The Pope is the head of the Catholic Church. His headquarters are in Rome, or more precisely in the Vatican, which is inside Rome. There seem to have been a goodly number of #Antipopes - see below. The Wikipedia explains all - one hopes. It also accuses Eight Bad Popes.
Some Popes past and present follow:-
Pope Joan
Was a woman and probably fictional. In one version she is alleged to have reigned between Leo IV and Benedict III in the 850s.
Pope Leo IV 847 - 855
He helped fight off Arab, Islamic(?) raiders. Some things don't change.
Pope Benedict III 855 - 858
Pope Urban II - 1088 – 1099 AD
Pope Urban II, born Otho de Lagery is best known for initiating the First Crusade.
Pope Adrian IV 1154 - 1159 AD
Born in England. Rarely went back. Incited the Invasion of Ireland. Was he Catholic or Jew? Rerevisionist wonders - see Was The Pope A Catholic? The evidence is non-existent, just a feeling about the nature of the enemy.
Pope Innocent IV 1243 - 1254
Lived in a turbulent period. He had to flee to France but made it back later. Mongols were making problems for Europe at the time.
Pope Celestine V [ 1215 - 1296 ]
He was a Pope who walked away by resigning. He was put in prison for his pains.
Pope Boniface VIII 1294 - ?
Had a lively time of it.
Pope Pius V 1566 - 1572 AD
In 1570 he published Regnans in Excelsis, excommunicating Elizabeth I of England for heresy and persecution of English Catholics during her reign. He also arranged the formation of the Holy League, an alliance of Catholic states to combat the advancement of the Ottoman Empire in Eastern Europe. Although outnumbered, the Holy League famously defeated the Ottomans at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. Pius V attributed the victory to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary and instituted the feast of Our Lady of Victory.[6] Biographers report that as the Battle of Lepanto ended, Pius rose and went over to a window, where he stood gazing toward the East. Then, turning around, he exclaimed "The Christian fleet is victorious!" and shed tears of thanksgiving. Now of course our rulers betray us, welcoming the enemy at the gates.
Pope Leo XIII - 1878 - 1903 AD
A decent man with a good brain.
Pope Leo XIII is well known for intellectualism, the development of social teachings. He brought us his famous papal encyclical Rerum Novarum, which told us that Capitalism is bad but Socialism is worse, making false promises to the honest working man.
Pius X 1903 - 1914 AD
A profoundly decent man who followed traditional teachings. This is why the Society of Saint Pius X aka SSPX is named after him.
Pope Pius XI 1914 - 1922 AD
Pope Pius XI 1922 - 1939 AD
Pope Pius XII - 1939 - 1958 AD
Pope Pius XII, born Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli was the Pope during the Nazi era and he has been accused of being indifferent at best to the fate of the Jews who came unstuck then. But Pius wrote Mit Brennender Sorge [ With Burning Care is my amateur translation ] in 1937, an encyclical which was unusual, if not unique because it was published first in German rather than Latin and told us thereby who it was written for. He wrote about the Nazi's breach of the Concordat with the German Reich (1933) and in favour of peace in Germany.
Pope John XXIII 1958 - 1963 AD
Pope Paul VI 1963 - 1978 AD
He brought us Nostra Aetate
Pope John Paul II 1978 - 2005 AD
Spoke about the dangers of Propaganda He told us that Propaganda Machines Are Weapons Of War. It's not often noted that that a famous Catholic canonized saint gave speeches decrying war propaganda, which, as he put it, is "directed especially to the young."The pope began with a strong rebuke of "stifling of all freedom through police control and the psychological conditioning resulting from the unilateral use of the media." He explained "totalitarianism destroys fundamental human freedoms and tramples upon human rights. Manipulating public opinion with the incessant pounding of its propaganda, it makes it easy to yield to the attraction of violence and weapons and in the end it overturns our human sense of responsibility." He continued "It is in fact characteristic of all totalitarian regimes to create an enormous propaganda machine in order to justify their own crimes...War gives rise to a propaganda which leaves no room for different interpretations, critical analysis of the causes of conflict, and the attribution of real responsibility."
