Bad Bad Bad Bad Popes Popes Popes Popes

James J. Drummey
(Endnotes not by authors)


Popes Alexander VI, Boniface VIII, and Clement VII

Q. How many of the more than 260 Popes would you characterize as being corrupt? G.P.,
Florida

A. It is generally agreed by historians that four or five Popes were guilty of serious moral
lapses.(1) Some critics of the Church have tried to use this information to undermine the
Catholic teaching on infallibility. But they are confusing infallibility (the inability of the Holy
Father to teach error when he speaks [ex cathedra] on a matter of faith and morals) with
impeccability (the inability of the Holy Father to commit a sin). The Church has never
claimed impeccability for any Pope, although many of them have lived lives of
extraordinary holiness,(2) because we are all sinners, but it has claimed the charism of
infallibility for every Pope because of Christ's promises to be with His Church all days,
and never to let the gates of Hell prevail against it.

The fact that some Popes were wicked in their private lives is no argument against the
truth of the Catholic Church, anymore than immoral conduct by an American President is
an argument against the goodness of the United States. In fact, it is an argument
for the reliability of the Church since it continued during the reign of those unworthy
Popes to teach faithfully the truths handed down by Christ and the Apostles and suffered
no lasting harm from the immoral conduct of a tiny percentage of its leaders.

____________________

James J. Drummey is a religious educator and co-author of the five volume catechetical
and apologetics series Catholicism and Reason/Ethics/Life/Society/Scripture. He is editor of
the Catholic Replies newspaper column. This extract is from the first published volume
of Catholic Replies (C.R. Publications, 1995).



The The The The Scandal Scandal Scandal Scandal of the Bad Popes of the Bad Popes of the Bad Popes of the Bad Popes
Patrick Madrid

[Accusation:] The most powerful evidence against the papacy being biblical is the record of
the popes themselves. There have been numerous bad popes,(3) men who murdered, stole,
were greedy, arrogant, violent and incredibly immoral. This alone disqualifies the papacy as
being part of Christ's plan for His Church. There's no way He would have entrusted the pa-
pacy to sinful men.


Main cast of the Showtime series, The Borgias

Then how do you account for Christ entrusting the office of Apostle to sinful
men like Judas? He was one of the Lord's hand-picked protgs. He was a pretty
sinful character, yet he was an Apostle! In fact, at one time or another, Scripture
tells us that all the Apostles failed to live according to Christ's commands. Though
they never appear to have slipped into sexual immorality, the Apostles did blunder
their way into plenty of other sins before the New Testament story was finished.

By turns they were violent (Peter cut off the ear of the high priest's servant in the
Garden of Gethsemane), vain (they bickered bitterly more than once over which of
them would be highest in heaven), lazy ("Can you not stay awake with me one hour?"
Christ asked them as they slept during his agony in the Garden), and disbelieving (Christ
identified him by name as a devil, one of those who refused to believe His
teaching on the Eucharist in John 6:70-71). The Apostl es were cowardly (running
away from Christ when he was taken into custody by the Jews). Peter denied three
times, once under oath, even knowing his Lord.

Clearly, Christ entrusted the role of Apostle to weak, even at times wicked men.
But does that fact somehow disqualify them from fulfilling the purpose for which
He called them? Of course not. God's grace is more powerful than man's sin, and
the same is true when it comes to the papacy.(4)

The good, the bad, and the ugly
Yes, there have been some wicked popes. Corruption, immorality, even murder, were
sins committed by some bishops of Rome. But what does that prove, except that
they, like the Apostles, were not always faithful to the graces God gave them?
This i s true of all of us, to one extent or another. The fact that there have been
bad popes and that's a fact no Catholic disputes does not disprove the doctrine
of the papacy. Why? Because as we've seen, Christ entrusts important work to
men who are sinners. He offers them all the grace necessary to be faithful and
holy, even though some spurn those graces and choose sin anyway.

