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Pope Alexander V. After a brief trial he was found guilty, "His dominating passion was nepotism, heaping riches and deposed, imprisoned and strangled. The Romans pelted mud and favors on his unworthy relatives. His nephew, the Cardinal stones at his coffin when it was brought to Rome. There was no Rafael Riario, plotted to overthrow the Medici; the pope was public funeral. Gossip of the day had it that during his legation he cognizant of the plot, though probably not of the intention to seduced 200 women and a similar number of men. In modern assassinate, and even laid Florence under an interdict because it times, in 1958, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (1881-1963) assumed __ rose in fury against the conspirators and brutal murderers of the papacy and for some reason adopted the same title as the first Giuliano dei Medici. Henceforth, until the Reformation, the John XXIII. Vatican historians then set out to remove from its secular interests of the papacy were of paramount importance. official records all references to the original John XXIII, but they — The attitude of Pope Sixtus IV towards the conspiracy of the were not completely successful, as papal lists then in publication Pazzi, his wars and treachery, his promotion to the highest offices were soon to come into the public domain. in the Church of undesirable people are blots upon his career. After two years of wrangling, the Nevertheless, there is a praiseworthy side cardinals elected Odo Colonna to his pontificate. He took measures to (1368-1431) as Pope Martin V One probable reason for suppress abuses in the Inquisition, (1417-31), and he and each of his Sixtus's negation of the rulings vigorously opposed the Waldenses, and successors made solemn oaths to annulled the decrees of the Council of reform the papacy and the Church, but of the Council of Constance is Constance." in fact they sank deeper into the mire. i (Catholic Encyclopedia, xiv, pp. The popes who had preceded Martin that the gathering decreed that 32-33) V had done so little for the betterment a woman, Joan Anglicus Vill, of the city of Rome that when Martin ay] i One probable reason for Sixtus's returned in 1420 after a long exile officially occupied the papal negation of the rulings of the Council imposed on him for legalising and chair for two years in the of Constance is that the gathering protecting the abuses of the Curia, he ninth century (855-58) decreed that a woman, Joan Anglicus found cows still grazing in its streets. VILL, officially occupied the papal chair Martin was so infuriated when he for two years in the ninth century learned that Oxford professor John (855-58). Unlike Marozia, who ruled Wycliffe (c. 1324-1384), some five decades earlier, had translated the papacy for several decades in the 10th century, Joan was the Bible into English that in 1427 he had the theologian's bones formally elected pope, and thus in Catholic eyes was a legitimate dug up, crushed and scattered in the River Swift. This was 43 successor of St Peter. Her story entered the mediaeval historical years after Wycliffe's death, and the pope's actions reflect the record in Thomas de Elmham's Official List of Popes which said: vagaries of an unbalanced mind, hardly compatible with sanity. "AD 855, Joannes. This does not count; she was a woman." During those "centuries of cultural darkness, the papal court Sixtus IV drafted plans for the nunneries to become "brothels was more depraved than at any period of the Dark Ages" filled with the choicest prostitutes, lean with fasting, but full of (Catholic Encyclopedia, Pecci ed., ii, p. 337), and the Church lust" (A History of the Popes, op. cit.; also similar descriptions of hoped that Catholics "looked forward to the time when the the nunneries centuries earlier are in the Annals of Hildesheim, c. religious orders, whose laxity had been occasioned in great 890). measure by the general looseness of the times, would be restored About this juncture, and after a thousand years of bewildering to some sort of discipline" (Catholic Encyclopedia, i, pp. 288-89). Church history, the protests of Christendom swelled steadily and Christian writers regard the 15th and 16th centuries as then broke into the Protestant Reformation, a religious revolution decadent, but few of them give their readers even a faint idea of by force and arms. An apologetic overview of the debauchery of the flagrancy of vice, the deliberate corruption of monasteries, the Church morals and minds which made possible this major vast spread and public encouragement of prostitution, the indecency of the numerous communal baths, the fiendish cruelty which persisted in spite of the efflorescence of art, and the cynical growth of treachery and lying in international Christian relations. Dr Ludwig Pastor (1854-1928), a sincere German historian of the papacy, almost alone among Catholic historians is candid. He says that "the prevailing immorality in Church orders exceeded anything that has been witnessed since the tenth century" and that "wanton cruelty and vindictiveness went hand in hand with immorality" (A History of the Popes, op. cit., chapter 1, p. 97). The epoch that occupies us is, without doubt, one of the strangest in Church history, one in which we meet with the greatest amount of crime and decadence. The Church says that a period of "decline followed after the middle of the thirteenth century, when war and rapine did much injury ... the Church suffered again in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries from the prevailing social disturbances" (Catholic Encyclopedia, i, p. 145). Speaking of moral conditions current in the age, the Vatican summarises its position in the time of Pope Sixtus IV (1471-84): This 1459 German woodcut shows Pope Pius II as a young man wearing a balaclava and breaking into a house. It was widely distributed in Rome by anti-papal groups, and after its release Protestants used the hype to ridicule the feigned holiness of the Catholic Church. (© Ancient Documents, Rathaus, Aachen) NEXUS + 47 FEBRUARY — MARCH 2007 www.nexusmagazine.com