See informed criticism from Maurice Pinay.
Pope John Paul I 2005 - 2005 AD - he lasted just 33 days
Pope Benedict XVI 2005 - 2013 AD
He delivered the Regensburg Address quoting an unfavorable remark about Islam made at the end of the 14th century by Manuel II Palaiologos, the Byzantine emperor..........The controversial [ sic ] comment originally appeared in the 7th of the 26 Dialogues Held With A Certain Persian, the Worthy Mouterizes, in Anakara of Galatia, written in 1391 as an expression of the views of the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos, one of the last Christian rulers before the Fall of Constantinople to the Muslim Ottoman Empire, on such issues as forced conversion, holy war, and the relationship between faith and reason. The passage, in the English translation published by the Vatican, was:
Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.
Sounds fair to me. Also, to be fair the Islamics made fuss. They take their religion seriously. We don't.
PS One of Pope Benedict XVI's entourage was Fr. Patrick Desbois, a priest subverted by Zionist crazies.
Pope Francis 2013 - present day
Is the Pope a Catholic? Is he in deed, in thought a Catholic? You might have thought the answer is obvious. It certainly should be, but people who understand the issues have their doubts. Maurice Pinay is one. He knows the ground.
Pope Joan 855 - 857
Was probably fictional, a woman who reigned as pope for a few years during the Middle Ages. Her story first appeared in chronicles in the 13th century and subsequently spread throughout Europe. The story was widely believed for centuries, but most modern scholars regard it as fictional.
Pope Boniface VIII 1294 - ????
- published on 24 December 2017
On this day in 1294: the election of Pope Boniface VIII begins a bloody feud which will upend medieval politics Benedetto Caetani was born in 1235 to a powerful Roman family. He went to Bologna to study law, then began a career in the papal government. In 1281 he was appointed Cardinal Deacon of St Nicholas in Carcere Tulliano, and 10 years later Cardinal Priest of St Martin in Montibus. In this role he travelled to Paris, where he helped avert a war between France and England, and assisted in bringing peace to France and Aragon.The pope at the time was Celestine V. He was an old man, had never wanted to be pope, found it all too much, and decided he would rather be a hermit. He therefore resigned the papacy – the only man ever to do so until Pope Benedict XVI did the same in 2013. Dante was not impressed, and in the Divine Comedy allocated Celestine to the entrance of Hell for cowardice in making “the great refusal”. On Christmas Eve 1294 Caetani was elected to replace Celestine, and took the name Boniface VIII.
One of the most pressing problems he inherited was the belligerence of Edward I of England and Philip IV of France, and their habit of illegally taxing the Church in their lands to raise money for armies.
Hoping to avert war, and keen to prevent Church assets from being depleted, Boniface issued the bull Clericis laicos in 1296, threatening excommunication for anyone taxing the Church without his permission.
In England the bull was largely complied with, but in France Philip countered by starting a trade war, forbidding the export of money and valuables from France, and expelling certain foreign merchants. This surprise move hit Boniface’s administration hard.
At the same time, in Rome, the Colonna family was manoeuvring against Boniface, and in May 1297 organised an armed robbery that made off with a significant amount of papal wealth. Beleaguered, Boniface climbed down from the demands of Clericis laicos, and a group of the Colonna fled to Philip's court in Paris.
To patch up the relationship between Rome and France, Boniface canonised Philip’s grandfather, Louis IX. But trouble came again when Philip hit a southern French bishop, Bernard Saisset of Pamiers, with trumped up charges of treason, heresy, and simony. He was given a summary trial, and imprisoned. This posed Boniface with a new dilemma. The Church, not kings, dealt with misbehaving Churchmen (Thomas Becket had fought the same battle with Henry II in England).
Indeed we declare, say, pronounce, and define that it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.
Unam Sanctam, 1302Boniface issued the bull Ausculta fili, requiring Philip to release the bishop. Philip’s administration responded, as usual, by moving heavily onto the attack, circulating doctored and distorted extracts of the bull, then calling the Estates General, at which the misinformed delegates voted to support Philip.
