The Questionable Damnation of Good Pope Formosus

by Tommy George

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THE DAMNATIO IMMEMORIAE OF POPE FORMOSUS

The Scandalous Dissolution of his Papacy in 883 C.E.

By the time of Summer Solstice, 883 C.E., the mortal coil of Pope Formosus had long been off-shuffled, and the dead Pontiff's eternal soul attuned for a perfect half-score years to the seamless bliss of Paradise. In the instant of his immortal soul's reawakening, Formosus realized all: his liberal Papacy had moved its own clerics to mendacity, and sown discord among them. Despite his efforts as Pontiff to improve the lives of the peasantry under his reign, the spiritual life of the Universal masses had plodded on the same as always–heavy as an anvil, ignorant as an ox.


The suffering peasants whom Formosus sought to aid when he hammered into his bulls reduced tithing minimums and curtailment of the absolute powers which parish clergy exercised over their flocks were never allowed to taste the beneficence that their progressive Pope had intended. Further, the early populism of his Holy See was far too bold for his College of Cardinals, all of whom feared what his new edicts would surely stir-up among the non-laity. Unbeknownst to Pope Formosus, his Cardinals silently and unanimously quashed his new bulls while representing otherwise to the Holy See.

No single ray of light, then, from Formosus' inspired edicts was allowed to illumine the benighted soul of the early post-Byzantine Universal Church. Peasants learned of his bulls only after his papacy had been dissolved, and the edicts redacted; and even then, his humane intentions were woefully misrepresented to the masses by the malefaction herein chronicled. Yet historians of the ancient Universal Church agree that Paradise's grace sustained the eternal Formosus, who awoke with a spontaneous understanding that misguided missal was all that could be expected of any mortal hierophant. I.e., earthly mistakes, including those of a Pope, were of no real consequence.

Pope Formosus's surviving detractors among the new Roman College of Cardinals conspired for ten years after his death to regain control of the Universal hierarchy to an end of restoring corrupt Byzantine procedure to the Papacy. In 883 C.E., they finally wrested the Holy See away from Formosus's aging partisans with the election of Stephen VI. The new faction's slow ascent to power had provided them ample time to formulate carefully manipulative means to their primary objectives: the Damnatio Immemoriae (condemnation of any remembrance) of Pope Formosus, dissolution of his papacy in its entirety, redaction of its bulls, and immediate cessation of its treasury-draining administrative protocols. Mere excommunication of a dead pope would not suffice to dissolve a Papacy, nor to redact even a single edict made under intact Papal Infallibility. God might be summoned to dispatch his Archangel Michael to extract Formosus' soul from Paradise, and cast it into the flames of Hades, but this would in no way further the pragmatic designs of a new Papal order that sought to restore the clerical-enrichment practices of Byzantium to the newly formed Universal Church of Rome.

A High Church trial was required for the Damnatio Immemoriae of Pope Formosus, but the defendant had been dead for ten years. Pope Stephen VI could move with assurance only when ancient protocol from the Lexicon Ecclesiasticus, long regarded as an insurmountable obstacle to any Damnatio, no longer constituted any confounding aspects to his plans. Its troublesome protocols were hastily re-interpreted by clerics under the new Pontiff's control, and the plan quickly sprang into action.

Under cover of the Summer Solstice's night sky in 883, Pope Formosus’ remains were disinterred from their tomb and transported back to Rome for a high ecclesiastical trial, called to order at midnight. The Pope's mostly mummified cadaver was refitted with Pontiff's resplendent cape, miter, and scepter, and seated upon the papal throne. Predictably, the moldering papal remains voiced no objection to clerics’ ex parte arguments before God (whose earthly proxy was the corrupt Pope Stephen VI), which wove the undisputed falsehood that a demonic hand had authored Pope Formosus' suppressed bulls, in possession of he who presently occupied the Papal Throne.

By the breaking of dawn, God had found for the prosecution, and ordered its desired relief: the Damnatio Immemoriae of Formosus, dissolution of his entire Papacy, and redaction of its bulls. So adjudged, the taciturn defendant was stripped of his erstwhile papal finery, his remains rudely butchered, and the unholy pieces of him cast into the River Tiber.

