by the pope in Rome. It made sense that a significant percentage of these Catholics—not to mention the millions who, like myself, had grown up as Catholics but had “fallen away”—would be interested in learning the many remarkable things that I had discovered.

The original book had nine very long chapters. The emphasis was on how the personalities of the individual popes and the forces of history combined to provide the fascinating story of the survival of the institution, which had property and authority but no standing army, for two thousand years. I don’t remember what the original title was.

When I was nearly finished, I bought a book at Barnes and Noble that had contained a list of names and addresses of literary agents. From that I made a spreadsheet, which I recently found. I sent letters to a dozen or two of the agents. A couple were interested, but I eliminated one who seemed like he might be running a scam. I sent the manuscript to the other one, Daniel Bial4, but he sent it back with a note that he was no longer interested.

I rewrote the whole book with a new approach. I increased the number of chapters to twenty-four and added a lovable fictitious nun named Sr. Mary Immaculata. She provided the Church’s position on puzzling events. The new version emphasized the trickiness of the various pontiffs. It was now called Stupid Pope Tricks: What Sr. Mary Immaculata never revealed about the papacy. I also added a lot of humorous touches such as a list of “bankable bar bets” about strange aspects of papal history.

I sent the new manuscript to Mr. Bial, but he would not read it. I did not blame him. Who was I to be writing about the history of the papacy? I had no credentials either as a writer or as a historian. I also had no “platform”, which is what publishers call the natural audience that politicians, celebrities, and a few others have for their memoirs.

I therefore decided to post it on Wavada.org using a slightly modified version of the code that I had written for my travel journals, as explained here. This would me allow me to add a lot of images and make it more entertaining. I did not promote it, but a few people stumbled onto the site and told me that they liked it. That was somewhat comforting. I don’t know what more that I could have done.

In my opinion the most fascinating pope was Benedict IX of the eleventh century. I could not find a single author that wrote anything good about him, but the source of most of the calumnies against him was a monk named Peter Damian. Yes, he was canonized as a saint, but he was also a cloistered monk who never visited Rome during Benedict’s pontificates. All of his information must have been second- or third-hand. Perry Mason could easily have gotten all the charges dismissed.

The word “pontificates” in the above paragraph was not a misprint. Benedict IX’s name is on the official list of popes three times. His first pontificate ended when a rival family staged a coup, drove him out of Rome, and elected a new pope named Sylvester III. That pontificate lasted 48 days before Benedict regrouped his supporters and reclaimed the throne. A short time later Benedict, who was still a young man, fell in love and resigned in order to get hitched. A new pope (Gregory VI) was elected, but shortly thereafter the new Holy Roman Emperor came to Italy, decided that he was not worthy, and forced the bishops to elect his choice to replace Pope Gregory. When the emperor departed from Italy, Benedict assumed the throne again. No one seemed to know what happened to his wedding plans.

In all, Benedict was the recognized pope for about thirteen years, the longest pontificate in the eleventh century. It was about the same length as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency.

I had a very hard time thinking of any set of scenarios that made sense of the middle of the eleventh century—before Gregory VII, the Great Schism, and the First Crusade. I came up with a few reasonable (to me) assumptions that seemed to explain the whole period. I then wrote a fictional translation of an imaginary autobiography of Benedict IX defending his reputation replete with scholarly footnotes.The result was Ben 9: An Autobiographical Apologia by Theophylact of Tusculum,Thrice Supreme Pontiff of the Christian Church Translated by Edgar Filbert Thomasson. Most of the characters were actual people. The behavior of the most outrageous character in the story, Gerhard Brazutus, was based on accusations leveled by at least one cardinal. I used Occam’s razor to concoct the simplest explanation that I could think of that explained what the cardinal claimed.

My experience with the first book chastened me from attempting to get this one published. As far as I know the only person who has read any version of it is my friend Tom Corcoran.

So, this novel was also posted on the Wavada.org website, along with the text of the story that Northeast Magazine published that has been described here.

Epilogue: I never lost my fascination with the popes. I have not done a lot of research on Benedict XVI and Francis, mostly because they seemed so much more boring than John Paul II. Benedict at least had snazzy shoes and wrote a three-volume history of Jesus Christ. Both Benedict and John Paul did a rather nifty job of tap dancing around the bishops’ approach to the problem of clerical molestation.

