Crises in the History of the Papacy: A study of twenty famous popes whose careers and whose influence were important in the development of the church and in the history of the worldMcCabe, Joseph
History
Crises in the History of the Papacy: A study of twenty famous popes whose careers and whose influence were important in the development of the church and in the history of the world
McCabe, Joseph
Catholic Church -- History; Papacy -- History
The end of his adventures is well known. The burghers of Freiburg
refused to protect him and he fled to Breisar, where the envoys of
the Council came to press for his resignation. He put on his rough
disguise once more, and made off with a troop of Austrian cavalry, but
Friedrich, to obtain a mitigation of his own sentence, betrayed him.
For several days he miserably resisted the pressure of the envoys,
weeping and wailing piteously, and on May 2d the Council summoned him
to appear before it within nine days to answer charges of heresy,
schism, simony, and immorality. On the seventh day a troop of horse
came for him, but he was ill and irresolute. On May 14th the patience
of the Council was exhausted; it suspended him from office and ordered
the public trial of the charges which had already been examined and
on which a mass of evidence had been taken. Two days later the great
assembly of prelates and doctors drew up the appalling indictment, in
seventy-two articles, of Baldassare Cossa. In the main the charges
referred to those acts of simony, bribery, corruption, and tyranny
which I have recounted, but it should be added that he was described as
"addicted to the flesh, the dregs of vice, a mirror of infamy" (art.
6), and "guilty of poisoning, murder, and persistent addiction to vices
of the flesh" (art 29). The worst charges of Dietrich were solemnly
endorsed by the gravest lawyers and priests of Europe.
John lay, prostrate and in tears, in an inn at Rudolphzell. He wished
to submit a defence, but a few friendly cardinals advised him to
submit, and when, on May 26th, he heard that the Council had endorsed
the indictment, he made no further resistance. He was deposed on the
29th and accepted the sentence with words of humility and repentance.
A few days later the wretched man was consigned to the castle of
Gottlieben, and then to a castle at Mannheim. There was, in the
following year, a futile attempt to rescue him, and he was confined in
the castle of Heidelberg, where he remained three years, with a cook
and two chaplains of his once magnificent establishment, composing
verses on the vanity of earthly things. The hollow words of his
consecration-ceremony, _Sic transit gloria mundi_, had for him assumed
a terrible reality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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