The Charge, Stated Honestly
An Orthodox apologist points to the Renaissance papacy—to popes who bought their office, fathered children, and financed basilicas by selling indulgences—and asks how a Church claiming a divinely protected, indefectible papal office can square that claim with such a record. It is a fair question, asked in good faith, and it deserves a real answer rather than a defensive one. The real answer requires two things: an honest, undefended accounting of exactly how bad the record is, and a precise statement of what the doctrine actually claims—because the two turn out not to be in the tension the objection assumes.
The Record, Undefended
From roughly 904 to 964, the papacy was effectively the property of one Roman family. Theophylact, Count of Tusculum, his wife Theodora, and their daughter Marozia controlled the election, imprisonment, and murder of a string of popes; Marozia’s own grandson, elected Pope John XII at about eighteen years old in 955, was deposed by a Roman synod in 963 on charges including sacrilege, incest, and perjury, and died the following year—reportedly of a stroke suffered in the act of adultery. Later historians, including Catholic ones, gave the period a name: the Saeculum obscurum, the dark age, or more bluntly, the Pornocracy.
From 1378 to 1417, the Western Church endured a schism in which two, and briefly three, men simultaneously claimed the papacy, each with his own curia, his own cardinals, and his own excommunications of the other’s followers. Canonized saints stood on opposite sides in good conscience—St. Vincent Ferrer backed the Avignon claimant, St. Catherine of Siena the Roman one—for the better part of forty years, until the Council of Constance finally untangled the mess in 1417.
Rodrigo Borgia, elected Pope Alexander VI in 1492 amid widely reported bribery of the conclave, openly fathered and acknowledged several children before and during his pontificate, and used the papacy’s own territory and armies to advance his son Cesare’s military ambitions in the Romagna. And in 1517, Johann Tetzel’s fundraising campaign for the rebuilding of St. Peter’s Basilica—entangled with Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz’s own debts to the Fugger bank—became the immediate trigger for Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses and the Reformation that followed.
None of this is contested by serious historians, Catholic or otherwise, and none of it should be minimized. The Church’s own repeated formal condemnations of the underlying problem—simony was targeted specifically by the Gregorian Reform of the eleventh century precisely because it was so widespread—are themselves evidence that these were recognized as corruptions of the Church’s own standards, not expressions of them.
What the Doctrine Actually Claims
The First Vatican Council’s 1870 definition, Pastor Aeternus, is narrow in a way popular usage of the word “infallible” obscures. It applies only when the pope, acting in his office as pastor and teacher of all Christians, by his supreme apostolic authority, formally defines a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by the whole Church. It says nothing about the pope’s personal holiness, prudence, or freedom from sin in his private life or even in his ordinary governance of the Church.
“Infallible” means personally protected from serious error or moral failure—so a corrupt, murderous, or simoniac pope directly falsifies the claim.
Infallibility is a negative charism attached to one narrow act—a formal, universal doctrinal definition—grounded in Christ’s prayer that Peter’s own faith “fail not” (Luke 22:32). It says nothing about the man’s character.
The standard pre-conciliar dogmatic manuals make this distinction explicitly, not as a modern face-saving move. Ludwig Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma states plainly that papal infallibility “does not make him impeccable” and does not extend to his private opinions, his prudential governance, or his personal morals—only to formal ex cathedra definitions. John XII never defined a doctrine of faith at all; he is remembered for his conduct, not his teaching. Alexander VI’s children are a matter of scandal, not of magisterium. The colloquial conflation of “infallible” with “impeccable” is doing most of the objection’s rhetorical work—and correcting that conflation is not a dodge, it is the actual answer.
Fine—but has any pope, formally and in the required manner, ever taught heresy? Pope Honorius I was condemned by name by the Third Council of Constantinople (680–681) for failing to oppose monothelitism.
This is the hardest case, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a dismissal. Honorius was condemned—the historical record of that conciliar act is not in dispute. Catholic theologians argue his private letters to Patriarch Sergius never met the strict conditions Pastor Aeternus later specified: he did not, in his office as universal teacher, formally define a doctrine binding the whole Church. Vatican I’s own fathers discussed the Honorius case directly during their debates and still proceeded to define infallibility as they did—which shows they did not regard it as a clean counterexample under the definition they were adopting. That is the Catholic theological position, stated as such; it is not the same as claiming the matter is a closed, uncontested historical question, and it should not be presented as one.
The Orthodox Parallel
Byzantine emperors repeatedly deposed, exiled, and installed patriarchs of Constantinople by simple imperial decree, and directly imposed doctrine as state policy—Leo III and Constantine V enforced Iconoclasm this way in the eighth century, deposing the iconodule Patriarch Germanus I in the process. The historian Steven Runciman—a Byzantinist notably sympathetic to Orthodoxy, not a hostile outside critic—documents this pattern directly in The Byzantine Theocracy, while carefully explaining the “symphonia” ideology of harmonious church-state union that produced it.
Under four centuries of Ottoman rule, the Ecumenical Patriarchate itself became entangled in outright simony: candidates for the patriarchal throne paid the Ottoman government an installation fee, and rival Phanariote-family-backed candidates could simply outbid one another, with the Sublime Porte deposing sitting patriarchs in favor of higher bidders. Turnover across the period was extremely high—this is Runciman’s own subject in The Great Church in Captivity, the standard scholarly history of exactly this era.