In 1302, keen to reassert the power of the papacy, Boniface issued the bull for which he is best remembered: Unam sanctam. In it, Boniface affirmed the general understanding that the world was split into the spiritual power, which was administered by the pope, and the temporal power, which was exercised by kings. Where he departed from previous popes was in the strength of the language he used to stress that the temporal power must submit to the spiritual power in order to achieve salvation.
In response, Philip again put his propaganda machine into action. Under William of Nogaret, the French court began spreading defamatory rumours about Boniface, questioning the lawfulness of his election as pope, and accusing him of heresy. Having set the hare running, Nogaret then went off to Italy to foment popular unrest against Boniface.
Once south of the Alps, Nogaret heard that Boniface was preparing a new bull against Philip. So, together with an armed band of 1,600 men from the Colonna faction, Nogaret broke into the papal summer residence at Anagni, and kidnapped the pope.
The Colonna argued for Boniface’s death, but Nogaret wanted to put him on trial. Two days later, the people of Anagni rescued the pope, but whatever Nogaret had done to Boniface in the two days had broken him in body and spirit, and Boniface returned to Rome, where he died shortly after, on 11 October 1303.
Not content with their victory, Philip and Nogaret then put the dead Boniface on trial for heresy and sodomy. The experience taught them much about manipulating public attitudes, which they deployed to dramatic effect in their battle with the next pope (albeit nominally an ally of theirs), in which they destroyed one of the papacy’s most iconic orders: the Knights Templar.
In terms of history, the Philip-Boniface affair was critical in the evolution of modern Europe. It was the first time a nation state – in this case France – tried to assert itself as the dominant power in Europe, answerable to no one. In response, Boniface had attempted to reaffirm the traditional primacy of the papacy.
While in many ways neither were immediately successful, the spat was a singular tussle in the story of European power and identity, and one in which the social and spiritual order of Europe began to evolve from its medieval framework.
Eight Bad Popes ex Wiki
#The Bad Popes by R Chamberlin is a 1969 book that documents the lives of eight most controversial popes:
- Pope Stephen VI (896–897), who had his predecessor Pope Formosus exhumed, tried, de-fingered, briefly reburied, and thrown in the Tiber.[1]: 19
- Pope John XII (955–964), who gave land to a mistress, murdered several people, and was killed by a man who caught him in bed with his wife.
- Pope Benedict IX (1032–1044, 1045, 1047–1048), who "sold" the Papacy.
- Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303), who is lampooned in Dante's Divine Comedy.
- Pope Urban VI (1378–1389), who complained that he did not hear enough screaming when Cardinals who had conspired against him were tortured.[1]: 153
- Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503), a Borgia, who was guilty of nepotism and whose unattended corpse swelled until it could barely fit in a coffin.[1]: 204
- Pope Leo X (1513–1521), a spendthrift member of the Medici family who once spent 1/7 of his predecessors' reserves on a single ceremony.[1]: 218
- Pope Clement VII (1523–1534), also a Medici, whose power-politicking with France, Spain, and Germany got Rome sacked.
The Bad Popes by R Chamberlin ex Amazon
Enjoy a great reading experience when you borrow the Kindle edition of this book with your Kindle Unlimited membership. Learn more about Great on Kindle, available in select categories. Here is the colorful, panoramic story of seven men who ruled the Church of Rome at seven critical periods in the 600 years leading into the Reformation. It was an age of grandeur and corruption, of magnificent architecture and petty human foibles, of ecclesiastical heresy and moral degradation. Popes led armies, made love and war, conspired for power, and armed themselves with the techniques of assassination and seduction while clothed with the authority of the Church. Against the background of this turbulent era, E. R. Chamberlin explores the lives, both private and public, of John XII, the dissolute Roman prince, Benedict IX, who subjected the Papacy to its greatest indignity; Boniface VIII, who carried the temporal claims of popes to supreme heights and was destroyed by them; Urban VI, the wild man from Naples, whose grotesque savageries widened and maintained the scandalous gap of the Great Schism; Alexander VI, who brought to the See of Peter the intrigues of the Borgia; Leo X, civilized, urbane, indifferent to the pleas of the Augustinian preacher from the North, Martin Luther; and Clement VII, the unskillful fox, who fell, tricked by the Holy Roman Emperor, bringing down Rome itself. Profusely illustrated with architectural photographs and contemporary art from both Catholic and Protestant sources, The Bad Popes is a vital and important book that vividly depicts the ecclesiastical corruptions which led to the Reformation.
