Digging Up a Pope — Again
The right’s comparison of Trump’s impeachment to the infamous Cadaver Synod has it completely backward
In 897 A.D., a proceeding that has been called the strangest trial in history, the Cadaver Synod, took place in Rome. The late pope Formosus, the first and last of that name, was disinterred from his crypt, dressed in the papal vestments, strapped to the papal throne, carried to the Lateran Basilica, and placed on trial. A young deacon was appointed to speak for the decidedly non-verbal corpse, and in short order Formosus was found guilty, the three fingers he had once used to bless people were snipped off, and the body was buried in unsanctified ground. Dissatisfied with this, the then-current pope, Stephen VI (or Stephen VII depending on how you count popes), had the body dug up again and tossed into the river Tiber, ostensibly to float away into history.
Except history had the last laugh: someone fished the body from the river, propped it up in a monastery, and soon peasants were claiming that the corpse was performing miracles. (There might also have been an earthquake in Rome during the trial, which may have been taken as a sign of God’s disfavor of the proceedings.) The citizens of Rome rose up against Pope Stephen, who had personally conducted the trial against Formosus and who is often described as one of the worst popes of all time. They deposed him and sent him to prison, where he was strangled to death. The next pope reinstated Formosus, a later pope tried him again, and on and on it went for about a century.
Small wonder that no subsequent pope ever took the name Formosus. That was some bad juju.
Fast-Forward to Today
In the wake of former President Trump’s unprecedented second impeachment, where this time the trial in the Senate will take place after Trump has already left office, some on the right are resurrecting (so to speak) the macabre tale of the Cadaver Synod. The Powerline Blog related the story on January 22nd, asserting that the left, described as “totalitarians who hated [Trump] with the white hot heat of a thousand suns for his getting between their power and us nobodies,” have in their “unhinged” mania for revenge devised this second impeachment at a moment when it can have no practical effect. What’s the point of impeaching a president who’s already departed from his office? Why dig up a pope who’s already departed from the world?
As it happens, last year (mid-quarantine) I finished writing a play about the Cadaver Synod. I spent about a decade researching it, and a few days ago my Google Alerts started flooding with misrepresentations of a story I knew very well. Though there is some dispute about the cause of the Cadaver Synod, I am confident in asserting that the tale-tellers on the right have it completely backward. Trump isn’t poor eternally-suffering Pope Formosus; he’s the power-mad duke who dreamed up the trial in the first place.
What Duke?
The first rule of propaganda is to only relate the facts that suit the conclusion you wish to draw. The Powerline article, for instance, only mentions that during his tenure as pope, Formosus “got involved in a number of fractious disputes.” But those fractious disputes are immediately relevant to why the trial happened, and you can’t just skip past the “why” of the Synod if you wish to assert that the left’s “why” is similar. This is, after all, the key point they’re trying to make— exactly the wrong moment to get fuzzy about the details.
Or it’s exactly the right moment if your goal is not to tell the truth but to fashion a convenient lie.
So. The duke in question, Lambert of Spoleto, is one of two dukes who figured prominently in the grisly tale of the Cadaver Synod. These two dukes (Arnulf of Carinthia was the other) were competing for the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, and the loser in that contest, Lambert, is almost certainly the one who caused Formosus’s disinterment and trial. Here’s how it happened.
Spiritual and Temporal Power Don’t Mix
Charlemagne died in 814, having created a vast Holy Roman Empire that stretched across much of the known western world. In customary fashion, as soon as he died his descendants started fighting over who got to rule. After several decades of this, and in the absence of any established rules of primogeniture, the death of each emperor initiated a period of often-brutal fights for the crown. And since the kingdom was called the Holy Roman Empire, obtaining spiritual approbation was considered crucial. The emperors wanted the approval of the popes, and the popes were only too happy to dabble in temporal politics.
In Formosus’s time, there were two leading contenders for the crown. Initially there was Guido III of Spoleto (a region quite near Rome) who had been crowned by Formosus’s predecessor. When Guido died, his son Lambert asserted his right to the crown. But Lambert was a little too fond of conquering the lands near Rome, which worried Formosus. He favored the claim of a different duke, Arnulf of Carinthia, which was far to the northeast. That made Arnulf a safer bet from Rome’s point of view (and Arnulf’s descent from Charlemagne was more direct, i.e., patrilineal), but it invited the ire of Lambert, whose army was much closer to Rome.
At Formosus’s invitation Arnulf invaded, defeated Lambert, and was duly crowned. Then, in a highly suspicious turn of events, Arnulf was paralyzed and rendered essentially powerless, and Formosus, at very nearly the same time, died. Granted, Formosus was around 80 years old, but there were rumors of poisonings in both instances. After the murder of Pope John VIII (by poison and a hammer to the head), and many subsequent suspicious deaths of popes and kings, the possibility that Arnulf’s and Formosus’s nearly-simultaneous afflictions were deliberate cannot be discounted.
Cui Bono: Who Gains?
Lambert, then, had everything to gain from this trial, while the recently-crowned Arnulf had everything to lose. But with Arnulf paralyzed, there was little he could do to prevent the trial, ghastly though it was, from going forward. And indeed, once Formosus was convicted, sentenced, snipped, buried, unburied, river-tossed, etc., Pope Stephen obediently crowned Lambert as emperor.
Lambert wanted power, he didn’t care that the path to that power was grotesque, and he got what he wanted. Yes, Formosus was put on trial after he was out of office (by virtue of having died), but there the similarity to Trump ends. The true similarity is to Lambert, who demanded power by any means necessary and who found a willing accomplice in Pope Stephen. And when Stephen then suffered the consequences of a popular uprising, imprisonment, and strangulation, Lambert did nothing to protect him. (For Stephen, picture the near-fate of Mike Pence, who came within a minute of being caught by the Trump-inspired mob on January 6th.)
Put it this way: if Trump had found an opportunity to charge Hillary Clinton with the crimes he accused her of, to actually “lock her up” as his crowds chanted endlessly, even though her tenure as Secretary of State had ended years before, does anyone doubt he would have done it?
A Thousand-Plus Years of Abuse
Despite the allegations against Formosus in his lifetime, he was well-loved by the people of Rome. (Which might help explain why powerful rivals kept levying charges against him, all of which were again alleged during his posthumous trial.) It suggests that Formosus’s policies were broadly popular and that his godliness was respected by a devout populace.
The Cadaver Synod was therefore a particularly hideous act of slander, so excessive that no subsequent pope ever chose to style himself as Formosus II. The trial became the only reason Formosus is remembered at all. And even after he was reinterred in the Vatican with all due honors, in the sixteenth century Pope Julius II had old St. Peter’s Basilica torn down and the current version erected — in the process, the burial places of dozens of former popes, Formosus included, were irrecoverably lost. Only Formosus’s name on a stone tablet in the Vatican memorializes his tenure as the Catholic world’s one-time spiritual leader.
Now, well over a thousand years after the Cadaver Synod, Formosus’s name and reputation are being smeared yet again, this time by drawing a false comparison with an ex-president whose real similarity is to the duke who persecuted Formosus in the first place. Apparently slander has no statute of limitations. But history is useless if it is not truly told, and the tale being spun by the right in support of their grasping ex-president has no relation to the truth of the shameful story of the Cadaver Synod.
