amazon.com
Sex Lives of the Popes : An Irreverent Expose of the Bishops of Rome from st Peter to the Present Day
by Nigel Cawthorne
Nigel Cawthorne NigelCawthorne@compuserve.com , August 7, 1999
More Sex (Lives)
No, this is not the thinnest book in the world. In fact, it is the fattest in the Sex Lives... series. There have been a lot of popes and even the current pope, John Paul II, has a lovechild in Poland. Before World War II, he was a poet in Poland. He had girlfriends, wrote love poetry and seemed to know what he was talking about. During the War, he joined the Polish resistance. His group were smuggling Jews out of Poland. He met and fell in love with a young Jewish girl. They could not get married, of course. But they had a private ceremony and an exchange of rings. She fell pregnant and had a baby. In post-natal depression, she left the safe house, went out on the streets, was grabbed by the Nazis and went to the death camps. He was left with a six-week-old baby daughter who he took to the local convent to be brought up by the nuns. And he became a priest to be near the child. He did nothing wrong, because he was not a priest when he had sex. But the one thing disturbs me about this story. Once you have tasted the forbidden fruit, how could you give it up? But John Paul II is not a patch on the first John XXIII (there have been two) who was deposed by the Council of Constance in 1414. He began his career as a pirate, but soon realised that there was more money in the church. When he was papal legate to Bologna, he had a palace with 200 concubines in it. At Constance, he was charged with 54 capital offences. He admitted four: murder, incest, adultery and--of all things for a pope--atheism. He was deposed, fined and jailed. He bribed his way out of jail and went on to become a cardinal again. You can't keep a good man down. Anyway, this is not any anti-Catholic book. It has sold best in Ireland, Italy and Poland. It is just a romp though 20 centuries of European history.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This book emphasizes on the attitude of the popes towards the sex lives of their priests. Many popes were concerned with the celibacy of their priests and forbade marriage for priests. However, they used to sell them licenses for keeping mistresses. Usually, they were prepared to tolerate priests who kept incestuous relations with female relatives or raped women in the church. "When a woman fainted during confession and the priest seized the opportunity to rape her, the Inquisition found that this, technically, was not a case of soliciting." The pope's only concern was that priests would defile the sacrament when handling it afterwards.
The passages about the sex lives of the popes themselves are mainly based on hearsay. Cawthorne accuses several popes of incest with either their sisters or bastard daughters, like pope Alexander VI Borgia, who retired with his daughter to "an interior room and remained locked up together for more than an hour". In secret she gave birth to a baby that was hidden, but that doesn't prove that her father was the father. Many other popes seem to have had preferences for young boys, prostitutes or sex-and-food orgies in general.
Despite many unproven accusations, the book clearly shows that many popes were mainly concerned with their own pleasures and did not give a damn about Christian values. Anyway, the book is good reading stuff.
The "Mother Church" and the reality it denies, June 22, 2000
Reviewer: A reader from Rockville, Maryland
"Sex Lives of the Popes" reads fluidly and easily. Others may find that a weakness in the lack of endless "scholastic" efforts to document every work by reference to "previous scholars." Well, for the minority among us who are "academia," that may be of interest. But for the ordinary reader, there is sufficient substantiation, and the book retains its vitality instead of succumbing to mind-numbing scholarly endedavor. It's real, and revealing, and surely an anathema to all the scholars of the "Holy Mother Church," to which the work may lend a new meaning. If one isn't a hidebound statistician, or a blindly faithful Catholic Cleric, then this book will be a great source of wondrous information, with relevance to the religious events and practices of the past centuries as well as to the present day's less than presentable (reported and unreported) practices of many of the Church's selected clergical leaders. By all means, everyone should read this book, in the interests of presentation of all the facts, whether they agree with the book or not. For example, do you know why the new pope must sit on the "saddle" before he's confirmed by the Cardinals? And did you know that there was a female Pope? It's a great book. Rush out and read it.
Brilliantly Written Reality Check, May 11, 2000
Reviewer: Matt Hood (see more about me) from Cambridge, UK
When I bought this book, I honestly thought that it would be a riotous laugh - after all it is in the humour section. But soon after starting to read it I was taken aback by the depth and quality of research - so much so that the acquisition of the facts portrayed becomes more wonderful than the sordid acts of the assorted pontiffs. They don't all get a mention here, presumably because they weren't all as bad as those mentioned, but there are sufficient here to keep even the most hardened reader amazed. Every type of debauchery seems to have taken place at one time or another, and Nigel Cawthorne suitably whets the appetite of the open-minded reader - although he's probably lucky that they're all dead and can't sue! |