Another problem with this fiction is that it seems to assume that all the popes
have been scoundrels. That's very far from the truth. The fact is, most of the popes
have been good even heroically good men. They have been, on the whole, good
examples of Christian virtue and perseverance in the apostolate. That fact is very
easily forgotten by critics of the papacy.

And there's another issue here. Scripture is clear that God can and does confer
special teaching authority on men even if they are sinful. One striking example
concerns Caiaphas, the high priest at the time of Christ's Crucifixion:

Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, You know nothing,
nor do you consider that it is better for you that one man should die instead
of the people, so that the whole nation may not perish. He did not say this on
his own, but since he was high priest for that year, he prophesied that Jesus was
going to die for the nation, and not only for the nation, but also to gather into
one the dispersed children of God. So from that day on they planned to kill him.
(John 11:49-55)

Thi s i s a good exampl e of God usi ng a si nful man a wicked man, i t seems
to utter i nspired prophecy. The Holy Spirit spoke through his lips, in spite of the
fact that Caiaphas was actively plotting to kill Jesus.

One bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch

Another episode that illustrates this point, though from a different angle, is found
in the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus points to the Jewish leaders and reminds his
audience that they possessed a God-gi ven authori ty to teach. Thi s authority was
valid even though many of them were corrupt.(5)

Christ later calls them hypocrites, a brood of vipers, bli nd guides,
whi tened sepul chers full of dead men' s bones. The Lord made i t cl ear that
even though these men

were personall y corrupt and unworthy of their position
of authority, they nonetheless had that authority:

Then Jesus spoke to the crowds and to his disciples, saying, The Scribes and
Pharisees have taken their seat on the chair of Moses.* Therefore, do and observe
all the things whatsoever they tell you, but do not follow their example. For they
preach but they do not practice. (Matthew 23:1-3)

In the same way, the Lord commissioned si nful, weak, impetuous Simon Peter
to feed His sheep and tend His flock, to carry the keys of the kingdom of heaven,
to bind and loose in His name and with His authority, to strengthen the other
Apostles in times of crisis and uncertainty, to be the rock on which the Church
would be built. Peter's successors, the popes, continue in that ministry. Some
fulfilled it poorly, hobbled by the chains of sin and personal failings, but most carried
out the task well, many of them completi ng thei r sacred mini stry wi th
martyrdom; their supreme effort to strengthen their brothers.


* The Greek phrase here, ts Mousos kathdras, the chair of Moses, is the classic Scriptural text
that coincides with the Catholic teaching on the Chair of Peter. This is the source of the Latin
term for the pope's teaching authority: ex cathedra (i.e., "from the chair").

____________________

Patrick Madrid is a Catholic apologist, editor-in-chief of Envoy Magazine, and a senior vice
president of the Missionaries of Faith Foundation. His books include Surprised by Truth,
Any Friend of Gods Is a Friend of Mine, and Pope Fiction (from which this is extracted).


ENDNOTES

(1) The great Catholic apologist and publisher Frank Sheed (1897-1981) cautioned against such a
simplistic tallying of papal sinners for purposes of claiming there were only six bad popes out of
260, and that the Apostles had a far worse average, one traitor in twelve. He notes that the
number six is arrived at by ignoring all the Commandments save one the Sixth as it chanced
and assuming that only six popes had ever sinned against that one. There are of course other sins
and worse sins: some of them can be in the depth of the soul, where only God can see them.
We learned soon enough that one cannot list good popes and bad popes in two columns,
gratified that the bad column is so much the shorter (The Church and I, Doubleday, 1974, p.62).
American theologian George Weigel once said that being Americans we tend to focus on sex
and money but for him, the really religiously corrupting aspects of the most difficult period in
the history of the papacy [which he identifies as the late medieval] had to do with the Churchs
entanglement with state power (In Depth, Book TV, June 1, 2008).