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FORMOSUS’S ELECTION IN 854 C.E.

Ending a Long Line of Ill-Fated Pontiffs

In the seven unwholesome years preceding Formosus's election to the Papacy in 854 C.E., death had claimed seventeen consecutive popes over a mid-century reign of apparent Divine Discontent visited upon the Holy See beginning in 847 C.E. During this period, the Papacy re-opened with alarming regularity. The first-installed Pontiff of the deadly era, Romanus, was taken by plague within four months of his investment; his successor, after three months, to arrested motion of the heart; the next Pope was lost to the plague after a reign of merely six weeks; and so on for seven years, over which a papacy in divine eclipse consumed fourteen more newly elected Pontiffs, one-by-one–to heretical sword, plague, brain fever, drowning, febrile possession, poisoning, kidnapping, spontaneous combustion, cholera, plague, satyriasis, and ultimately, strike of lightning. The College of Cardinals grew accustomed to flocking twice or thrice annually in Rome to elect yet another Pontiff from their own, thinning, realpolitik ranks.

Some among the College had begun seriously to question the efficacy of the usual proceedings; but long-to-dawn dubiousness among the majority was finally made manifest when the accelerating cycle of Papal fatalities peaked in 853 C.E., during which cardinals five times convened for Papal elections, and the year's fifth-installed Pontiff was reported by observers to have been struck down by lightning as he traversed afoot the grassy field that would become St. Peter's Square, bearing aloft the ceremonial cross of pig-iron traditionally borne aloft by Pontiffs “crossing the great field of Rome” to greet military delegations. Stephen V was so-felled only seventy-two hours after his installation, before the College of Cardinals had sufficient time formally to adjourn.

It was a fretful electorate that cast its net about for a fresh alternative, and quickly turned their attention to dark-horse candidate Vincenzo de Salvatore–a cardinal from the northern lands, already thrice-passed-over, who freely espoused a non-conforming realpolitik which only a decade earlier would have earned him the censure and reprimand of the College's Urbane majority. Vincenzo’s candidacy treaded cautiously, and never ran to dogma; encouraged the weak, and openly confessed it could no longer countenance privilege to the stronger, higher-born, and Urbane. His oath, restore every member, initially fell flat upon the electoral ear, sounding on first hearing too simple-minded to command the infallible Holy See; but in light of the seventeen deceased Popes who preceded the 854 election (all of them urbane members of the College of Cardinals), its words resonated with deeper meaning when more closely considered.

God showed favor to Cardinal Vincenzo de Salvatore's candidacy, pursued as it was bravely hot upon Stephen V's divine discharge by flesh-blackening strike of lightning. Despite the country cardinal’s staunch, unequivocal support of the burgeoning Monastic Orders; his avowal of no privilege to urbane clergy; and his fealty to pastoral, country parishes of the sort that dotted his north-lands; in 854 C.E., Vincenzo de Salvatore was unanimously elected, and invested with the Papal name of Formosus.

Guests invited by the newly installed Pope Formosus to his humble inaugural supper included his valet, a delegation of northland country priests, and a tipsy retinue of his beloved monastic companions. Retiring to his private cabinet with these friends after the taxing ritual of formal investment, Pope Formosus cast aside his splendid miter and cape to reveal to the assembled company an ever-worn shirt of hair. He toppled himself with surprising playfulness onto his successor’s divan, where he drank wine with his companions, and attended to the diverse supplication of each for God's blessing on his new Papacy.

Formosus reputedly jested before adjourning to feast, "The way our Almighty God has discharged so quickly a near-score of Popes who preceded me, all of them men so much more worthy than I, any one of them far more learned in law than ever I could hope to be—yet all dispatched to Paradise so soon–why, He has me deeply worried, Brothers! My simple, obedient love and fear of Him, and my honest respect for all others who so love and adore Him, may so bore the Almighty Creator that He will move his hand even more quickly this time, and make me the most temporary pope of them all! So come, boys! Let us praise Him well, and get to feast post-haste–before it is I who have grown cold ere a Pope's first supper can be enjoyed."

