Tag Archives: Pope Francis

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.

Canonization of Two Popes

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Do they deserve it? Continue reading →

Two popes will be canonized on Sunday, John XXIII and John Paul II. Maureen Dowd has recently written in the New York Times that there was only one halo between them, and it belonged to John XXIII. She objected to the way that John Paul handled the numerous scandals caused by abusive priests. Particularly offensive to her were the ways that he dealt with Cardinal Law and the unbelievable story of Marcial Maciel Degollado. Dowd argues that these shortcomings outweigh the good that the pope did in other areas, most especially his role in the overthrow of the Communist regimes in eastern Europe.

If you take the question seriously, and she almost certainly does, the first issue must certainly be establishing criteria for evaluating a pope’s determination that someone is worthy of canonization. The theory behind this (and much of Catholic doctrine) is entirely based on two verses in the Gospel of Matthew. The pope, as the successor to St. Peter, has the Keys to the Kingdom. If he says that someone is in heaven, then that person is there. Live with it.

It is therefore clearly heretical for Dowd to claim that Pope Francis is wrong in canonizing John Paul II. I have not read about anyone calling her a heretic, but it seems obvious to me that an article entitled “A Saint He Ain’t” puts her in the camp of Jan Hus and Giordano Bruno, and the last thing that entered their nostrils was the stench of their own burning flesh.

One could, of course, consider this from the perspective of a historian of the Church. Did these two popes do an outstanding job of promulgating the Church’s message and advancing its principles? That seems to be the approach that Dowd took, but many Catholics would think that she has it backward. To them John XXIII took the first steps on the Church’s disastrous journey to becoming a more humanistic and less dogmatic institution. John Paul II, on the other hand, stood up to the Commies and helped restore respect for the traditions and doctrines throughout the world.

There are several other ways of looking at this. The first is to compare these decisions with the canonizations of other popes. Only three popes who served since the eleventh century have been canonized, and they had almost nothing in common. It is therefore not easy to make intelligent comparisons, but I feel confident that the historical record indicates that the recent popes seem at least as saintly as the previous trio. I made that case here.

Another approach is to judge the popes by the standards of Church history. How closely Pope John Paul was involved in decisions to cover up the clerical abuse cases is not clear. I would argue that even if he personally decided to stonewall on the issue, that was consistent with Church principles and the actions of previous pontiffs.

In the first place one should bear in mind that the most basic Catholic doctrine concerns forgiveness and redemption through the sacraments. Even the most serious sins can be forgiven, and even the most incorrigible offender can be given a second chance. The most outrageous pope of all time, the first John XXIII, was, after being convicted of five serious felonies, eventually welcomed back into the Church and was even restored to the rank of cardinal. The most serious crime in the Church’s eye is not murder or rape. It is heresy because the heretic is actively recruiting others to reject the Church’s teaching. He (or in this case she) is actively trying to deceive others with the expressed intent of denying them access to the means of achieving salvation. The Inquisition was specifically convened to exterminate these people and their ideas.

So, while no pope* would condone pedophilia, a person who commits pedophilia is just an ordinary sinner. All people are sinners, and the way that the Church deals with known sinners has been consistent throughout its history. If they show contrition and have “a firm purpose of amendment,” they are forgiven. They are probably counseled to pray for sanctifying grace and to avoid “near occasions of sin.” The same rule applies to children who disrespect their parents and to serial killers and rapists like the first Pope John XXIII.

Furthermore, priests are special people. They alone have received the sacrament of Holy Orders. The Church has always preached that this confers upon them divine grace that empowers them both to administer the sacraments, the only path to redemption, and to spread the Church’s message. These men have always been considered a valuable resource that is to be husbanded.

In this context it is perfectly reasonable for Church officials to keep quiet about the foibles of one of its priests, all of whom, after all, are sinners. It is perfectly reasonable to expect the officials, assuming that the offenders repented and seemed sincere, to forgive the abusive priests and to try to help them with their problem by moving them away from temptation.

How many times should you do this before you consider them beyond the pale? The Bible says that the answer is 490 (Matthew 18:22)! I have not heard of even one priest who approached the biblical limit on forgiveness.

And what of mental illness? Aren’t the pedophiles sick? I don’t know, but this way of looking at things is not consistent with Church teachings. The fact that some people are more strongly drawn to one type of sin or another is not really germane. We all must struggle with the temptations that come our way.

Of course, the Church’s approach does not consider the rights of the victims. From its perspective, however, we are all mistreated in one way or another. Our job is to “offer it up,” forgive the sinner, and to try to use the experience as a way to increase our own resolve. I don’t remember anything in the catechism about hiring a lawyer to sue the Church for millions of dollars.

