Popes have only officially been infallible since 1870. The tradition, however, stretches back much further, and is part of Catholicism’s eternal efforts to depict its leader as a holy man with a hotline to heaven; someone who is head and shoulders — in matters of faith and morals — above the rest of us, as we fall prey to secular whims, sexual urges and the blandishments of the devil.
So each new incumbent is, in theory, as good as hand-picked by God. Which, unfortunately, means that even God himself is not infallible. For some of the men he has anointed have, like Benedict XVI, a habit of saying or doing the wrong thing, especially when it comes to their relationships with other faiths.
The most controversial pope of modern times was Pius XII, who took over in 1939 and was labelled ”Hitler’s pope” by those who accuse him of turning a blind eye to reports of the Holocaust. He did so, they claim, in the firm belief that it was better for the church to sup with a dictator who killed six million Jews than it was to condemn him and risk seeing him replaced by ”godless” communists. Try as it might, the Vatican has still not managed to find a decent gloss to put on Pius’s actions, though, like his 19th-century predecessor Pius IX, who described Jews as ”dogs who bark in the street”, he is on the fast track to canonisation.
Further back, there was Leo XIII, who, in the closing years of the 19th century, dashed fledgling hopes of reconciliation between the Church of England and the Church of Rome by declaring that all Anglican ordinations were ”null and void”, a judgement which still stands. So however friendly the pope is to the Archbishop of Canterbury when they occasionally meet, the official Catholic teaching is that Archbishop Rowan Williams is an impostor who is only pretending to be a man of the cloth.
Even further back there was yet another blow against the suggestion that different faiths should live and let live. In 1034 Leo IX wrote a long and scathing letter to his Orthodox opposite number, Patriarch Michael Cerularius, claiming that the latter’s office was worthless because a woman had once held it. By way of what some might see as divine justice, the same charge was later brought against the papacy — namely, that a young German woman named Joan had disguised herself as a man and tricked her way into office, only to be discovered when she gave birth in the street.
However, the offence that Benedict XVI has caused to today’s Muslims pales next to the rousing recruitment appeals for Crusaders that Urban II made at the end of the 11th century. Those who helped him forcibly eject Muslims from Jerusalem and much of the Middle East, Urban said, were promised eternal salvation as their reward. (The jihadists of today might find this promise familiar.) So when the First Crusade reached Jerusalem in 1099, the entire Muslim population was massacred, an act for which the papacy only apologised in the late 1990s. Benedict has stolen a march on his predecessors in this regard by issuing his mea culpa in just 24 hours.
If it took the popes a millennium to say sorry to Muslims for the Crusades, it needed almost two before they asked forgiveness of the Jews. It was only in 1965, in the document Nostra Aetate, that Catholicism finally acquitted the Jews of deicide, an accusation that had fuelled 2 000 years of persecution by the church.
While not strictly a competing code of belief, science has also attracted the wrath of misguided popes. Urban VIII in 1633 was prepared to see his erstwhile friend Galileo Galilei literally hauled over the coals by the Inquisition in order to prove that this new science nonsense was a fad that would not last.
So if infallibility has left more than one custodian of what is regarded as God’s business address on Earth looking foolish, then the parallel claim to an apostolic succession has caused no end of trouble. One of the most powerful weapons used by the Protestant reformers of the 16th century against the Catholic Church was to detail quite how unsavoury were some of the men who had managed to get their hands on the Keys of Saint Peter, a traditional symbol of the papacy.
Far from being a glowing example to the world of Christian values, the papacy spent much of its first thousand years being passed from one disreputable scion of a Roman family to another. Stephen VI (896-7) decided to exhume the corpse of his predecessor but one, Formosus (891), so that it could stand trial. Dressed in the papal vestments, it unsurprisingly offered no adequate defence and was condemned to be mutilated and thrown into the Tiber.
And in what was a low point for the sexual morals of the papacy, in 954 the 18-year-old John XII, the son of a previous pope, took office and turned the Lateran — the papal palace before the Vatican — into a brothel, and was ultimately murdered a decade later by an outraged cuckold who found him in flagrante with his wife.
Popes getting it wrong? Old news. — Â