Did the Pope Sponsor King Billy?

First published in the Western People on Tuesday.

Father Hoban’s column the week before last had to do with sainthood, and how tricky it is for popes to claim a halo. Interestingly, a quick look at the list of the Blessed, those who are next in line for sainthood shows a pope who may or may not have had a role in the history of this country and – if the rumours are true – not at all for the better.

There are a number of parallels to be drawn between Blessed Pope Innocent XI, who reigned from 1676 to 1689, and the current Pope Francis. Reform of the Roman Curia was said to be a major reason behind Francis’s election this year, and Innocent was a zealous reformer himself. Both men’s natures were frugal – they didn’t care for ceremony and enjoyed living humble lives.

Jorge Bergoglio father was an accountant. Benedetto Odescalchi’s family were gentry, but very minor gentry. They pulled themselves up by their bootstraps by founding a bank, and lending money to those whom they thought were good for paying it back. This fact will be significant in Innocent’s later career.

We Irish are inclined to moan about the EU but the reality is that the history of Europe before the founding of the Common Market was continual and unceasing war between the different states and noble families. When Innocent ruled the Papal States, he helped King John III of Poland lift the siege of Vienna in 1683 and rout the Turks who were threatening from the east. You’d think that would have made Innocent a hero in Christendom. It didn’t.

The most important man in 17th Century Europe after Pope Innocent was King Louis XIV of France, the so-called Sun King. Louis wanted to be boss himself and did his best to undermine papal authority by getting councils of bishops to say, in not so many words, that maybe England’s Henry VIII had a point, and the pope shouldn’t be telling divinely appointed kings what they’d do or to whom they’d bend the knee.

You can imagine how little Innocent cared for these onions. And another King who had the gift of giving Innocent a pain in his neck was James II of England. James had converted to Catholicism while in exile in France, and got to be good buddies with Louis XIV while he was there.

Innocent thought that James could have been a little more subtle in the way he went about restoring Catholicism to England, and he was also a bit worried that this restored English Catholicism would a French-flavoured Catholicism, instead of Rome’s own hard drop.

As every schoolchild knows, it wasn’t only the pope who thought James II needed to draw in his horns. A Protestant delegation travelled to William III of Orange, married to James’s daughter Mary, and told him that now was the time for a Glorious Revolution.

William arrived in Devon in November 1688, James’s reign imploded and the only fighting that was done was here, in Ireland, where lives mattered less.

All that is on the record. What is less widely known is that the Glorious Revolution arrived at just the right time for William of Orange, because at the time he got the call the man who would become King Billy was up to the feather in his tri-corn hat with debt. He hadn’t a shilling, and what was worse, he owed money.

Internal Dutch politics meant that the House of Orange wasn’t popular at all in the middle of the seventeenth century and therefore the House of Orange had to get itself some bridging finance to keep things ticking along. And bridging finance they got, from an Italian banking family based outside Milan.

Once William sat on the English throne, he was able to pay off his debts and still have the price of his Friday night porter. And who were those Italian bankers who got their money back? Why, they were the Odescalchis – those same Odescalchis whose brother sat on the Throne of Peter, invested with the power to loose and to bind.

Pope Innocent XI was beatified by the Venerable Pope Pius XII in 1956. Innocent’s actions at the Battle of Vienna had a poignant echo in 1956, when the Russian tanks rolled into Budapest and the west seemed in as much danger from an Eastern invader as it did in 1683. But that’s as far as it’s got for Innocent, who waits on for his elevation.

Italians enjoy conspiracy theories like no other nation. The idea that Pope Innocent XI winked at the fall of Catholic England because, Protestant or not, William of Orange would be able to pay his debts to the Odescalchi family if he were King of England is exactly the sort of intrigue that delights them.

Rita Monaldi and Francesco Sorti, the journalists who discovered details of payments between William of Orange and the Odescalchi family in the Vatican archives, claim that the novel they wrote based on their findings caused them to be run out of town by the Vatican, and they now live in Vienna. This is all grist to the rumour mill.