* * *
In sum, I have no idea whether either pope is actually in heaven. I think that they are both admirable men. If neither is in heaven, I don’t want to go there either. I do want to go to Africa to see the animals, and I hope to visit Italy several more times.

* Well, maybe one. Pope Julius III had a very strange relationship with an adolescent ironically named Innocenzo.

Person of the Year?

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Are words and symbols enough? Continue reading →

TimeSmallTwo popes had previously been named Time magazine’s Man of the Year. John XXIII was chosen for 1962, the year that he opened the Second Vatican Council and charged it with bringing the Church into the twentieth century, or at least the Age of Enlightenment. It was a dramatic decision. The Church had not convened an ecumenical council in a century, and that last one was called to rubber stamp decisions made by Pope Pius IX. In contrast, John XXIII had set in place a mechanism for listening to new ideas and implementing the best of them.

MOYSmallJohn Paul II was chosen for 1994. By that time the pontiff’s role in undermining the Communist governments in eastern Europe was becoming clear. He provided spiritual support for all of those movements, and he did much more than that for Poland. Many people still do not realize that the Vatican bank underwrote the political campaigns of the Solidarity Trade Union that eventually brought independence and democracy, not to mention the resurgence of Catholicism, to the Polish people.

Plenty of Catholics would argue that either or both of these two dynamic leaders were misguided (or maybe even tools of Satan), but no one could claim that they were ineffective or that their acts were of little consequence. Both pontiffs were masters at public relations, but they also knew how to convert their popularity into meaningful changes. They were actors.

Bestowing this title on Pope Francis seems to me comparable to giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama in his first year in office. I suspect that the people in Oslo would like a do-over on that one. The evaluations of both of these men seemed based not on what they had done so much as what their predecessors had done. Obama seemed ready to disavow Bush’s doctrine of preventive war, and Francis has at least eschewed the plodding mannerisms, luxurious accommodations, and red Prada shoes of Benedict XVI.

FrancisPope Francis has certainly made a number of startling statements and gestures. It is difficult to imagine any of his 263* predecessors uttering the words, “Who am I to judge?” His washing of the feet of others and, indeed, his choice of the name “Francis” were no doubt acts of symbolic importance.

But what has Pope Francis actually done? I read the Time article to see if I missed anything. OK; he has set up some commissions to look into some tricky issues, but that is the same tactic that Clement VII employed back in the sixteenth century to put off Henry VIII’s request for an annulment of his marriage. The only actual act that I could find was the elimination of the rank of “monsignor.” I suppose that that is something, but it did not go far in eliminating the hierarchy. There are still deacons, priests, bishops, archbishops, patriarchs, cardinals and who knows how many other levels. The curia may feel threatened, but it has not yet been attacked directly.

Don’t tell me that Pope Francis has done everything that he could be expected to do. He is the man. He can make judgments! For example, he could eliminate the ban on contraceptives tomorrow morning right after his two hours of prayer. There is no basis in scripture, and the reasoning is convoluted. Other popes have contradicted their predecessors on far weaker grounds.

Someday Pope Francis may be widely recognized as a great pope. I strongly feel that Time should have waited for that day and instead selected someone who sacrificed his livelihood if not his life to bring to light the shenanigans in and around the NSA.

* Pope Francis is #266 on the list of popes, but Benedict IX’s name is there three times.

Who Am I?

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The pope talks about gay people. Continue reading →

Pope Francis made an extremely peculiar remark about gay people yesterday: “If they accept the Lord and have good will, who am I to judge them?” The pundits and Vaticanistas went into a frenzy of speculation as to whether this signaled his intention to change the Church’s policies in any number of areas. My interest was more in the phrasing that the pontiff chose: “who am I to judge them?”

Who is he? He is the guy with the Keys to the Kingdom. He lives in Rome; he must have seen the crossed keys that are displayed nearly everywhere. There must be at least one hundred sets of them in St. Peter’s Basilica alone. According to the most central doctrine — bar none — of the Catholic Church the pope, and only the pope, possesses the authority to determine the requirements for eternal salvation. The words of Matthew XVI encircle the dome of St. Peter’s: “I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Other opinions are immaterial. “Roma locuta est, causa finita est.”

The Church has never made a big issue of homosexuality. No pope has ever come down as hard on gays as, say, the nineteenth-century popes did on the Freemasons. So, the inclusive tone of Pope Francis’s message did not surprise me, but I found the wording to be absolutely astounding. I have read a considerable amount about every single pope, and I can never recall even one of them who expressed the slightest doubt that he had the authority to condemn a set of acts, a lifestyle, or a specific person. I also cannot remember any pope who considered “good will” as an overwhelmingly mitigating factor when exercising his pontifical judgments.