(2) Asked about the Borgia popes in a 2008 television interview, Catholic author and columnist
George Weigel responded, I remember a wonderful National Geographic coffee-table book on
the Vatican, it was published maybe 15 years ago. And in it an elderly priest has a wonderful
line. He said, God has been very kind to us. We havent had a wicked pope in 500 years. I
think thats about right! Which is not a bad run for any institution (In Depth, Book TV, June 1,
2008). Of course that does not exclude any number of unexceptional sinners or morally
mediocre popes.
The Annuario Pontificio (the Pontifical Yearbook) lists a total of 265 popes in the Churchs two
thousand year history. Of that number 78 are called Saint (including the first 35 bishops of
Rome) and another eleven are called Blessed (including John XIII and John Paul II). Beatification
is the penultimate step before canonization. One pope is titled Venerable (Pius XII) and two as
Servants of God (Paul VI and John Paul I) the first of the four steps to canonization. This
should not be interpreted to mean that these are the only popes that lived lives of deep faith and
Christian virtue. It simply means that these are the ones that some influential person or group
created the impetus to at least start the process of canonization.

(3) The most popular book in English on the subject, The Bad Popes, was published in 1969 (the
year after Pope Paul VIs encyclical Humanae Vitae). Written by historian Eric Russell Chamberlin
(1926-2006), it highlighted the immoral lives of seven or eight of the most notorious pontiffs
(reigning years included in parenthesis) and gave dishonourable mention to some of their
predecessors:

Pope Stephen VI (896-897), who had his predecessor, Pope Formosus, exhumed, his
rotting corpse vested and propped up on a throne, tried, de-fingered, briefly reburied,
and thrown in the Tiber. Later that same year Stephen was imprisoned and strangled.
Pope John XII (937-964) was a member of the powerful and corrupt Theophylact
family who appointed popes for the first sixty years of the 10th century. He became
pope when only 16 to 18 years of age. John was an inveterate womanizer and gambler,
whose licentiousness led to the Lateran being spoken of as a brothel, and who invoked
Zeus and Venus when playing dice. A contemporary historian accuses him of accepting
payment to ordain a ten year-old bishop in the city of Todi. John had several episcopal
opponents tortured and killed. He died eight days after he had been, according to
rumour, stricken by paralysis while in the act of adultery.
Pope Benedict IX (1032-1044,1045,1047-1048) was the last member of the
Theophylact family to sit on the papal throne. His father obtained it for him when he
was 18 to 20 years of age. He was accused of numerous counts of fornication, rape and
murder and was twice expelled from Rome, only to return. In 1048 he resigned the
papacy to pursue marriage and sold the office to his pious godfather. Charged with
simony the following year, he refused to appear and was excommunicated.
Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303) encouraged his saintly predecessor, Celestine V, to
resign the papacy, only to imprison him for the remainder of his life upon election. He
had many bitter quarrels with the Habsburg Emperor, the King of France, King of Sicily,
and the powerful Colonna family of Rome. His quarrel with Dante led to the poet
lampooning Boniface in his Divine Comedy, putting the pontiff in the Eighth Circle of Hell
for simony.
Pope Urban VI (1378-1389), who went from being a devout and learned monk to an
obstinate, imprudent and violent pope. Some of his Curia thought him a madman. When
several of his cardinals conspired against him, Urban had them seized, tortured and
killed.
Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503), a Borgia, who was guilty of nepotism and fornication.
While a Cardinal he had four children, including Cesare and Lucrezia, by his then
favourite mistress. He made Cesare the Archbishop of Valencia at age 17. While
Alexander VI has become the poster boy for papal corruption, his alleged misdeeds are
similar in nature to those of other Renaissance princes. But as the French philosopher
Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) noted in his work Du Pape (1819), The [popes] are
forgiven nothing, because everything is expected from them, wherefore the vices lightly
passed over in a Louis XIV become most offensive and scandalous in an Alexander VI.
Pope Leo X (1513-1521), a member of the Medici family, who was probably too
preoccupied with papal and family politics to adequately respond to Martin Luthers
challenge (dismissing it as a monks squabble) that ignited the Protestant Reformation.
He was a spendthrift whose lavishness quickly exhausted papal funds and precipitated a
financial crisis from which his pontificate never emerged. He is remembered for granting
indulgences for those who donated to the reconstruction of Saint Peter's Basilica.
Pope Clement VII (15231534), like Leo X, was a member of the Medici family.
Power-politicking got him caught between France, Spain, and Germany and led to the
Holy Roman Emperors army sacking Rome in 1527.