My obsession with the popes has continued for two decades. Every so often I have come across an article or book that makes reference to “the pope”. I always make the effort to chase down which pope was involved and what was the context. Almost always the person making the comment misunderstood or misstated the actual event. The last such event occurred in Würzburg on the cruise that I took in 2022. It has been documented here. In this case it was actions by two different popes that were conflated into one story.

Additional blog entries about the popes can be found here.

1. Everything concerning the popes—even the numbering—is complicated. There has only been one Pope Formosus (the name means “shapely” or “physically fit”), and so he will never have a number unless some future pope picks that name. The perpetrator of the Cadaver Synod was known as Stephen VII at the time, but later a previous pope named Stephen, who had been Supreme Pontiff for only three days, was removed from the list. All subsequent Stephens had their number reduced by one. So, the prosecutor/judge of the trial has been known as Stephen VI since that time. There are also quite a few numbers that have been skipped. For example, there is no John XX or Benedict X on the list. Furthermore, in the twentieth century two popes, Cletus and Donus II were removed, because historians determined that they never existed. So, Pope Donus I lost his number.

2. A description of the amazing partnership between Google (now known as Alphabet) and U-M can be read here.

3. The canonized pontiffs are Celestine V, a hermit who never entered Rome and was essentially imprisoned in Castel Nuovo during the entirety of his short pontificate, Pius V, who was most famous for excommunicating Queen Elizabeth I of England and thereby causing persecution of English Catholics, and Pius X, who opposed modernism and saxophone music in the early twentieth century. As of 2023 Pope Francis had canonized three recent popes.

4. Mr. Bial’s agency still existed in 2023. The website is here.

2007 & 2009 Jim and Mike at Funerals in Trenton, MO

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A journey to Trenton, MO. Continue reading →

Aunt Margaret’s funeral: In March of 2007 my dad, Jim Wavada, was living in Enfield near our house. This situation has been explained here. He learned in a telephone call from either his brother Vic or one of Vic’s children that Vic’s wife Margaret had died on Tuesday, March 27. Vic and Margaret had resided in Trenton, MO, for as long as I had known them,. The services were scheduled for Saturday at St. Joseph’s church in Trenton.

Dad could not have undertaken the journey by himself. I retained only the vaguest memory of Aunt Margaret1, but I agreed to accompany him to pay his respects. I have absolutely no recollection of staying in or near Trenton on that occasion. I therefore have deduced that we flew to KCI airport on Friday and stayed overnight at the Hampton Inn near the airport. I have a pretty vivid memory of staying with my dad at that hotel, and I cannot imagine any other occasion on which we might have done so.

Why did we not fly out earlier and spend some time with the family? I can think of two possible reasons. Either I had business commitments that I could not get out of, or my dad wanted to minimize his time there. I strongly suspect that it was the latter. My last trip for the last major installation that I did (Macy’s South, as explained here) was in January of 2007. I don’t have any notes about major trips in March or April. Furthermore, I know from several conversations with him that my dad did not have much respect for his oldest brother.

I am pretty sure that we arrived at KCI on Friday afternoon. I rented a car from Avis. After we checked in at the Hampton, we treated ourselves to fried chicken at the Strouds restaurant near the airport.1

The next morning we ate an early breakfast at the hotel and then drove to Trenton. The drive took about an hour and forty-five minutes. I remember nothing about it.

In Trenton I got to see my Uncle Vic, and my cousins Charlie, Vic Jr., Margaret Anne Deaver, and Cathy. I also got to meet their spouses and children. Some of these people were probably at my mom’s funeral eight years earlier. The others I had not seen for at least thirty-seven years. Many I had never met at all.

St. Joseph church in Trenton.

I have very few memories of this occasion. I remember that my Uncle Vic had recently purchased a car. For some reason this upset my dad, who thought that it was a waste of money. I could not understand why my dad would care about this.

I am pretty sure that we stopped at Uncle Vic’s apartment before going to the church. I can visualize it, but I am not sure that I can trust the details.

The other memory that I have was a disparaging comment that Uncle Vic made about me. It was something to the effect that I thought that I was too good for them.

Since he was eighty-eight years old and did not know me at all, I did not get angry or embarrassed. My only mental reaction was to consider this a very strange thing to say about someone who had just paid to fly halfway across the country for services for someone whom he barely knew. At any rate one of my cousins, Margaret Anne or Cathy, reprimanded him for the comment, and he attempted to make a joke out of it.

