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White Semidouble Vanity of vanities and all is vanity. No argument was needed to impress this truth upon the Saint of today, when the coffin was opened which contained all that Spain had admired of youth and loveliness, and death suddenly revealed to him its awful reality. O ye beauties of all times, death alone never dies; it invites itself to your dances and pleasures, it assists at all your triumphs, it hears promises said to be eternal: and how quickly it can scatter your adorers! A few years, a few days, perhaps even less, and all your borrowed...

Management gurus tell us, “Personnel is policy.” Southern mothers say it differently. “You can tell everything about someone from his friends.” Historians will look at the men Pope Francis promoted. They will draw interesting conclusions. Meet one of the pope’s closest aides. Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga. He faces appalling charges of financial corruption. They keep getting worse. Maradiaga’s handpicked deputy stands accused of sex abuse. Maradiaga seems to have more in common with Marxist politicians than we thought. In socialist systems from Venezuela to Soviet Russia, the oligarchs might sound like ascetics. But in fact they live like Tsars. The only...

White Semidouble Vanity of vanities and all is vanity. No argument was needed to impress this truth upon the Saint of today, when the coffin was opened which contained all that Spain had admired of youth and loveliness, and death suddenly revealed to him its awful reality. O ye beauties of all times, death alone never dies; it invites itself to your dances and pleasures, it assists at all your triumphs, it hears promises said to be eternal: and how quickly it can scatter your adorers! A few years, a few days, perhaps even less, and all your borrowed...

[This is part of Catholic Analysis' special series on Pope Alexander VI. This part, the fourth, details Alexander's election and coronation. Read the third part.] The conclave of 1492 was an awesome, if typical, affair. After the death of Pope Innocent VIII, the primary contenders to succeed him quickly became obvious: Rodrigo Borgia, Ascanio Sforza, and Giuliano della Rovere (who later became Pope Julius II). [1] Rodrigo was the obvious choice, a man of high honors and popularity. However, that he was Spanish, and therefore seen as an outsider, was likely a point of considerable contention. Ascanio, the Italian and...

[This is part of Catholic Analysis' special series on Pope Alexander VI. This part, the second, deals with the pontiff's family. Read the first part.] Vannozza dei Cattanei was Rodrigo Borgia's mistress and the mother of his children. She "doubtless was of great beauty and ardent passions; for if not, how could she have inflamed a Rodrigo Borgia? Her intellect too, although uncultivated, must have been vigorous; for if not, how could she have maintained her relations with the cardinal?" [1] He was "faithful through his life to [this] one woman". After the births of their children and before he...

Malcolm Moore Thursday, January 25, 2007 Five hundred years after he was killed in battle, the remains of Cesare Borgia, the notorious inspiration for Machiavelli's The Prince, are to be moved into a Spanish church. Banned from holy ground by bishops horrified by his sins, the remains of the ruthless military leader lie, at present, under a pavement in Viana in northern Spain. Borgia was the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI, and was made a cardinal by his father at the age of 17. He was an accomplished murderer by 25 and had conquered a good part of Italy...