The Popes of Rome – By Ronald Cooke
Chapter four The Popes in Reformation Times
Contents
Pope Paul III 1468 -1549
Paul’s original name was Allessandro Farnese. He was educated at the University of the Medici at Florence. He was noted for the immoral company which he kept at this time in his life. He supported various mistresses, fathered children out of wedlock, and as McClintock and Strong note, “in many ways gained uneviable notoriety.”1 He worked his way up the ranks of the “church” first as apostolical chancellor’s aide where he gained friends by his promptness to duties. In 1493 he was made a bishop. In 1499 he was created a Cardinal and then later Dean of Sacred College. On the death of Clement VII in 1534, Farnese was elected pope.
He is noted in history because of the times in which he served the papacy, the times when the Protestant Reformation was breaking out in Europe. He was pope when Henry VIII of England defected from Rome. He also was the pope who was involved with the struggles of the German and Swiss Protestants at this juncture in history. He was guilty of simony and cruelty. He put to death the leaders of the people in Perugia and built a citadel there to keep them in fear and subjugation. He attacked the Colonna, a powerful baronial family and took all their strongholds. He died in 1549 having failed to defeat Protestantism.
Leo X -?-1521
This waster was pope for only two years but it would take more than the few lines we can give him to fully describe all that he was able to do in such a short time. Malachi Martin writes of this pope:
One matter troubles Leo besides money -Petrucci. Petrucci is a name Leo never forgets. He used to love that cardinal and the other conspirators. But they did not understand; and when Leo banished Cardinal Petrucci’s brother from Siena, drove Cardinal Piera’s brother from Florence, defeated Cardinal Riario in the conclave, and refused the rich archbishopric of Marseilles to Cardinal di Saulis, they plotted against his life.2
Malachi Martin is a Roman Catholic who still believes, as far as I know, in the primacy of the pope, end that the Roman Catholic church is the true church. Yet he describes some of the worst crimes and sins, which the various popes have committed, in more detail than I do. In the above quote all these cardinals are plotting to murder the pope and yet it is the house of Cardinals who sit to elect the pope’s successor. So a group of murderous conspirators is the group from which the next pope will be chosen!
Martin continues:
Petrucci was given a safe-conduct pass by Leo on condition that he come back to Rome in 1517. Once back, Leo had him thrown, cardinal’s robes and all, into the infamous Sammarocco dungeon in Sant’ Angelo and tortured daily on the rack. “No faith need by kept with a poisoner,” Leo retorted to the Spanish Ambassador who was a guarantor of Petrucci’s safe-conduct. . . The same day Cardinal Riario and cardinals Soderini, Adrian, and di Saulis were also arrested, imprisoned, and tortured. Leo presided at their trials in which Adrian and di Saulis were fined 25,000 ducats apiece, . . . Cardinal Riario was fined 150,000, to be paid in three monthly payments, and promised a grand-niece in marriage to de’ Medici nephew. Cardinal Petrucci was condemned to death and received his sentence with a stream of blasphemies and curses. He kicked a priest in the groin who approached to confess him, and was strangled in prison by Leo’s official executioner, Roland the Moor.3
Martin also recounts the following:
For two years after this Leo lived in fear of assassination; he sought out and liquidated the family and friends of Petrucci… Leo himself said mass daily surrounded by men with drawn swords and hidden archers with arrows at the ready. .. Leo shivered at Petrucci’s confession on the rack: “Eight times, I, Cardinal Petrucci, went to a consistory with a stiletto beneath my robes waiting for an opportune moment to kill de’ Medici (Leo).”4
Leo was also the pope who declared Luther anathema, excommunicated him, and placed him under the ban of the empire to be killed on sight.5 Leo had no time for religion he liked to hunt, put on banquets, masked balls, comedies, music, dancing, and theater. He could not understand why many did not like him.
He died on Dec. 1, 1521, just as the Reformation was getting off the ground. He died suddenly and more than likely had been poisoned.
Paul IV-1476-1559
Pope Paul IV has been praised by some writers as a very efficient pope. He certainly was. One of the main areas in which he exercised his efficiency was in the strengthening of the Inquisition.
Von Ranke states that prior to the rise of Caraffa, who was later to take the name of Pope Paul IV, the Inquisition had fallen into decay. So Caraffe, who was at that time a Cardinal along with Cardinal Alvarez of Toledo, told the pope that the only way the evils of false teaching could be remedied was to set up a thoroughly efficient and thoroughly searching Inquisition.
Von Ranke noted,
Caraffa and Burgos were both old Dominicans, zealots for the purity of Catholicism… these men advised the pope to establish a supreme tribunal of inquisition in Rome, universal in its jurisdiction, and on which all others should depend. “As St. Peter,” exclaimed Caraffa, “subdued the first heresiarchs in no other place than Rome, so must the successors of Peter destroy ail the heresies of the world in Rome.” The Jesuits account it among the glories of their order, that their founder, Loyola, supported this proposition by a special memorial. The bull was published on the twenty-first of July, 1542. 6
Caraffe lost not a moment in carrying this edict into execution. Von Ranke stated,
he hired a house for immediate proceedings at his own expense; this he fitted up with rooms for the officers, and prisons for the accused, supplying the prisons with strong bolts and locks, with dungeons, chains, blocks, and every other fearful appurtenance of his office. He appointed commissioners-general for the different countries. ..
