The same men who chose the Pope have chosen another

FONDI, Campagna, September 20, 1378 AD — The cardinals who chose the Pope five months ago met again today. They came together in a palace south of Rome, and they chose a different man. They said their April votes did not count. A crowd in Rome had frightened them into voting the way they did.

Pope Gregory XI died at Rome on March 27 this year. As soon as his funeral was over, the cardinals went into conclave. People in the streets shouted after them to pick a Roman. They chose Bartolommeo Prignano, the Archbishop of Bari, and he took the name Urban VI.

The Pope who shouted at his cardinals

Within weeks Pope Urban VI was insulting the cardinals to their faces. He shouted at them in public. He called one cardinal stupid and another a liar, and told a third to be quiet. He warned them that he would bring in enough new Italian cardinals to swamp them.

Saint Catherine of Siena took Pope Urban VI’s side. She had been writing letters about the quarrel since the first news of it reached her. She had written to the Pope more than once since the election, asking him to hold back his sudden temper: “Mitigate a little, for the love of Christ crucified, those sudden impulses which nature forces on you.”

In June the French cardinals left Rome. They said the city was unhealthy in summer, and they rode out to Anagni. The man in charge of the Pope’s household went with them. He took Pope Gregory XI’s crown and most of the Pope’s jewels. A Dominican prior brought Pope Urban VI the cardinals’ demand that he resign. The Pope answered: “I will not resign to give place to the devil and make sinners exult. Nay, I will abide and beat them down in the name of the Lord our God.”

Nobody on earth could tell them they were wrong

A pope who has been properly elected can be removed for one reason only: if he teaches something false about the faith. Nobody had accused Pope Urban VI of that. So the cardinals did not say they had removed him. They said there had never been an election at all.

When a person is frightened into doing something, the law treats it as though it never happened. The cardinals had voted in April with the crowd shouting at the doors. And there was no court anywhere above a pope to take the argument to.

On August 9 the cardinals had a letter read aloud in the cathedral of Anagni. It called Pope Urban VI an antipope, a deceiver and destroyer of Christians. Then they moved to Fondi, where Onorato Gaetani, Count of Fondi, took them under his protection.

Gaetani was angry with the Pope for two reasons of his own. Pope Urban VI had taken away his job running the Campagna, the country south of Rome. He also would not pay back a large loan Gaetani had made to the Church.

Two days ago Pope Urban VI made twenty-six new cardinals, and all but two of them were Italians.

Today the cardinals who had left Rome met in Gaetani’s palace. Every one of them voted for Cardinal Robert of Geneva. The three Italian cardinals were in the room. They did not vote, and they said nothing against it. The next day they proclaimed Robert of Geneva Pope, under the name Clement VII.

Now every king, queen and city in Europe has to decide which of the two men is the Pope. The King of France is a relative of Robert of Geneva. Queen Joanna of Naples owes the Pope’s treasury 64,000 florins. The money will go to whichever of the two men she decides is the real Pope.

The palace they voted in today belongs to a man St. Catherine of Siena had already written to. A few weeks ago she told Onorato Gaetani that he was putting himself first and acting out of anger: “In the secret of your heart, you hold that Pope Urban VI is the true Sovereign Pontiff… We are bound to hold that he is the Pope, canonically elected, the vicar of Christ on earth, and we are bound to obey him even unto death.”