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To: marshmallow

Surely 20 Jesuits. Straight out of the Borgias.


5 posted on 01/14/2015 7:15:41 AM PST by wolfman23601
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To: wolfman23601

Actually, not all the Borgias were bad, few were Jesuits, and the Jesuits in those days were the good guys.

Francis Borja (not a pope) was cannonized as a saint!

And aside from nepotism, Pope Callixtus III (Alfons Borja) is considered to have been a very good pope. He defeated the Muslims in Belgrade, helped heal the Western Schism, was a leader of the Council of Basel (which failed to end the Great Schism between the Catholics and Orthodox, but yielded theological treatieses on many key issues which all Catholic and Orthodox bishops could agree to), and vindicated Joan of Arc. His greatest failure was the papal bull Inter Caetera, which was intended to deal with the problem of conquered warriors, but ended up being used to justify slavery in the Americas. Giovanni Pamphilj (Innocent X) was also considered to be a strong pope, without such scandal as Inter Caetera. The fact that many heirs of the Borjas became cardinals under Callixtus is often presumed to be motivated by worldly corruption and vice, but making them Cardinals meant that when they died, the Church — and not the Borgia family — inherited any wealth they had.

Even Alexander VI, the most infamous of all popes, was considered in his day to have been a great pope by many. He is known to have had illegitimate children, but contemporaries claim he changed his stripes before becoming pope. That such a man could manuever himself into the papacy is still a terrible scandal on the Catholic church, but the lack of any contemporary scandal makes the infamous “Banquet of Chestnuts” orgy highly questionable. Many suppose that the orgy was added to a contemporary diary centuries later by opponents of the Borjas.


9 posted on 01/14/2015 8:37:54 AM PST by dangus
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