The cardinals are gathered amid scandal.The Vatican is widely known to be corrupt.
Cardinals use their offices to market favors, and even positions within the Holy See are up for bid.
One frontrunner for the papacy has bought off the other leading candidates, sending his closest rival four mules laden with gold ingots.
That frontrunner was Spanish cardinal Rodrigo Borgia,
soon to become Pope Alexander VI, and the year was 1492. The more
things change, the more they stay the same.
Alexander’s papacy was the stuff of legend. He
brought the most beautiful prostitutes in Italy to his Vatican orgies,
and he was justifiably proud of his impressive collection of
pornography; it was the finest in Rome, and that was no mean feat.
Vatican parties, already extravagant, become more so.
Guests approaching
the papal palace would walk past rows of living statues - naked young
men and women, dusted with gold and arranged in erotic poses.
Alexander
admired virility, and his chamberlain would keep track of each male
guest’s orgasms.
At the end of the party, His Holiness would award
prizes to those “who made love with those courtesans the greatest number
of times,” according to master of ceremonies Johan Burchard.
Alexander was widely believed to be involved in an
affair with his beautiful, 17-year-old daughter, Lucrezia. For her part,
Lucrezia became unavailable for her father’s bed when she entered a
torrid sexual triangle with her brothers, handsome older brother Juan,
and his equally handsome younger brother, Cardinal Cesare Borgia.
When Juan Borgia was found floating in the Tiber,
butchered, Rome automatically assumed that Cesare had done the deed.
Cesare had become a proficient killer in his teens, and he continued to
enjoy bloodshed until his own murder at Viana.
No mere thug, he was
witty, urbane and well educated, as well as brutal. He was also jealous
of Juan. Lucrezia had enjoyed her relations with both her brothers, but
being more traditional than she, each wanted her for himself. They were
also both involved with the wife of their younger brother, Gioffre.
Lucrezia was available because her father had
manipulated her into leaving her husband, Giovanni Sforza, nephew of
Ascanio. Her marriage was annulled when Alexander declared to the world
that her husband was impotent.
Infuriated, Giovanni announced that
Alexander had broken up their marriage so that he could have his
daughter for himself, and then proved his virility by going off to
father some children of his own.
Lucrezia attended the ceremonial annulment at the
Lateran Palace six months pregnant.
The canonical judges declared her a
virgin, to the general mirth of bystanders. Three months later, she gave
birth to a son, also Giovanni.
Giovanni’s father was either Lucrezia’s father, the
pope, or her brother, the cardinal. It’s possible that Lucrezia herself
didn’t know which it was. She went to give birth in the Convent of San
Sisto, taking with her a new Spanish lover.
She was surrounded at San
Sisto by nuns who were apparently as sexually adventurous as she (the
convent was eventually thoroughly cleansed, figuratively speaking), and
was eventually married off to the future Duke of Ferrara, who had ample
experience with illegitimate children whose provenance could not be
revealed.
Alexander decided to legitimize the bastard, issuing
two bulls. The first, which was made public, identified the father of
young Giovanni as Cesare Borgia, and his mother as an unnamed, unmarried
woman.
By naming Cesare as the father, Alexander was able to recognize
as legitimate a child he could not claim as his own son.
The second
bull, kept secret, named as Giovanni’s parents the pope and the same
unmarried woman mentioned in the first.
Pope Alexander VI named his
son/grandson the Duke of Nepi and Camerino. A generous man, he also made
the brother of a former mistress a cardinal.
*****
“God has granted us the papacy,” wrote Pope Leo X, “now let us enjoy it.”
The papacy is an ancient institution, and like all
ancient institutions, it’s had its ups and downs.
The conclave that
elects the new pope will meet amid scandal - sexual abuses by priests
and high-level cover-ups, sexual “misconduct” by Cardinal Keith O’Brien
and a cover-up that may extend to emeritus Pope Benedict, dishonest
dealings at the Vatican bank, a group of homosexual Vatican priests and
blackmail allegations - and critics talk hopefully of a church in
terminal crisis.
Catholicism and the papacy have gone through much
worse than this, and they’ve shown themselves remarkably resilient.
Not
all 115 cardinal electors have arrived at the Vatican, but the cardinals
there have started to discuss what the church needs in a new pope and
consider the starting date for the conclave that will elect him.
They
have been sworn to secrecy about the deliberations for a new pope under
pain of excommunication.
It’s unlikely that we will learn much about the
conclave’s deliberations, but we can be certain that the next pope will
enjoy the papacy much less than Leo X did.
We can also be certain that
an institution that survived the Protestant Reformation and the brutal
sack of Rome by the troops of Charles V will survive a century or two
longer.