In retrospect I surmise that the comment was really directed at my dad. I had not consciously done anything (or, for that matter, failed to do anything) that would provoke enmity with Uncle Vic.

I was happy to establish a little bit of communication with my cousins even though I am almost certain that we left shortly after the funeral and drove back to the Hampton Inn. It must have been during this drive that my dad vented about Uncle Vic’s car.

I surmise that we then flew back to Connecticut on Sunday.

Uncle Vic’s funeral: My dad and I returned to Trenton in October of 2009 for Uncle Vic’s funeral. He was ninety years old, which, unless I have miscalculated, tied him with his mother Hazel for the family’s longevity record. I have much more numerous and vivid memories of the second trip, but it is definitely possible that some of the events that I associate with it actually occurred in 2007.

On the second trip my dad and I shared a room at the luxurious Knights Inn3 just outside of Trenton. We spent at least two nights at the Knights. It made quite an impression on both of us. Our room contained an old light green rag that was covered with stains. A sign near it implored the temporary residents to use this rag to clean their firearms as opposed to the towels or sheets. This admonition was unnecessary for dad and me, as we both carried our own cleaning equipment whenever we brought our rifles on trips.

All of my cousins were again present. I am pretty sure that this time we went to the rosary and wake on Sunday evening. We also ate supper with them and some friends of Uncle Vic’s at what Vic Jr. called “a pizza joint”4 in Trenton. The atmosphere was fairly lively. My cousins lived in St. Louis, KC, and Denver. I had the impression that most of them were happy that they need never come to Trenton again. There was very little reminiscing about good old days with “Pop”.

I remember talking with an optometrist who was, I guess, Uncle Vic’s friend. I told him that I had been taking the PreserVision vitamins to try to stave off macular degeneration. He validated that this was probably a good idea.

I met Charlie’s wife Mary and Vic Jr.’s wife Theresa5. Margaret Anne’s husband was probably there, too, but I do not remember his name. John maybe? I don’t remember anyone asking about my sister Jamie.

On Monday we attended the funeral and burial. Afterwards there was a lunch at the church hosted by the Ladies Club. I sat near some of my cousins. I remember Vic Jr. remarking about his mastery of texting. He said that recently he and his son Matt had texted one another while they were in the same store. Theresa worried that people would become overly dependent on them and stop planning.

I recall quite a few kids, a few of whom were a little rambunctious. I can’t say that I tried very hard to assign names to all of them.

The return trip: My dad, who at this point began referring to himself as the last of the Mohicans6 was unusually talkative. He told me about a problem that he had had with Vic Jr.’s son, Matt. I don’t remember the details.

I think that it was either in the car ride or the airplane that he talked about Vic. It may have occurred at another time; I am not certain. He said that his mother, Hazel Wavada, had negotiated a deal with the Benedictines to provide a good high school education for her three sons at Maur Hill in Atchison, KS. One of them had to become a priest. Vic, thee oldest actually took the name Brother Hildebrand, O.S.B., before he quit the order. That, my dad said, was why his other brother, Joe, became a Benedictine priest.

He also told me that Vic had been married before he met Margaret to a woman in Birmingham, AL, of all places.

1. Her very brief obituary, which was posted here, says that “Mrs. Wavada retired from the Jewitt Library in Trenton after 28 years.” This was news to me. I also did not know where my Uncle Vic had been employed. His even briefer obituary, which was posted here, was no help. I have a vague recollection that he worked for a company known as Trenton Foods, which may have been purchased by a conglomerate.

2. My recollection was that the restaurant was near the airport. The closest Strouds that was open in 2023 was located in Oak Ridge Manor, sixteen miles southwest of the Hampton Inn. That is farther than I remembered, but we would have thought nothing about driving such a distance for real fried chicken, which is unknown in New England.

3. The building that housed the Knights Inn still existed in 2023. It was renamed the Cobblestone Inn and Suites. Its website is here. The exterior does not appear changed much, but the photos of the rooms did not seem familiar.

4. I don’t think that the joint survived until 2023. The only pizza places in town in 2023 that Google knew about were Pizza Hut, Godfather’s Pizza Express, and Casey’s, a “convenience store known for fuel and pizza.”

5. Theresa died in 2017. Her obituary has been posted here.

6. He only held this title for two years before passing it on to me. As of 2023 I have now been the most senior of the KC branch of the Wavadas for twelve years, almost 1/6 of my total life.