It is inconceivable that Pope Francis does not know the official interpretation of Matthew XVI. It is the sole basis for the canonizations that he recently announced. So, the only conclusion that seems reasonable is that this pope considers himself qualified to judge that at least two men were worthy of eternal salvation, but he does not feel that that his authority allows him to condemn actions done with “good will.” Pope Urban VI, for one, certainly felt no such reluctance. He formally excommunicated King Charles of Naples three times a day for several years.

Reflections on the Conclave

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Assessment, predictions, etc. Continue reading →

Now that the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI has come to an end, it is time to reflect on its achievements and shortcomings. Actually, it is difficult to think of much to put in either category. Benedict continued virtually all of the policies of his predecessor. He had none of Pope John Paul II’s flair, however, and nothing that he did comes close to matching the latter’s accomplishment of serving as the wedge that toppled the Iron Curtain in Europe. I would say that no pope since the end of the Papal States in 1870, with the exception of the short-lived John Paul I, has been less influential. If Benedict XVI is remembered for anything, it will be for his attention to his appearance. He hired a new tailor, wore fabulously jeweled crosses, and, of course, he often appeared in his red Prada loafers. He was almost certainly the most style-conscious pontiff since Paul II, the flamboyant Venetian of the cinquecento. Benedict even made a splashy exit by taking a helicopter to Castel Gandolfo, which can be reached by car in an hour or so.

The conclave was much shorter than I expected, but the outcome was exactly as I predicted. The electors chose a male Catholic. According to the reports of the most reliable vaticanisti, no woman received more than 20 percent of the vote on any scrutiny (the official term for a round of voting in a conclave), and no Jews or Muslims were seriously considered.

The new pope selected the name Francis. He has not personally disclosed the thought process behind this choice, but a Vatican spokesman has announced that “Cardinal Bergoglio had a special place in his heart and his ministry for the poor, for the disenfranchised, for those living on the fringes and facing injustice.” So, it appears that, until the pontiff expresses himself, we must conclude that he was dedicating his pontificate to the memory of St. Francis of Assisi, the thirteenth century ascetic who founded the order now known as the Franciscans.

So, what can we expect from a new pope named Francis? Based upon my years of research of papal history and fully cognizant that my heretofore perfect record of pontifical predictions is on the line, I confidently make the following two predictions:

  1. There will be no change in the official Church policies on ordination of women or abortion.
  2. We have seen the last of the red Prada shoes and the bejeweled accoutrements for a while.

That a Jesuit such as Cardinal Bergoglio would take the name of the founder of another order is certainly peculiar. There have been a couple of Franciscan popes before. By some strange twist of fate, in fact, the pope who suppressed the Jesuit order, Clement XIV, was a Franciscan.

Evidently Pope Francis wants Catholics to focus their attention on the spiritual matters that were important to St. Francis in the thirteenth century rather than the material concerns that he had completely forsaken. As a matter of fact this same dichotomy was the focus of a rather famous controversy that came to a head ninety-eight years after the saint’s death in 1226.

A lot had transpired in the interim. The order established by St. Francis had grown dramatically. The popes for the last seventeen years had not been living in Rome; instead they had usurped the bishop’s residence in Avignon in the Provence and had transformed it into a colossal palace/fortress for their own use. The resident at the time was an irascible and miserly figure named John XXII. His was the sort of pontificate that Scrooge McDuck might have been aspired to if he had been a Roman Catholic cleric.

The Fransiscan order at the time was split into two sects, the “Conventuals” and the “Spirituals.” The latter argued that St. Francis and Jesus before him had ordered their followers to reject all of their worldly possessions in pursuit of spiritual salvation. The Conventuals opted for a more lenient and less literal interpretation. A previous pope and council had ruled in favor of the Spirituals, but Pope John issued a bull that endorsed the position of the Conventuals.

At this point the story gets interesting. The Spirituals argued that the matter had already been settled by the pope and council. The fact that John XXII was contradicting established doctrine was irrefutable evidence that he was not in fact a legitimate pope! John XXII responded with another blustery bull, Quia Quorundam, in which he declared their positions as outright heresy.

Pope John meant business. Sixty-four of the Spirituals were summoned to Avignon. Some were remanded to the Inquisition, and four of them were burned at the stake in Marseilles.

Incidentally, when Pope John XXII died in 1334 he was so rich that some people thought that he had found the Philosopher’s Stone and that it gave him the power to transmute base metals into gold.