THE COMMUNIST FRIENDS OF THE NEW WORLD POPE
Primitive communism is much like primitive Christianity but the former has done much evil, accounting for 85 million murders, See The Black Book of Communism on the point.
Antipopes
An antipope (Latin: antipapa) is a person who claims to be Bishop of Rome and leader of the Catholic Church in opposition to the legitimately elected pope.[1] Between the 3rd and mid-15th centuries, antipopes were supported by factions within the Church itself and secular rulers.Sometimes it was difficult to distinguish which of two claimants should be called pope and which antipope, as in the case of Pope Leo VIII and Pope Benedict V.[2]
History
Hippolytus of Rome (d. 235) is commonly considered to be the earliest antipope, as he headed a separate group within the Church in Rome against Pope Callixtus I.[3] Hippolytus was reconciled to Callixtus's second successor, Pope Pontian, and both he and Pontian are honoured as saints by the Catholic Church with a shared feast day on 13 August. Whether two or more persons have been confused in this account of Hippolytus[4] and whether Hippolytus actually declared himself to be the Bishop of Rome remains unclear, since no such claim by Hippolytus has been cited in the writings attributed to him.Eusebius quotes[5] from an unnamed earlier writer the story of Natalius, a 3rd-century priest who accepted the bishopric of the Adoptionists,[6] a heretical group in Rome. Natalius soon repented and tearfully begged Pope Zephyrinus to receive him into communion.[7][8]
Novatian (d. 258), another third-century figure, certainly claimed the See of Rome in opposition to Pope Cornelius, and if Natalius and Hippolytus were excluded because of the uncertainties concerning them, Novatian could then be said to be the first antipope.
The period in which antipopes were most numerous was during the struggles between the popes and the Holy Roman Emperors of the 11th and 12th centuries. The emperors frequently imposed their own nominees to further their own causes. The popes, likewise, sometimes sponsored rival imperial claimants (anti-kings) in Germany to overcome a particular emperor.
The Western Schism – which began in 1378, when the French cardinals, claiming that the election of Pope Urban VI was invalid, elected antipope Clement VII as a rival to the Roman Pope – led eventually to two competing lines of antipopes: the Avignon line as Clement VII moved back to Avignon, and the Pisan line. The Pisan line, which began in 1409, was named after the town of Pisa, Italy, where the (Pisan) council had elected antipope Alexander V as a third claimant. To end the schism, in May 1415, the Council of Constance deposed antipope John XXIII of the Pisan line. Pope Gregory XII of the Roman line resigned in July 1415. In 1417, the council also formally deposed antipope Benedict XIII of Avignon, but he adamantly refused to resign. Afterwards, Pope Martin V was elected and was accepted everywhere except in the small and rapidly diminishing area of influence of Benedict XIII.
Is The Pope A Catholic? [ 5 April 2014 ]
This is usually asked as a rhetorical question. Now it is a real one. The issue of bears in the woods seems to be settled. If the Pope decides that Church doctrine can be jettisoned the Faithful might decide to take their loyalty elsewhere. Joe Stalin asked how many divisions the Pope had. We had the last laugh on that. However Antonio Gramsci, the leading intellectual of the communist party in Italy set up the attack on the Church as the main thrust of his offensive on Western Civilization. It is Cultural Marxism; it is winning the battle of ideas. The Church of England has been broken by infiltrators - see e.g. Bishop Is A Heretic Inciting Sodomy. The Long March Through The Institutions is paying off. The Main Stream Media are propaganda machines, just like the Education industry.