7. The original Brother Hildebrand of the eleventh century eventually became the famous Pope Gregory VII. I have written an entire chapter about his influence and posted it here. I also included him as a character in the historical novel, Ben 9, that I posted here.

Ben Ten and the “Reformers”

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Evaluating the Tusculan popes and the reformers who succeeded them. Continue reading →

Almost no one has even heard of Pope Benedict X. Pope Stephen IX had died in Florence on March 29, 1058. On April 4 a group of bishops met in Rome and elected John, the Cardinal-Bishop of Velletri, as the new pontiff. At the time there were no set rules for the selection of a new pope. The designation of the College of Cardinals as the body charged with papal elections did not come until later (although not much later). Benedict’s election was pretty much in line with established procedure at the time. The elections that were quite different from it were generally far less canonical. For example, Stephen’s three predecessors were all hand-picked by Emperor Henry III and rubber-stamped by councils sometimes held as far away from Rome as the German city of Worms. Furthermore, John was a rising star in the curia and was widely considered as being on the short list of papabili.

Benedict’s pontificate, however, had a few fatal flaws. In the first place he was a relative of the counts of Tusculum who had controlled the papacy for most of the eleventh century. The second was that the most influential figure in the so-called reform party, a young monk named Hildebrand, was in Germany at the time negotiating with Henry III’s widow, Agnes, who was the regent for her seven-year-old son. Allegedly Pope Stephen IX had asked that the election of his successor be postponed until Cardinal-Deacon Hildebrand could return.

Hildebrand did return, but he did not exactly rush back. Pope Benedict ruled until January of the following year. Not much is known about his pontificate, which is a pretty clear indication that it was a period of peace and relative tranquility. The same, by the way can be said of the pontificates of the other three Tusculan popes of the eleventh century. All told, these four men ruled Rome, the papal territories, and the Christian Church for about thirty-five years.

The cardinals met in Florence and on January 23, 1059, elected a man named Gerard from the Provence area of France. Hildebrand had arranged for Godfrey, the Duke of Lorraine, who was by far the most powerful man in Italy because of his marriage to Beatrice, the widow of the Margrave of Tuscany, to accompany them to Rome. Since Godfrey brought most of his army with him, Benedict was forced to flee, and Gerard was installed as Nicholas II. His first six months were largely devoted to employing Godfrey’s troops and some Normans who had been commissioned by Pope Stephen to hunt down Pope Benedict and his Tusculan supporters. A series of bloody battles ensued. Benedict fled first to a castle near Tivoli and then to the castle of the Count of Galeria, which was north of Rome. Eventually he was apparently captured, but accounts differ greatly as to what became of him after that.

Hildebrand also eventually was elected pontiff. He was known as Pope Gregory VII from 1073-1085.

There is no question that the reformers won a total victory over the influential noble families that had controlled the papacy in the early eleventh century. Reading the official records one can easily to picture them as a group of progressives who loved the Church so much that they felt obligated to do whatever was required to eliminate the corruption that had infested the papacy. In fact, Hildebrand and one other reform pope, Leo IX, are both canonized saints. Since only seven popes in the second millennium achieved that distinction (and two of those were named in the last year), this is quite unusual. For all that I know the two of them are sitting at God’s right and left hands (assuming that He has hands and that there are only two of them). I do know, however, that it is hard to think of any popes who were less successful than these two.

Leo, like the other German popes, spent almost no time in Rome. A cousin of Emperor Henry III, he almost immediately turned his attention to the Normans who controlled large swaths of southern Italy. The pontiff went to Germany and tried without successful to persuade the emperor to provide him with an army. He then hired a band of Swabian freebooters and led them back to Italy. After he combined this force with part of Godfrey’s contingent, he marched into Apulia, where he confronted the Normans and provoked them into the Battle of Civitate. When the dust settled, the papal forces had been routed, and the pope himself was in Norman hands. Although he was treated with respect and allowed to communicate freely with his subordinates, Pope Leo was held in Benevento almost until his death.