And in 1721, Peter the Great abolished the Patriarchate of Moscow outright, replacing it for two hundred years with a “Most Holy Governing Synod”—a state-controlled committee of bishops overseen by a lay Ober-Procurator answerable directly to the Tsar. The Russian Church did not have a Patriarch again until November 1917, and only then because the Tsarist state that had suppressed the office had itself just collapsed.
Runciman’s own subtitle for his study of the Ottoman-era Patriarchate speaks for itself: A Study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence. The book documents, in detail, the peshkesh payment system and the repeated depositions and reinstatements that resulted from it—not as an outside polemic, but as settled academic history.
Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity (Cambridge University Press, 1968)Handle With Care: The Soviet Era
The broad pattern of twentieth-century state control is not seriously disputed by historians of any confessional background. Stalin permitted a controlled restoration of the Moscow Patriarchate in 1943 explicitly as a wartime and Cold War instrument of state policy, administered through a government council that vetted hierarchy appointments; serious academic historians of Russian Orthodoxy—Nathaniel Davis and Dimitry Pospielovsky among them—document that a meaningful number of bishops and clergy were compelled informants of the security services, and that the institutional Church’s public positions were frequently steered by state interest.
A more specific 1992 allegation—that a particular future Patriarch cooperated with the KGB under a specific code name—originates from a legitimate Russian parliamentary commission of the period, headed by the dissident Orthodox priest Fr. Gleb Yakunin, who had briefly gained access to KGB archives. That specific allegation is treated by serious historians as credible but not independently, judicially confirmed, and the Moscow Patriarchate has never offered a full public accounting of it either way. This article does not repeat the specific name or code-name attached to that allegation, because it cannot be verified here to the standard this site holds for every other claim on it; the broader, uncontested pattern of state and security-service entanglement with the Soviet-era hierarchy is more than sufficient to establish the parallel this article is making, without resting anything on an unverified specific.
The Orthodox Steelman—And Why It Is Fair
An honest Orthodox response does not need to dispute a single fact above. It can grant every one of them and still say, correctly: none of this touches a claim we never made. Orthodoxy never defined a doctrine of one bishop’s personal, protected infallibility comparable to Pastor Aeternus. Its ecclesiology locates final doctrinal authority in the conciliar consensus of the whole Church, received over time—not in any single patriarch’s guaranteed freedom from error. A bribed, state-installed, or politically captured Patriarch of Constantinople therefore does not generate the same kind of internal contradiction a corrupt pope arguably would, precisely because Rome, uniquely, attached a formal personal doctrinal-protection claim to one office and Constantinople never did. This is a genuinely fair asymmetry, not a rhetorical dodge, and it deserves to be represented with its full force rather than flattened into “well, you had bad patriarchs too.”
The Verdict
The load-bearing principle, honestly stated, cuts the same way for both traditions: personal and institutional sin at even the very highest levels, sustained for decades or centuries, is not by itself evidence against a Church’s doctrinal claims—provided the specific doctrine at issue was never a claim of personal moral protection in the first place. Nobody argues that John XII or Alexander VI infallibly defined a heresy; the objection conflates “the office was held by a wicked man” with “the doctrinal charism failed,” and those are different claims. The same distinction protects Orthodoxy’s own patriarchs from an equivalent charge, on its own, differently structured terms.
But accountability still matters for the credibility of the Church’s witness in both communions, and neither tradition should hide behind the theological distinction to avoid it. The Gregorian Reform’s relentless campaign against simony, and Catholic historians’ own unflinching name for the Pornocracy, are real evidence of an internal capacity for honest reckoning on the Catholic side. Fr. Gleb Yakunin—imprisoned in Soviet labor camps for defending religious freedom, and later defrocked in 1993 after working from within Orthodoxy to expose Church-KGB entanglement—is the same kind of evidence on the Orthodox side. Both traditions have, at their best, produced the very reformers their worst periods needed. That, and not a scorecard of whose scandals were more embarrassing, is the honest place to end.
Works Cited
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- Kirsch, J. P. “Pope John XII.” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 8. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1913.
- Duffy, Eamon. Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes. 3rd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
- Ullmann, Walter. “Western Schism.” New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2003; and The Origins of the Great Schism. London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1948.
- Rollo-Koster, Joëlle. The Great Western Schism, 1378–1417. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
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- Morris, Colin. The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050 to 1250. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
- First Vatican Council. Pastor Aeternus, ch. 4 (18 July 1870).
- Ott, Ludwig. Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma. Trans. Patrick Lynch. Rockford, IL: TAN Books, 1974.
- Kelly, J. N. D. The Oxford Dictionary of Popes. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Entries: “Honorius I,” “John XXII.”
- Hussey, J. M. The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
- Runciman, Steven. The Byzantine Theocracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977; and The Great Church in Captivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968.
- Cracraft, James. The Church Reform of Peter the Great. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971.
- Davis, Nathaniel. A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy. 2nd ed. Boulder: Westview Press, 2003.
- Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984.
- Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1979.
- Ware, Timothy (Kallistos). The Orthodox Church. Rev. ed. London: Penguin, 1993.
- “Gleb Yakunin, Russian Priest and Dissident, Is Dead at 80.” The New York Times, 30 December 2014.