The manuscript life of Caraffa gives the following rules as drawn up by Caraffa himself; and as being the best he could devise for promoting the end in view:
“First. When the faith is in question, there must be no delay; but at the slightest suspicion, rigorous measures must be resorted to with all speed.
Secondly. No consideration to be shown to any prince or prelate, however high his station.
Thirdly. Extreme severity is rather to be exercised against all who attempt to shield themselves under the protection of any potentate…
Fourthly. No man must debase himself by showing toleration towards heretics of any kind, above all toward Calvinists.”7
Everyone was subject to the authority of the Inquisitors. The suspected were at once “to be thrown into prison, the guilty to be punished by loss of life and confiscation of property. They were thus to proceed enforcing and executing whatever might most effectually suppress and uproot the errors that have found place in the Christian community, and permitting no vestige of them to remain.”8
Persecution and inquisition now filled many parts of Europe. “Scarcely is it possible to be a Christian and die quietly in one’s bed,”9 stated Antonio dei Pagliarici. All men of letters were subjected to the most rigorous supervision.
To aid the Inquisitors to keep writers in check lest they spread any heresies, Caraffa decreed that no book, whether new or old, and whatever its contents, should in the future be printed without permission from the inquisitors. Even the officers of customs were ordered not to deliver any package whether of printed books or MSS, without first laying the contents before the Inquisition.
Von Ranke notes that these laws were carried into execution with incredible success. Though many thousands of copies of the work “On the Benefits Bestowed by Christ,” were disseminated, not one was suffered to escape; the book entirely disappeared. Whole piles of confiscated copies were burnt in Rome.10
When Pope Paul IV died there was a riotous tumult in the streets of Rome. The common people rose in insurrection, ran to the prison of the Inquisition, wounded a Dominican monk who acted as commissary, delivered all the prisoners, and burned papers. 11 They also threw down a statue of the pope, crying out, “Death to Caraffa.”
During the long centuries of the Inquisition various kings and heads of states entered into negotiations with the papacy to try to bring to pass some reformation of the hideous tribunal but without success. At times, the occupant of the papal chair would make concessions, but they were never carried out.
In Spain, the Inquisition never really died out until the last vestiges of Protestantism had been ruthlessly suppressed. Even as late as 1762 when the Grand Inquisitor was exiled to a convent for condemning a book against the king’s will the Inquisition was still operating in Spain.
When Joseph Napoleon by an edict in 1808 finally abolished the Inquisition in Madrid, Llorente calculated that from the time of its introduction into Spain in 1481 until 1808, the Inquisition in Spain alone had condemned 341,021 persons. “Of these 31,912 persons had been burnt alive; 17,659 in effigy, and 291,456 others punished severely.”12
But Spain was not yet through with the Inquisition even then. For Ferdinand VII reestablished the Inquisition when he regained the throne in 1814. McClintock and Strong wrote the following:
One of the first acts of the Revolution of 1820 was the destruction of the palace of Inquisition by the people… Yet after the restoration, the apostolical party, continued to demand its re-establishment; an inquisitorial junta was organised in 1825 and the old tribunal finally restored in 1826. The law of July 15,1834, again suspended the Inquisition, after sequestering all its possessions, and the Constitution of 1855 expressly declares that no one should be made to suffer for his faith. Yet in 1857 the Inquisition showed itself still very vigorous in persecuting all persons suspected of Protestantism, and all books containing such doctrines (were to be destroyed).13
To this day there still remains the holy Office of Inquisition in Rome. It no longer brings people before its once feared tribunals, but it does demonstrate the papacy never really changes unless forced to do so by civil governments.
Some of the popes, as Paul IV, Innocent III, and Nicholas III, with others, demonstrated great attachment to the Inquisition and increased, rather than diminished, its power. The men who called themselves the Vicar of Christ lived off the possessions they stole from those hauled before their Inquisition.
Yet the modern dunderheads continue to praise such an unholy regime as if such things were pipedreams instead of stern and hideous historical realities.
References
1. McClintock and Strong, p. 831. 2. Martin, Malachi, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Church, Bantam books, NY, NY., 1983, p. 170. 3. Ibid., p. 171. 4. Loc.cit. 5. Ibid., p. 173. 6. Von Ranke, Leopold, History of the Popes, P. F. Collier, and Son, NY, NY., Vol. II., p. 142. 7. Ibid., p. 143. 8. Loc.cit. 9. Ibid., p. 145. 10. Ibid., p. 146. 11. McClintock and Strong, op.cit., Vol. VII., p. 833. 12. Ibid., p. 603. 13. Loc.cit.
