Cadaver Synod: A papal trial beyond the grave
The Cadaver Synod placed the corpse of Pope Formosus before a papal court in Rome in January 897. He had been dead for about nine months when Pope Stephen VI arranged the proceeding at the Basilica of St. John Lateran. A deacon answered for the deceased pope, whose body was propped on a throne. The court found him guilty and declared his papacy null. The spectacle belongs to a period of political instability and rapid changes in the papal office, when disputes over authority could continue long after the person at their center had died.
Before the Cadaver Synod, Formosus had built a career involving both church appointments and diplomatic travel. He became bishop of Porto in 864 during the reign of Nicholas I. Sent to Bulgaria as a papal legate in 866, he impressed its ruler, Boris I, who wanted him appointed archbishop there. Nicholas refused permission because church law prohibited a bishop from administering more than one see. Formosus also traveled to Constantinople and to the Carolingian court. There he met Arnulf of Carinthia, a king who aspired to Italy's throne, linking his ecclesiastical career with the political rivalries of the period.
A rupture with Pope John VIII brought another stage of conflict. In 876, Formosus fled Rome in fear of John. Later in 876, John accused him and his associates of conspiring against papal and political authority. Among the allegations were that Formosus had tried to seize the papacy, abandoned his see at Porto, and influenced Bulgarians against accepting another bishop. John excommunicated the group. A later story says Formosus sought forgiveness at a council in Troyes and swore to remain a layman and stay away from Rome. That story is disputed, since another telling of the council omits his presence there.
After John VIII died in December 882, Formosus resumed his bishopric at Porto. He remained there until his election as pope on 6 October 891. The quarrel with John later furnished accusations for the Cadaver Synod, including perjury and exercising episcopal office while a layman. Formosus's papacy also involved competing imperial ambitions. He crowned Lambert of Spoleto as co-ruler of the Holy Roman Empire in 892, then invited Arnulf to invade Italy and receive the imperial crown. Arnulf's first invasion failed, but Formosus renewed the invitation. After Arnulf entered Rome, Formosus crowned him emperor, and the Frankish army subsequently departed.
Formosus died in 896. His immediate successor, Boniface VI, died after only two weeks, and Stephen VI then became pope. The political motives behind the Cadaver Synod have been debated. An older interpretation held that Lambert forced Stephen to convene the trial to reassert his imperial claim and perhaps seek posthumous revenge. Joseph Duhr challenged that view in 1932 by pointing to Lambert's later approval of measures reversing the trial's decrees. Girolamo Arnaldi also challenged a simple picture of Formosus as exclusively pro-Carolingian. He proposed that Lambert's cousin, Guy IV of Spoleto, helped drive the proceeding after aggression that had alarmed Formosus.
Inside the court, Stephen's charges concerned the legality of Formosus's exercise of church offices as well as alleged perjury. Liutprand of Cremona reports that Stephen challenged the deceased pope over moving from the bishopric of Porto to the Roman see. The guilty verdict was followed by physical degradation of the body. The body was stripped of papal vestments and subjected to ritual humiliation. Formosus's acts and ordinations were invalidated, including his ordination of Stephen as bishop of Anagni. The body was dressed as a layman, buried in a foreigners' graveyard, then later weighted and thrown into the Tiber.
Public reaction to the Cadaver Synod turned against Stephen. Formosus's body washed onto the riverbank, and a rumor circulated that the waterlogged corpse was still performing miracles. An uprising removed Stephen from power and put him in prison, where he was strangled in July or August 897. The reaction did more than change the occupant of the papal office: it also preceded a formal reversal of the judgment against Formosus. In December, Pope Theodore II convened a synod that annulled the proceeding, rehabilitated Formosus, and directed that his recovered body be reburied in Saint Peter's Basilica wearing pontifical vestments.
Pope John IX continued the reversal in 898 through councils in Rome and Ravenna. They affirmed Theodore's findings and ordered the trial's written acts eliminated. Six clerics involved in the proceeding were condemned, and future trials of corpses were prohibited. Lambert attended the Ravenna council and actively approved the nullification, the action that later became central to Duhr's challenge to the older political interpretation. The turbulent turnover of popes extended beyond these events: between 896 and 904, a new pope took office on average every year, within a longer period shaped by the machinations of competing Roman factions.
- Cadaver Synod - Wikipedia — en.wikipedia.org