The election of Pope Formosus was credited by the Roman College of Cardinals with having dispelled God’s displeasure with questionable decretals  used by the new Universal Church of Rome, for he reigned for nineteen years. His Papacy maintained its promised preference for God's humbler servants to those high-ranked, even among his own hierarchy. He practiced a bona fide concern for faithful peasantry, usually the faction least-favored by parish clerics, and persisted in Papal indifference to the opulent accommodation and rich victuals expected by visiting plenaries, whom he gleefully disappointed.

Formosus was unseated by disease from the Papal throne in 873, when weakened by a long-cirrhotic liver, his mortal body gave up the ghost. God rewarded his generous heart and obedient soul with immediate ascension into Heaven. Once ensconced in Paradise, Roman Church historians aver that the Almighty gifted Formosus with the services en perpetua of his very own, full-blooded angel.

So campaigned a rustic Cardinal, and was elected. So reigned a Papacy in advocacy of the humble, and his Bulls conspiratorially restrained; and so perished the good Pope, and was admitted to Paradise

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THE THEFT AND DESECRATION OF FORMOSUS' REMAINS

A Heinous Trial to Achieve a Good Pope’s Obliteration

It was upon the Summer Solstice of 883, ten years after his mortal death, that Formosus' malefactors among the living Universal Church resurrected and unseated his mortal body a second time, subjecting it to a scandalous trial and punishment, the common knowledge of which irreparably damaged Pope Stephen VI's papacy, and begat a popularly despised notoriety to his reign, and by association, to clerics of the Universal Church throughout Europe. Formosus had wrongly been judged Damnatio Immemoriae, his entire Papacy dissolved, and his corpse defiled, chopped to pieces, and cast into the River Tiber.

Historians of Ancient Catholicism emphasize that the crimes herein chronicled had been inflicted upon the inert remains of his earthly existence, ergo his eternal soul suffered no divine disenfranchisement. Among monastic orders, it is held that the unsullied spirit reflects, Glory Be to God!–that such concerns belong to mortal men; and so dismissing, withdraws from any further contemplation on the gravity-bent follies of men.
His was Paradise! Glory Be to God!–and instantly, Paradise re-enfolded Formosus, and cradled once again and for all eternity, his immortal soul in its wonted, wordless contentment.

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FORMOSAN MYTHOS

His Dismemberment Fails to Disintegrate Noble Intent

Each drifting, castaway constituent of Formosus' hacked-apart corpse was in time retrieved from the dark waters of the River Tiber: snagged, held fast, and spared irretrievable loss by some device of Nature. Searchers of the first morning, scarcely two miles downstream, discovered three of the Pope's severed extremities ensnared in the leafy branches of an oak limb knocked from the sky and laid low upon the water, still attached to its ancient trunk at a splintered, freshly charred nexus. “Lightning,” the aging trio of Formosus' partisans concurred. The missing fourth–a papal right hand, stripped of the ruby adornment worn as it lay a decade entombed–turned up a kilometer downstream. Formosus’ withered right hand appeared to have crawled halfway up the river's eroded bank. One bony, shriveled finger pointed accusingly toward Rome, as its brother-digits clung fast to a knot of exposed roots. “Wind and water,” the hierophants marveled at the Almighty’s work.

God's timely remission of these first-found papal pieces so nearby suggested His continuing favor for the clerics' unauthorized task, and the three broadly praised Him. Encouraged, they re-boarded their search-craft–a pleasure-craft, its deck arranged like a canopied drawing room set upon pontoons–and bade their oarsmen continue on downriver. The elderly clerics arranged themselves comfortably but strategically, to ensure that any further offerings from God's rescuing hand would not be overlooked.

They pushed on downstream unrewarded until late afternoon, when an isle draped in writhing ebony came into view. A large company of ravens had claimed a mid-river shoal as their unassailable fortress, for there, no natural predator could molest them. The arrogant flock's shoal was completely covered by the swarm of black, screeching birds. As the expedition drew closer, it became apparent that the flock was at a most ravenous repast; but the black, winged gluttons belied no concern for the clerics' slow-approaching boat. It was not until the craft had floated alarming near that the midnight flock raised alarm.

