So, I hear you all moan, he’s lost it at last. After vampires, serial killers, histories of this country and that country, animation and aviation he’s reduced to the most boring topic of all time: popes.
What?
Boring did I hear you say?
Boring?
Let me tell you, nothing could be farther from the truth! The history of the papacy is littered with lies, corruption, sex, racism, misogyny, wars, betrayal, and power hungry men who would stop at nothing to get what they wanted. Boring? It’s like the Roman Empire, only without the sex. Well, okay, with the sex. But without the war. No, wait a minute, it has that too. Well, without the betray - okay, basically the long, two thousand year plus story of the papacy is just like the history of the Roman Empire, but with just the one god.
It’s also incredibly amusing that because one man who may or may not have been the son of God (who himself may or may not exist) gave authority to another over his people, this authority has carried through two millennia and continues to hold sway over the faithful, sending them into paroxysms of ecstasy whenever he even appears before them. But the real question is: how did this institution , which was originally intended to be the idea of a shepherd leading his flock and caring for them, turn into century after century of men setting themselves up as little less than kings and emperors, and lining their own coffers while the ministration to the faithful could go f
uck itself? And how, after so many corrupt popes, did the whole thing - on the surface, at least - turn itself back to the business of looking after God’s people?
I feel the history of the Papacy should be a very interesting thing to research - not always; surely there were Popes who did little in their term, just spent their time nodding off and calling for mugs of milky tea, but certainly in the earlier days they all but reigned like kings or emperors, so there should be a lot of meat there. And while of course the “bad Popes” are going to be more interesting to write about, I don’t intend this to be a hatchet job: many of the Popes supported the arts, were patrons of literature and architecture, even helped the poor and contributed to world history in a positive way. So I will be taking the good with the bad, and trying to draw a picture of what the Papacy has looked like over the now two thousand years and counting of its existence. As you probably all know, I am a non-believer, but my intention is not to denigrate or jeer at the institution of the Papacy, and I will give as balanced and fair an account as I can manage.
But it should not and cannot be overlooked that it was the Catholic Church that instigated the Crusades, the Inquisitions and who ordered certain books - and many people - to be burned, the Church which actively held back advances in science because they did not fit in with their teachings and were therefore seen as heretical, and who kept women and minorities down, believing this to be the “will of God.” Popes often sponsored or even commanded armies, wars and land grabs, allowed loveless marriages for the sake of alliance building, and helped to keep Europe in the Dark Ages. On the flip side, as noted, and certainly during the Renaissance, they were the patrons of the arts, builders of cathedrals, hospitals, schools and of course churches, and provided for the poor and the destitute.
Whether true or not we shall see, but the TV series
The Borgias implied that Popes were not just elected - at least, at that time in history - but could buy, bribe, threaten or even murder their way into the job. In many ways (and again, how much of this is fantasy, distortion of the truth or pure lies I don’t know at the moment) the Vatican seems to have been, for some considerable time, almost a forerunner of the Mafia, with hired killers, poisonings, suppression of the truth and, of course, twisted sexual practices. I’d like to say that was just a few bad apples, but this is not something I know, so you’ll have to find out as I do, as we descend into the murky forgotten dusty crypts of the Vatican and unearth the stories of the men behind the office down through almost two millennia.
Of course, I say the Vatican, but the independent city-state was only established less than a century ago, in 1929. Prior to that, all popes presided from Rome (though there were a few exceptions as we will see) as this was of course the centre of the Roman Empire, which changed from a pagan worship to a Christian one on the conversion of the Emperor Constantine the Great, allowing the new sect, which had up till then been persecuted by the Romans, its adherents tortured and killed, its priests hunted down, to be practiced in public and in safety.