The Cadaver Synod, when a Dead Pope Stood Trial

The office of Pope has historically always been a highly important one. Such a role was and is intensely political, with the Pope uniquely being able to influence foreign powers through their people and their faith.

This power does not always attract the pious, and the history of the Vatican and the broader Catholic Church is far from spotless. The Papacy has used its influence for the personal aggrandizement of whomever it is controlled by for centuries, and the Popes have often been victims of circumstance, if not outright up for sale.

But of all the strange events that surround this strange institution, one stands out. There is, as a rule, only one Pope (putting that Avignon business aside for a moment) and it is a rare moment in time indeed when we see Popes challenging each other.

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But it has happened, and perhaps the most famous time that it did became known as the “Cadaver Synod” because one of the Popes, present at the trial, was not in a good way. Specifically, he was dead, and had been for several months.

What crimes were levelled at a dead Pope? What could his punishment be, given he had already been gathered to the arms of God?

And, perhaps more pressingly how had a corpse returned from his grave to attend the charges levelled at him?

A Pope Who Wouldn’t Answer for his Crimes

This did not happen recently, to be sure. We are talking about the Papacy during the 9th century, over a thousand years ago.

This was a period of extremely instability, not just for the Italian peninsula but for the Papacy itself. The Pope, as always, was an important figure to have supporting your cause, but the competing and warring factions of the time did not favor persuasion and flattery so much as skullduggery and getting their guy in the chair.

This led to the Papacy coming with a mortal warning. Between 872 and 965 AD there were 24 different Popes, and for nine years in the middle there was a new Pope every year. A dangerous profession indeed.

The Cadaver Synod occurred at the start of this annual Papal refresh, and started apparently as an internal dispute. The dead Pope in question, Pope Formosus, had been a powerful figure in the Catholic Church even before becoming pontiff, earning the enmity of his Papal predecessors along the way.

This was down to Formosus being a successful and popular bishop, holding great sway particularly with the Kingdom of Bulgaria. A popular man arouses the envy of the powerful, and Pope Nicholas I placed measures in place to prevent Formosus becoming an Archbishop.

Nicholas I’s successor, John VIII, would go further, accusing Formosus of corrupting the minds of Bulgarians. Formosus had already escaped from Rome, and everyone knew what was coming: excommunication, expulsion from the Church.

This should have been damning indeed, and the fact that it was not is revealing about the state and stability of the Catholic Church. The excommunication did not last beyond John’s death in 882, with Formosus able to return as bishop under the new Pope and serve for the next decade.

In 891 Formosus was elected Pope, and found himself enmeshed in a new level of politicking which spanned a continent. The situation was almost impossibly complex, but the key fact is that there were two factions vying for control of the Holy Roman Empire, both militarily powerful, and that the job of Pope involved negotiating these troubled waters without being squashed by one or both.

On the one hand, we have Lambert of Spoleto, whose father had been Emperor and who was himself crowned as Emperor by Formosus in 892. On the other, we have Arnulf of Carinthia, the rival claimant, whom Formosus also crowned in 896. Formosus was not making everyone he feared Emperor, this is more testament to how quickly the power dynamic could change at the time.

Formosus and Arnulf both died in 896, and historians had long thought that the Cadaver Synod was convened by the new Pope under pressure from Lambert, the remaining claimant. But there are several problems with this conclusion, and the fact is we don’t exactly know why Pope Stephen VI had his predecessor dug up in early 897 and placed on the witness chair at a show trial.

Nor were the accusations current, but instead harked back to Formosus’s arguments with Pope John. Formosus was accused of trying to usurp the Papacy while John was alive, of hoping to hold multiple bishoprics at once, and of promising to life as a layman and then returning as bishop after his excommunication.

His guilt as to these crimes remains a source of contention. He was proposed as Archbishop of Bulgaria while a bishop in Italy, but this was not his idea. There are also records of him promising to leave the church while John was Pope, but these come from questionable sources. 

What is clear is that the trial was rigged against him, what with him being dead and all. It took the form of a series of questions put to his corpse, with his silence being interpreted as guilt. Not exactly fair.

His guilt established by his successor, Formosus was posthumously stripped, mutilated, his acts as Pope annulled, and his body dumped, first in a common graveyard and then into the river Tiber. And this was where things started to go wrong for Pope Stephen VI.

The corpse of the former Pope, despite the weights tied to his feet, washed up on the shore of the river in full view of the Roman public. There, rumors started to spread that the dead body was capable of performing miracles.

This was all too much for the populace, who rose up against Stephen for what he had done. He was summarily removed from the Papacy and strangled in a prison cell some six months after the Cadaver Synod.

What had Stephen hoped to achieve with this macabre spectacle? Currying favor with the Emperor Lambert must have been a part of it, even if strictly unnecessary, but Lambert himself oversaw the revoking of the Cadaver Synod before a council of bishops and cardinals in 898. Nothing was mentioned of his involvement there.

The fact is, like so much of the politicking in Rome at the time, we simply do not know. We know very little of the power blocks and factions that controlled the Eternal City a thousand years ago, only that Pope Stephen VI had his predecessor dug up so he could be questioned for transgressions that were decades old.

And that Pope died for what he did.

Header Image: The Cadaver Synod, where Pope Formosus failed to defend himself against the charges levelled against him, on account of being dead. Source: Jean-Paul Laurens / Public Domain.