OUTROS SUMO-PATÍFICES ANTES DE BXVI (IV)

Alexandre VI (Pinturicchio, 1492-95)

"Alexandre VI (1492-1503) ganhou fama não pelos seus valores religiosos, mas pela forma de vida sensual, pelo modo desinibido de utilizar o poder, pela personalidade frequentemente escandalosa dos seus filhos e pelas lendas e calúnias elaboradas durante o seu pontificado. (...) Das várias lendas que envolvem Alexandre VI, estão as de que comprou o papado e foi amante das próprias filhas, com as quais teve vários filhos; que teria participado na orgia mais depravada de todos os tempos na residência papal; e a de que envenenou muitos cardeais ricos da Europa depois de deliberar que após a morte destes a Igreja herdaria as suas fortunas". (aqui)

"He sired at least twelve children through a number of mistresses. The most famous of his offspring were his son Cesare, noted for the murder of political rivals, and his daughter Lucrezia who was married off to a number of husbands for political gain". (aqui)

"Like many other prelates of the day, his morals were far from blameless, his two dominant passions being greed of gold and love of women. (...) the condition of Rome became every day more deplorable. The city swarmed with Spanish adventurers, assassins, prostitutes and informers; murder and robbery were committed with impunity, heretics and Jews were admitted to the city on payment of bribes, and the pope himself shamelessly cast aside all show of decorum, living a purely secular and immoral life, and indulging in the chase, dancing, stage plays and indecent orgies. One of his boon companions was Jem, the brother of the sultan Bayezid, detained as a hostage. (...) During his pontificate the church was brought to its lowest level of degradation". (aqui)

Lucrezia Borgia (real. Abel Gance, 1935)

"As early as 1460, when he was cardinal and papal legate, he had been reported to Pius II (1458-62) for holding obscene dances with naked ladies in a garden at Siena, and he continued to enjoy such spectacles until the end of his life. His pontificate provided one of the gravest scandals in the Vatican since the Reign of the Whores, and the parade of his sexual licence was maintained with little or no concealment. It is from the diary of German chaplain Johann Burchard, Pope Alexander VI's master of ceremonies, that we learn the most about the character of this Borgia pope. Burchard personally witnessed Alexander's debauchery and wrote the famous comment saying that 'the pope's Christianity was a pretence'. Alexander VI was so notoriously infamous and his history so large and well known that he has proved a great embarrassment to the modern Church vainly trying to portray a pious papal past. He has a unique record among the popes for the public prominence of his illegitimate children and the blatancy of his amours in the 'Sacred Palace'. With his 12 bastard children (Collins Dictionary), including Cesare, Giovanni (Juan), Lucrezia and Jofre, and his numerous mistresses, the 'Vatican was again a brothel' (The Records of Rome, 1868, British Library) and his debauched papal court was compared to the ancient 'fleshpots' of Caesarea in which St Augustine (d. 430) revelled. Alexander VI was a sexual pervert, and lurid stories were bandied about by the intellectual underworld of Rome. (...) Ambassadors speak of Cesare's introduction of multitudes of beautiful courtesans into the Vatican for Alexander's sexual pleasure in his later years. Burchard gives us astonishing details of one occasion in which the pope presided at an orgy in the Papal Palace:

Alexandre VI/Rodrigo Borgia (gravura 1580)

'On Sunday evening, 30 October [1501], Don Cesare Borja gave his father a supper in the apostolic palace, with 50 decent prostitutes or courtesans in bright garb in attendance, who after the meal danced with the servants and others there, first fully dressed and then naked. Following the supper, lampstands holding lighted candles were placed on the floor and chestnuts strewn about, which the prostitutes, naked and on their hands and knees, had to pick up with their mouths as they crawled in and out among the lampstands. The Pope watched and admired their noble parts. The evening ended with an obscene contest of these women, coupled with male servants of the Vatican, for prizes which the Pope presented. Don Cesare, Donna Lucrezia and the Pope later each took a partner of their liking for further dalliances'.

At that time, witchcraft was an ecclesiastical rather than a civil concern, and the documentation reveals that the pope's personal beliefs were not that of Christian orthodoxy. This remark, buried away in a collection of once-suppressed papal pronouncements called Anecdota Ecclesiastica or Secret Church Histories (Vienta, Paris, 1822 reprint of 1731 ed.) and confirmed in Diderot's Encyclopedie reveals what Pope Alexander VI really thought of Christianity: 'Almighty God! How long will this superstitious sect of Christians, and this upstart invention, endure?' (...) Pope Alexander VI did continue the centuries old Papal and now senior church tradition of institutional sodomy of children, especially young boys. Furthermore, that Pope Alexander VI and the Vatican did falsely maintain the traditional justification of such practice amongst European nobility as an ancient Greek tradition of homosexuality". (aqui)

(2010)