{"id":7186,"date":"2018-08-27T07:42:36","date_gmt":"2018-08-27T13:42:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/?p=7186"},"modified":"2018-08-27T07:48:44","modified_gmt":"2018-08-27T13:48:44","slug":"bad-popes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/bad-popes-7186.htm","title":{"rendered":"Bad Popes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It is small comfort, but things have been worse in the papacy before.\u00a0 The learned John Bellairs sums up the pornocracy of the ninth century:<\/p>\n

There are only a few things that the well-informed Catholic absolutely must<\/em> know about Church history. These are<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Popes\n
      \n
    1. Good<\/li>\n
    2. Bad<\/li>\n
    3. Lost<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Popes<\/em><\/p>\n

      Since no Catholic will be called upon to defend Good Popes, and since we know nothing at all about the Lost Popes, let is concentrate upon the Bad Popes.<\/p>\n

      The worst Pontiff ever to slouch menacingly in\u00a0 a corner of the Chair of Peter was Spatulus III (898-899) who came to power as the nerveless ninth century was dissolving imperceptibly into the tepid tenth. He was, no doubt, a product of his times, born to a family of decayed Roman nobility in an age was Rome was little more than a \u201cbattered caravanserai.\u201d To be fair, we must say that Spatulus might have been better if his mother Papella had not kept him in a root cellar from the time he was three till his election at forty-two. As it turned out, he was (to quote the learned Father Roodscreed) \u201cno better and no worse than one might expect.\u201d<\/p>\n

      Among the more interesting excesses of Pope Spatulus were:<\/p>\n

        \n
      1. His love of rock candy. He made a little house out of it in his garden of his villa at Spumanti and took his mistresses there for unspeakable rites.<\/li>\n
      2. His dog Gorgo. \u201cIt was much too large,\u201d says Father Grabney in his book The Dog at Rome: Famous Pets of Pope<\/em>s.<\/li>\n
      3. His insistence on dressing up as Amon-Ra and his fortunately averted scheme to be declared an Egyptian deity.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        Spatulus was crushed to death by the Curia in 899 after making six necrophiles and a hat fetishist cardinals.<\/p>\n

         <\/p>\n

        So let us comfort ourselves that we are merely afflicted with Francis, who will eventually be given a suitable sobriquet: Francis the Foolish? Francis the Phony? Francis the Donald Trump of the Catholic Church?<\/p>\n

        \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

         <\/p>\n

        \r\n\t<\/div>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

        It is small comfort, but things have been worse in the papacy before.\u00a0 The learned John Bellairs sums up the pornocracy of the ninth century: There are only a few things that the well-informed Catholic absolutely must know about Church history. These are Popes Good Bad Lost Popes Since no Catholic will be called upon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1540,791,1539],"class_list":["post-7186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bad-popes","tag-francis","tag-john-bellairs","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7186"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7190,"href":"https:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7186\/revisions\/7190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}