Bad Popes: Does Scandal Disprove the Papacy?
The Objection That Proves the Doctrine
Bad Popes: Does Scandal Disprove the Papacy?
The bad popes are the anti-Catholic’s favorite argument and the embarrassed Catholic’s least favorite conversation. Alexander VI, the Borgia pope, was almost certainly the father of Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, conducted flagrant affairs at the Vatican, and turned the papal court into a family business. John XII was elected pope at eighteen, reportedly died in bed with a married woman, and was accused by a synod of his own clergy of virtually every sin in the catalogue. Stephen VI had his predecessor Pope Formosus exhumed, dressed in papal vestments, put on trial, condemned, and thrown into the Tiber River. These are not legends. They are documented history. They are, frankly, appalling.
And yet — and this is the point that the objection misses entirely — none of them disproves the papacy. They do not even embarrass it, if you understand what the papal claim actually is. The claim is not that popes are good men. The claim is not that popes are holy men. The claim is not even that popes are particularly wise men. The claim is that when the pope speaks ex cathedra on a matter of faith and morals, the Holy Spirit prevents him from binding the Church to formal error. That charism is entirely compatible with the holder of the office being a sinner of the first order.
The Structural Argument
The Office and the Man
Catholic theology has always distinguished between the office and the person who holds it. This is not a special pleading invented to protect the papacy — it is a distinction present throughout the New Testament. Caiaphas, the high priest who condemned Jesus to death, nonetheless uttered a genuine prophecy: “It is expedient for you that one man should die for the people” (John 11:50). St. John adds: “Now this he said not of himself: but being the high priest of that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for the nation.” Caiaphas was a corrupt official who killed an innocent man — and the Holy Spirit used his office to speak truth through him anyway. The office was legitimate. The man was despicable. Both things were true simultaneously.
This is the template for understanding bad popes. Alexander VI was a moral catastrophe. He also, in 1493, issued the papal bull Inter Caetera dividing the newly discovered Americas between Spain and Portugal — an exercise of the papal office that had nothing to do with his personal virtue. The office functions independently of the virtue of its holder. The keys given to Peter were not given to Peter’s holiness; they were given to Peter’s office. When Peter fell, the keys did not fall with him.
The parable of the wheat and the tares (Matt 13:24-30) and the parable of the dragnet (Matt 13:47-50) both presuppose that the Church will contain both saints and sinners, right up to the end. The dragnet parable is explicit: the net catches fish of every kind, and the sorting happens only at the end. Jesus did not promise a Church of perfect members. He promised a Church that the gates of hell would not prevail against — which is not the same thing. The persistence of the Church through the scandal of her own members is itself evidence for the divine promise, not against it.
The Full Record
Proportionality and Context
The bad popes deserve to be assessed in full historical context. The Renaissance papacy — which gives the critics most of their material — operated in a world where political power, military force, and ecclesiastical office were inextricably intertwined. The Papal States were a genuine territorial power. Popes were not merely spiritual leaders; they were heads of state engaged in the same brutal politics as the Italian princes who surrounded them. Some of them were worse than the princes. Some were better. The standard of behavior expected of a sixteenth-century Italian prince is not the standard we apply to a twenty-first-century religious leader — and the critics know this, even if they pretend not to.
Moreover, the full record must be told. For every Alexander VI there is a Gregory the Great, who sold the papal treasury to ransom captives. For every John XII there is a John Paul II, who absorbed an assassin’s bullet and forgave his would-be killer in prison. For every Stephen VI there is a Pius VII, who sat in Napoleon’s prison for five years and refused to become the French Emperor’s chaplain. The bad popes are real. They are also a small minority of a list that stretches over two thousand years and includes some of the most remarkable leaders in human history.
Judas at the Last Supper
The Original Bad Apostle
The original scandal was not Alexander VI. It was Judas Iscariot — an apostle, handpicked by Jesus Himself, who attended the Last Supper and then sold his Lord for thirty pieces of silver. If Jesus’s choice of Judas does not disprove His divinity, why should the Church’s history of bad popes disprove the papacy? Jesus was not fooled by Judas; He chose him knowing exactly who he was (John 6:64). The presence of evil within the apostolic college from the very beginning is not an embarrassment — it is a pattern that continues through history and tells us something about how God works: through human beings as they actually are, not as we wish they were.
The bad popes are a test. They test whether you believe in the Church as a divine institution or merely a human one. If it is merely human, the bad popes are a fatal embarrassment — a human institution would not survive them with its doctrine intact. If it is divine, the bad popes are precisely what you would expect: the gates of hell pressing against the Church from within and without, and failing, as promised, to prevail.