Another book on the same subject, Peter De Rosas Vicars of Christ: The Dark Side of the Papacy
(Crown Publ., 1988), covers much the same territory but in a more sensationalistic fashion. De
Rosa is a former Jesuit, now married, who dissents from the Churchs teaching on contraception,
divorce, clerical celibacy, papal infallibility, etc. the usual roster. He appears less concerned
with historical context and fairness than with casting papal misdemeanours in the worst possible
light so as to discredit papal authority. De Rosa was scriptwriter for the popular British television
comedy series, Bless Me, Father, based on his novels.

(4) Frank Sheed expands on this fundamental point in The Church and I:

Upon the human failings of popes and bishopswe of the [Catholic Evidence]
Guild were the best-instructed body of laymen in the Church's history. And none
of this dimmed either our loyalty to our own bishop, or our certainty that from
papacy and hierarchy the Holy Spi rit would see to it that we got true doctrine
and true sacraments. Unworthy pastors were the Holy Spirit's problem, not
ours. It took us a while to grow into this knowledge. At the beginning we had a
general notion that there had been some morally eccentric popes (but they had
never defined anything!). We had not a notion of the tidal wave of papal and
hierarchical ill-doing that was to break over us.
But, looking simpl y at what hi story records, while we may feel that the
popes present a magnificent totality, they have their souls to save. I am devoted
to the papacy wi thout i t there woul d be hundreds of debates and no
adjudicator for any of them. I hope that if the test came I should die rather than
deny it, as St. Thomas More and St. John Fi sher did though i n thei r boyhood
they had li ved under Alexander VI and they went to their deaths under Clement
VII. I admire all the popes I have lived under, but there have been some whom no
one could admire. For them and for us, Christ is the point.
We were there to introduce people to Christ's Church. We were not
prettying the Church for its photograph. Still less were we like lawyers with a
shady client, trying to keep his worst crimes from the jury's knowledge. We had to
show them the Church Christ founded exactly as it was and is. If they were
scandalized by what they saw, they must take it up with Christ, who founded it,
or with the Holy Spirit, who vivifies it.
However ill [Christ] might be served by his representative at any given time, we
could still find in his Church, as nowhere else, life and truth and the possibility of union
with him to the limit of our willingness.