During his captivity Pope Leo dispatched some envoys to Constantinople to confront the patriarch. They came armed with forged documents that claimed that six centuries earlier the Emperor Constantine had bequeathed all of western Europe to St. Peter, whose vicar on earth was the Bishop of Rome. The westerners may have considered the documents to be genuine, but the story they told contradicted many events that were well documented in the east. When the patriarch refused to meet with them, the pope’s legates left a decree of excommunication on the high altar of the Hagia Sophia. This reckless act began the Great Schism between the Roman Church and the Greek Orthodox Church and its affiliates, which has lasted until this day.

So, Leo had two great legacies. He spent most of his time gathering together a Christian army that he used to attack a different Christian army. This one resulted in a lot of deaths and his own capture. The other was a committee armed with bogus documents that split the Christian Church in two irreparable (at least so far) pieces.

Gregory VII’s claim to fame was his attempt to wrest from Emperor Henry IV (a young man by this time) the power to invest bishops in imperial holdings. When the emperor refused, Gregory excommunicated him. The emperor, who was facing opposition in Germany, eventually repented and came to Gregory to ask for the lifting of the excommunication. For three long winter days he stood outside in the cold waiting for the pontiff to make up his mind. Eventually Gregory reinstated him.

Henry had to return to deal with a civil war in which the pope supported his opponent, Rudolph. When it appeared that Rudolph was winning, the pontiff again excommunicated Henry. The tide turned, however, and Henry not only solidified his hold in Germany. He also marched back into Italy and called a council that elected a new pope named Guibert. For a time there was a stalemate between Gregory’s forces and those of Henry/Guibert. Finally, in a desperate move Pope Gregory asked Robert Guiscard, the leader of the Normans to liberate him. He did, but the Normans also sacked Rome, inflicting much more damage than either the Goths or the Vandals had inflicted.

Gregory became a persona non grata in Rome. He spent the rest of his pontificate wandering as a beggar in southern Italy. His two hand-picked successors also had great difficulty even entering the city.

Here are a couple of questions that Church historians seldom ask. 1. Who were these “reformers”? 2. What did they want?

The answer to #1 is that almost all of them were Benedictine monks. The answer to #2 is a little trickier. Their platform included the elimination of simony (purchasing of religious offices) and the enforcement of celibacy among the clergy in the Church. By Hildebrand’s time they also championed the elimination of investiture by civil rulers like Henry IV. They have been almost uniformly portrayed as righteous people who took a corrupt papacy and returned it to the principles of the gospels. The word “portrayed” here is key. Almost everything known about these people was written by them and their supporters.

There is a different way to look at it. Before the reformers took over, the papacy was a local affair. The popes were generally elected by groups of local bishops. It is probably true that sometimes one noble family or another would spread enough cash around to influence the election. Outsiders would, however, only be called upon to help in dire circumstances when the very life of the papal states and the pope were in jeopardy. Seldom did any pope attempt to exert much influence outside of the papal states. Other regions chose their own bishops. There were no general rules for doing so. The popes seldom left their own territories.

The sex lives of clergymen was not high on the priority list of any of the Tusculan pontiffs. Pope Benedict IX, the third of the Tusculan pontiffs, was charged with many outrageous acts of sexual misconduct. His primary accuser was Peter Damian, the chief propagandist of the reformers, a man who never set foot anywhere near Rome during the time when Benedict IX was supposedly misbehaving.

Ethics aside, the reformers transformed the papacy in two ways. Their primary focus was the attempt to make the pope, once they controlled who wore the tiara, a prominent player on the European and, eventually, the world stage. Pope Urban II, who called the First Crusade, was a disciple of Hildebrand’s. In this they had mixed results. The First Crusade, although it caused the loss of hundreds of thousands of Christian lives, did result in the capture of Jerusalem. The other crusades – and there were many – were, by just about any measure, disasters.

They were much more successful in the other aspect, which was to change the rules so that they had access to power. In fact, the monks exerted dominance over papal elections long after the original purposes of the reformers were dim memories.

The question no one seems to ask is this: What did the Christians in Rome think? If I were a Roman, I would certainly have preferred the relative calm of the Tusculan pontiffs to the chaos and catastrophes of the reformers.

Two men, Boniface VII and Benedict X, were elected as pope and served as the unquestioned leader of the Church for a considerable period of time. Everyone considered them the pope. Both fled when threatened. In both cases the next pontiff who took the name (centuries later) assigned himself a number that was one more than the neglected pope.

Neither Boniface nor Benedict is on the official list of popes, and, take my word for it, there are dozens of popes with flimsier claims. All that it proves is that history is written by the winners.