Popes with Brief Reigns

Of the 262 Popes since Linus I succeeded St. Peter in A.D. 67, 45 did not survive a year after their election. Six were murdered; one died of wounds received in the course of the Guelph-Ghibelline civil wars; one, John XXI, 1277, was killed by a falling ceiling.

Thirteen Popes did not serve even as long as John Paul. The shortest reign of all was that of a priest named Stephen. Elected Pope in 752, he died three days later, before consecration, and so is not officially a Pope. But he is remembered because of the numerical confusion he created for all subsequent Popes who took the name Stephen (i.e., Stephen II was really Stephen I, and so on).

Beginning in 896, there was a veritable epidemic of papal brevity: four Popes in 20 months. Boniface VI, who died after 15 days, was a rascal who had been dismissed from several ecclesiastical offices. His successor, Stephen VI (or VII), had the decomposing body of his predecessor-but-one, Formosus I, disinterred, clothed in papal robes, and set on the throne in St. Peter's; whereupon Stephen called a synod to "depose" him, had the dead man's blessing forefinger cut off, and the corpse flung into the Tiber.

Resisting the power of the Holy Roman Emperors in the tenth century, various Roman noble families, especially the Crescentii, opposed imperial-backed candidates for the papacy with their own candidates, with disastrous results. Benedict V was deposed by the Emperor in 964 after a month. Benedict VI, the Emperor's papal candidate, was thrown into prison in 974 by the Crescentii. Then the family set up an antiPope, Boniface VII, who had Benedict strangled in prison.

The first "involuntary conclave," in 1241, consisted of ten Cardinals who were shut up in a dilapidated palace by a powerful Roman senator to keep them from being influenced by Emperor Frederick II, then besieging the city. Three of the Cardinals died of brutal treatment; the remaining seven elected a Pope who died within 16 days, after excommunicating the bad senator.

In the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the Borgia family brought the papacy to its nadir. After the death of the notorious Alexander VI in 1503, Cardinal Sforza succeeded in frustrating Borgia ambitions by having decrepit Cardinal Piccolomini elected Pius III. Rapacious Vatican bureaucrats, accustomed to plundering the apartments of every new Pope on the assumption that the Holy Father would need no further worldly goods, so stripped Pius' cell that he even had to buy back the bed in which he died of gout just 25 days later.

Of Marcellus II, who died 22 days after his election in 1555, it was said in his epitaph that "he was destined only to appear." Of all the short-lived Popes, Urban VII was most promising. Elected in 1590, he immediately began reforming the Papal States and promoting public works. But the day after his election Urban caught malaria and died in eleven days.

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