Public Intelligence Blog

The Pope and the Kill List

In 1984 — the year not the book, but it was fitting — and five years before she died, Barbara Tuchman published a book called The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.  In one part of the book she looked at the destructive work of a series of a half-dozen popes, work destructive of the papacy, work that brought into being the protestant secession from the Catholic church.  This was offered as an example of folly, of rulers acting against the interest of their own institution.  It was also an example of what we so casually label “the imperial presidency.”  That is, in these popes we watched the mad and cumulative concentration of power and normalization of abuses that Tuchman almost certainly was aware she was living through again — along with the debasement of an institution previously imagined to embody certain principles and integrity.

Does history repeat itself?

Is the Pope Catholic?

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Clement VII, Pope from 1523 to 1534 / Barack Obama, President since 2009

“The new Clement's reign proved to be a pyramid of catastrophes.  Protestantism continued its advance. . . . Supreme office, like sudden disaster, often reveals the man, and revealed Clement as less adequate than expected. Knowledgeable and effective as a subordinate, Guicciardini writes, he fell victim when in charge to timidity, perplexity, and habitual irresolution. . . . By 1527, hardly a part of Italy had escaped violence to life and land, plunder, destruction, misery, and famines.  Clement's misjudgments having prepared the way, Rome itself was now to be engulfed by war.”

“The folly of the popes was not pursuit of counter-productive policy so much as rejection of any steady or coherent policy either political or religious that  would have improved their situation or arrested the rising discontent.  Disregard of the movements and sentiments developing around them was the primary folly. . . . When private interest is placed before public interests, and private ambition, greed, and the bewitchment of exercising power determine policy, the public interest necessarily loses, never more conspicuously than under the continuing madness from Sixtus to Clement.  The succession from Pope to Pope multiplied the harm.  Each of the six handed on his conception of the Papacy unchanged. . . . St. Peter's See was the ultimate pork barrel.  Their three outstanding attitudes — obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents, primacy of self-aggrandizement, illusion of invulnerable status — are persistent aspects of folly.  While in the case of the Renaissance popes, these were bred in and exaggerated by the surrounding culture, all are independent of time and recurrent in governorship.”

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