(5) If the flawed character of popes or bishops is proof against the divine origins of the Catholic
Church and papal authority then why is it not likewise proof against the religious claims of the
ancient kingdom of Israel and Protestantism? When the Israelites demanded a monarchy, Saul
was selected by God through the prophet Samuel to be their first king. Yet he proved unworthy
of the office and eventually committed suicide (1 Sam. 31:4). Next came King David, a man
after Gods own heart (1 Sam. 13:14), to whom authorship of the Psalms is attributed and
through whom God entered into a special covenant with His people (2 Samuel 7). Yet David
committed adultery with the wife of his loyal general, Uriah the Hittite, and then plotted the
innocent mans death. To Israels third king, Solomon, God gave a wise and discerning heart
like no other (1 Kgs. 3:11-12; 10:24). Solomon built the first Temple in Jerusalem and is
traditionally attributed authorship of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs. Yet he was a
spendthrift who quickly depleted the royal treasury. Needing funds to pay for the costly
imported materials used in his many building projects and to maintain his extravagant lifestyle
Solomon taxed his people heavily, and what he could not pay for in taxes he paid for in land and
people. He gave twenty towns to foreign powers, and he paid Phoenicia in slave labour: 30,000
men had to perform labour for the King of Tyre (1 Kgs. 5:1-18). Solomon was a sensual man who
had a harem of 700 wives and 300 concubines. He was even an idolater who disobeyed God in
marrying non-Hebrew women and then built altars and temples to their pagan gods, and
worshipped at them himself (1 Kgs 11:1-8). Groaning under the oppression of Solomon, the
Hebrews became discontent, so that upon his death (c. 926-922 BC) the ten northern tribes
revolted. Unwilling to be ruled by Solomons son, Rehoboam, these tribes successfully seceded
and established their own kingdom. The empire of David and Solomon was gone, never to be
seen again. Examining the character of the subsequent monarchs of the divided kingdom one
could reckon all the kings of Israel as bad and the majority of the kings of Judah the same. While
some might retort that God did not intend for Israel to be ruled by a hereditary monarchy, in fact
warned them about it (1 Sam. 8:8-19), that does not negate the fact that Bible-believing
Christians and Jews hold that God did establish the Davidic royal lineage and that Israel continued
and even deepened its covenant relationship with God during the monarchic period, despite any
misrule or personal sins of the various kings. Why should Gods New Covenant relationship with
the New Israel the Church be any different?
Serious defects of character can also be found among the big three leaders of the
Reformation, men Protestants believe were led by the Holy Spirit. Martin Luther (1483-1546)
was a course man whose vulgar and obscene language shocked friend and foe alike. His
bombastic personality and polemical style made his writings confusing, as he frequently seemed
to affirm and deny the same point on different occasions. One biographer explains: For, like his
doctrines and his writings, Luther's life was a mass of contradictions arising from the neurotic
temperament (Frantz Funck-Brentano, Luther, 1936). Luther confessed, I am but a man prone
to let himself be swept off his feet by society, drunkenness, the torments of the flesh (Table
Talk, Weimar edition, 9,215,13). In later life he blamed his physical ailments on excessive wine
and Satan. In 1539 one of his princely protectors, Philip I of Hesse, petitioned Luther for
permission to take a second wife. Luthers right-hand man, Philip Melanchthon, wrote a
document sanctioning bigamy, based on Old Testament precedent, that was signed by Luther
and six other reformers including Martin Bucer. However they advised Philip to keep his double
marriage secret. Luther encouraged the deceit, saying a secret yes must remain a public no
and vice versa (Wilhelm de Wette, Dr. Luthers Briefe, vol.6,263). In his later years Luther
became fiercely anti-Jewish, writing a letter entitled The Jews and Their Lies, in which he called
upon Christians to destroy their holy texts, forbid their rabbis to teach, set fire to their
synagogues, schools and houses, and to eject them from the country. In his pamphlet Against
the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants he endorsed the violent suppression of the
peasant uprising (1524-25), that cost maybe one hundred thousand lives, by invoking Romans
13:1-7 as justification for Germanys ruling class to cut them down, slaughter and stab them,
openly or in secret. And of course he favoured violence against Catholics: The emperor, kings,
and princes should attack this plague [the Romanists] of all the earth no longer with words but
with the sword" and wash our hands in their blood.
French theologian Jean Calvin (1509-64) exercised tremendous influence on the laws and
mores of his adopted Geneva. He proved to be a most tyrannical authority, consumed by the
rightness of his vision of Christian living and imposing it on the population regardless of the
misery it caused. Historian Will Durant gives an impression of what it was like to live in Calvins
Geneva:

Calvin himself, austere and severe, dreamed of a community so well regulated that its
virtue would prove his theology, and would shame the Catholicism that had produced or
tolerated the luxury and laxity of Rome. Discipline should be the backbone of personality,
enabling it to rise out of the baseness of human nature to the erect stature of the self-
conquered man.To regulate lay conduct a system of domiciliary visits was established:
one or another of the elders visited, yearly, each house in the quarter assigned to him,
and questioned the occupants on all phases of their lives. Consistory and Council joined
in the prohibition of gambling, card-playing, profanity, drunkenness, the frequenting of
taverns, dancing (which was then enhanced by kisses and embraces), indecent or
irreligious songs, excess in entertainment, extravagance in living, immodesty in dress. The
allowable color and quantity of clothing, and the number of dishes permissable at a meal,
were specified by law. Jewelry and lace were frowned upon. A woman was jailed for
arranging her hair to an immoral height. Theatrical performances were limited to
religious plays, and then these too were forbidden.To speak disrespectfully of Calvin
or the clergy was a crime. A first violation of these ordinances was punished with a
reprimand, further violation with fines, persistent violation with imprisonment or
banishment. Fornication was to be punished with exile or drowning; adultery, blasphemy,
or idolatry, with death. In one extraordinary instance a child was beheaded for striking its
parents. In the years 1558-59 there were 414 prosecutions for moral offenses; between
1542 and 1564 there were seventy-six banishments and fifty-eight executions; the total
population of Geneva was then about 20,000. As everywhere in the sixteenth century,
torture was often used to obtain confessions or evidence. (The Reformation,1957, pp.
473-74)

A child who had called his mother a devil, and flung a stone at her, was publicly whipped and
suspended by his arms to a gallows as a sign that he deserved death (J. M. V. Audin, History of the
Life, Works, and Doctrines of John Calvin). The Geneva Council sometimes reacted to the severity
of Calvins codes and moderated them. Yet Calvin justified the harsh punishments, even of
children, with appeals to Old Testament levitical law. Attendance at Sunday services was
compulsory and citizens were routinely questioned by authorities as to their attendance.
Everyone was encouraged to spy on everyone else. Every unbecoming word, even heard in the
street, was to be made known to the Consistory. Some men who laughed while Calvin was
preaching were put in prison for three days and forced to publicly repent. In 1547 the embryonic
freethinker Jacques Gruet was tortured and beheaded for publicly criticizing Calvin, as well as for
privately holding heretical ideas. In 1553 the Spanish physician-writer and anti-trinitarian Michael
Servetus was passing through Geneva. At Calvins behest he was arrested, tried and burned at
the stake for heresy (some apologists reply that Calvin only wanted him beheaded).
Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531), like Luther, was a former Catholic priest. In 1518 he was accused
of seducing a girl of good family. In a letter to Heinrich Utinger (dated December 5th and still
preserved) Zwingli denied that he had seduced her but that she seduced me with more than
flattering words. That girl, he said, was a virgin during the day and a woman at night
(Hans J. Hillerbrand, The Reformation in Its Own Words, 1964: 115-16). He confessed to
having had sexual relations with other women in the past but with the scruple that he had never
dishonoured a virgin, nun or married woman. Zwingli was jealous of the growing influence of
Luther and claimed that the doctrine of Christ was taught to him by the Word of God before
Luther was ever heard of in Switzerland. In 1524 he married a comely widow with whom he had
been cohabiting for two years (his defenders claim there was an earlier secret marriage).
Zwinglis attitude appears ambiguous toward the repression of the Anabaptists by his political
disciples which escalated from imprisonment and fines, to torture, banishment and finally death
(possibly 5,000 killed in Switzerland in the first ten years of Anabaptism). His attitude towards
Catholics was less ambiguous. He wrote that the massacre of the Catholic bishops was
necessary for the establishment of the pure Gospel. To compel the Catholic cantons to accept
the new doctrines, he urged civil war and succeeded in persuading Zurich to march against the
Catholic territories. Zwingli and other pastors were among the Protestant troops. He was killed
at the Battle of Kappel.
And then there was Henry VIII