Suddenly, the birds took to the air as one, stunning the old clerics with the deafening crush of their thousand beating wings; then repulsing the aged men who could now see the Ravens’ abandoned carrion–a gruesome pulp of shredded flesh and half-picked bones, to which the flock’s ravenous gluttony had reduced the pope's torso, which had washed up on the shoal the evening past. The colleagues bade their servants retrieve what remained of the dead pope and cover him over–then ordered their oarsmen to row back up the river. Though still wanting for many portions of the papal cadaver, Formosus' old friends praised God for those returned to their safekeeping. However, now dissuaded from further collection by a reluctance–unspoken, but churning in every viscera–to discover any more parts such as the bird-ruined papal torso, the old partisans concurred that a promise of pecuniary gain would attract men better-suited than they to carry on the search.

Formosus' bald head voyaged on for ten days, borne by the River Tiber's accelerating current to within a furlong of the sea; but by grace, the bobbing Papal cranium veered off into an inferior forking of the river, and thence into a peasant farmer's stone-lined culvert, where it fell into a blackly comedic, perpetual cycle. Formosus' water-wizened head would rush bumptiously at the culvert's narrow spillway—and be repelled each time with energy precisely sufficient to knock it spinning anew in another, identical orbit. Curiosity overtook the peasant farmer who had in the morning observed the whirling dervish from the rude footbridge that crossed to his field. That afternoon, his interest renewed by the object’s unfaltering course, and unable still to fathom the odd, ever-repeating antic, the peasant waded down his culvert's inlet and plucked the dancing top from the water. He shivered inwardly: A shrunken man-head! ‘Swounds, what a thing.

The peasant fetched the curiosity home for his beloved Lord Harry's pleasure; but as soon as the noble beast laid eyes upon it, he vowed not to gnaw. Guided by the Great Dam of all Dogs, blessed Lord Harry nosed the wrinkled grotesquery across the earthen floor of the serf's rude hut, and pushed it down to the dry bottom of a wooden root cellar. The papal head had arrived in advance of news on the latest Roman desecration, but soon enough Lord Harry's master heard the tale, and happily trekked five weeks northward to redeem his dog's prize for 3 shiny coins of pure gold. Thus did Formosus straggle back to his family's ancestral estate, piece-meal, delivered by priests, peasants, and before long, any profiteer in possession of some missing part of a man.

Thus, at profane ordeal's end, the members of Pope Formosus were mostly reunited and laid a second time to eternal rest. However, his popular legend had only begun to find its legs. His ghost-ridden trial, ghoulish punishment (by clerical cannibals)–and most of all, the wandering pieces of his dismembered cadaver–emblazoned themselves upon the popular imagination, and quickly devolved into a satire which flowed splashing along like the wine lavished upon its raconteur. Formosus' lost member was wont to resurface at many-a punch line of popular bawdy jokes, and before long the entire peasantry of the northern Mediterranean Basin had become conversant in the pointed anti-clericalism of Formosus' misadventuring body parts.

Not until five decades later in 933 C.E. was the Damnatio Immemoriae of Pope Formosus vacated, his Papacy restored, and his bulls reinstated in a series of reasonable, sober steps taken by the first reformers within the new Roman Catholic Church, eager to show that it had purged itself of all Byzantine vestiges, and returned at last to reason.The church's sober steps inspired naught but boredom among the peasantry, and initiated the inevitable decline of Formosus' legend from popular currency. Not  until nearly eight centuries after his death was Pope Formosus canonized, attaining in 1689 the sainthood recognized today by Catholic Monastic Orders.
The posthumous trial and punishment of Formosus–in the early common era, a low-water mark for the Universal Church–have all but disappeared from popular mind. Today, the shameful misuse of human mortal remains for ends of ecclesiastical expediency is but one among many, far more harrowing misdeeds remembered only to a few historians of the ancient archives of the Universal Church and Roman Catholicism.