What About Bad Popes?

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Top 10 Worst Popes in History
TopTenz | 21.I.2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTy8l26PJG8

Intro

0:21 "millions have been slaughtered in the name of God" - care to expand on that?

[He didn't, but may have referred to Urban II and Boniface VIII, neither of whom slaughtered millions even indirectly.]

Boniface VIII

2:30 Sacking of Palestrina can not be put down to Boniface VIII.

Leo X

3:59 The indulgences for St. Peter's Basilica were actually given as indulgences precisely for contributions to that goal.

It's not as if he he given indulgences for his own private spending.

4:07 As to homosexuality, wiki only has:

"Suggestions of homosexual attraction appear in works by two contemporary historians, Francesco Guicciardini and Paolo Giovio. Zimmerman notes Giovio's "disapproval of the pope's familiar banter with his chamberlains – handsome young men from noble families – and the advantage he was said to take of them.""

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Leo_X#Sexuality

Francesco Guicciardini was a friend of Macchiavelli - arguably a secularist, hardly interested in defending a pope.

The footnote says:

"Paolo Giovio, De Vita Leonis Decimi Pont. Max., Firenze (1548, 4 vols), written for the Medici Pope Clement VII and completed in 1533; and (covering the years 1492 to 1534) Francesco Guicciardini, Storia d'Italia, Firenze (1561, first 16 books; 1564 full edn. 20 books) written between 1537 and 1540, and published after his death in the latter year. For the characterisation of the relevant passages (few and brief) in these authors, see, e.g., Vaughan 1908, p. 280:- and Wyatt, Michael, "Bibbiena's Closet: Interpretation and the Sexual Culture of a Renaissance Papal Court", comprising chap. 2 of Cestaro, Gary P. (ed.), Queer Italia, London (2004) pp. 35–54 a. To these can be added Zimmerman, T.P., Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of Sixteenth-Century Italy, Princeton University Press (1996), citing at p. 23 Giovio's disapproval of the banter. Two pages later Zimmerman notes Giovio's penchant for gossip."

I checked the Latin text of Giovio, it certainly lacks the word "sodomia[m]".

Giovio was a physician, so used to interpreting small signs, perhaps overinterpreting some.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_Giovio

http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/scanned/paulo_giovio_de_leonis_x.htm

His dying in bed with a boy might be from one Bale, John Bale, known as Bilious Bale ...

Urban II

5:41 Disagree on First Crusade. It was a defensive war.

Atrocities committed during a war do not always reflect on those who ordered it, unless also leading it.

Urban II at Clermont said nothing about doing atrocities to either Jews or Eastern Schismatics (whom he was trying to help), and for that matter neither about any against Muslim civilians.

Part of what damaged the actual morality of the war effort was bad discipline (Geoffroy of Bouillon notably took three days before succeeding in stopping a massacre, that of Jerusalem), part of it was leaders who were ambitious for own power gains, like Tancred and Bohemond whose grandparents or greatgrandparents or something (perhaps a bit further back, though) had been Pagan Vikings.

Julius III

7:03 You are for "Julius III" showing Raphael's portrait of Julius II. That is, of the predecessor of Leo X.

Your assessment of Julius III may for all that be fairly correct.

Stephen VI / Sergius III

Relating to Formosus trials

9:25 sth, "his ordinations were declared null"

Very good point.

Protestants have argued against Apostolic succession due to schisms in Rome, when Popes have retroactively been declared non-popes - but the succession depends on validity of ordination or episcopal consecration and this can be the case even when the man consecrating held his episcopal or papal functions illegally.

Declaring someone's ordinations and episcopal consecrations null is an extra, it doesn't follow from someone being an Antipope. This means earlier and later Antipopes can - as well, obviously as real Popes and all real bishops also not Pope or not even bishop of a See - transmit Apostolic succession, plus obviously even Formosus' consecrations being null doesn't mean all other bishops consecrated prior to him suddenly lost Apostolic succession too.

Whether you consider Stephen VI or Formosus the baddy, either way, the story when studied in detail debunks a few Protestant ideas - probably gotten from misapplying this declaration of nullity to all other Popes who were declared Antipopes.

As to Sergius III burning the corpse of Formosus over again, that seems physically impossible.

Benedict IX

11:43 Henry intervened, but ineffectively, however, then Benedict IX resigned for real and died penitent in a monastery. Probably Pope St Leo IX had also lifted the ban on him.

Alexander VI

12:58 No, not quite no.

9th and 10th C. Popes were equal to Alexander VI's worst moments.

Belloc considered him "a bad liver and a good pope". Liver arguably not as "foie" but as "viveur" - "un mauvais viveur mais un bon pape". Then, Belloc could have been somewhat biassed against the somewhat puritanic Savonarola who was victim of a trial where he basically had ordered the outcome.

If Savonarola had told people "you need to stay in Florence if possible and if not live like here elsewhere, so everyone needs the bonfires of vanities", he would have been over the top, but it seems the bonfires were voluntary and those who didn't throw jewels, cosmetics, paintings and novels on them were either discreet or leaving Florence, so, Savonarola could have been innocent.

Plus, unlike Julius III, Alexander VI was at least hetero.

13:28. I suppose you mean "Borgia Pope".

A Borgia non-Pope was by contrast a good Jesuit priest, even a saint : Francis Borgia.

And while he tried to foist the see of Carpentras on his son Cesare, the latter refused, preferring to be a layman.

Meaning, Carpentras after that got a bishop Alexnader VI nominated on his merits, not their family relation.

Extro

14:19 This somewhat not so correct presentation we hosted by Simon Whistler, a very popular presenter, and authored by Keith Burnside.