Is the story true? Well, who knows? Money has a well-earned reputation as the root of all evil but could Innocent XI be so fond of it that he would support someone whom he considered a heretic? Or was it the case that at least William never pretended to be something he wasn’t, unlike the treacherous Sun King of France?

Father Hoban wondered in these pages how it was that only five popes have been elevated to sainthood in the past 900 years. If all their cases are as complex as that of Innocent XI, it’s a wonder that even five of them have made it over the line. It’s hard to be a saint in the city.

St Malachy's Prophecy, the Last Pope and the End of the World

In the first half of the twelfth century a pilgrim to Rome was granted a vision – the next one hundred and twelve popes were shown to him in a dream, after which would come the ending of the world. If that prophecy is correct, yesterday’s news of Pope Benedict’s resignation means that there’s just one more Vicar of Rome to go and then it’s so long, been good to know you.

The pilgrim in question was one of our own – St Malachy, Primate of Armagh. He went to Rome in 1139 to petition the then pope, Innocent II, to recognise Armagh and Cashel as being suitable to become metropolitan archdioceses. While in Rome, Malachy received his vision, the parade of the popes starting with Celestine II, Innocent II’s successor, all they way to the successor of Benedict XVI, whose reign will begin around St Patrick’s Day this year.

Malachy described his vision of the popes in pithy Latin phrases – pastor et nauta (pastor and sailor), flos florum (flower of flowers), and so on. All except the last man. The last pope Malachy explicitly named as Petrus Romanus, Peter the Roman, about whom Malachy makes the longest, and most devastating, of all his remarks: "In the final persecution of the Holy Roman Church there will reign Peter of Rome, who will feed his flock amid many tribulations; after which the seven-hilled city will be destroyed and the dreadful Judge will judge the people. The End."

The End, indeed. And this is where it gets interesting. After he received his vision, Malachy’s prophecy was never heard of again for four hundred years. Malachy returned to Ireland, and died nine years later.

The prophecies were first discovered in 1590, in time for that year’s conclave. The story was that, after receiving his vision, Malachy presented the list of his successors to Innocent II, as a consolation to Innocent during a particularly fraught time for the church, what with anti-popes in Avignon and crusades and all the rest of it. Innocent placed the list in the Vatican archives for safekeeping, and there they stayed for the four hundred years until their reappearance in 1590.

Sceptics – and they’re out there – contend that Malachy’s prophecy was hidden for four hundred years because it had yet to be written. As ever, there were shenanigans taking place at a conclave, and a nephew of Pope Julius III fancied the job when it became vacant in 1590. His name was Girolamo Simoncelli and the fact he was from Ovieto, which means old city, made him completely papabile if the next man up had been described in the prophesy as “ex antiquitate urbis,” from the antiquity of the city.

Simocelli didn’t get it the triple tiara though. Niccolò Sfondrati was crowned Gregory XIV instead. The Sfondratis were nobles of long-standing in Milan which, you could argue, is more semantically fitting as from the antiquity of the city, rather than from the antique city. If you were so inclined.

One of the arguments in favour of forgery is that the match between the popes before 1590 is quite obvious while it’s something a stretch for the popes after then. But that’s not accurate – some of the anti-popes are listed and some are not. If you were forging in 1590, surely you’d chose to leave them all in or leave them all out?

It’s also a thing that the list of modern-day popes isn’t a bad fit at all for the prophecy. Of course, when you’re taking a phrase and trying to hook it back onto someone you’re being lead in a particular direction rather than seeing all of the facts. And again, we’re talking about a prophecy from a time when they still dunked witches.

But still. It’s interesting that the thing has persisted for so very long. There is a story that refuses to die that Cardinal Francis Spellman, a former Archbishop of New York, was a big fan of the prophesies of St Malachy.

Aware that the next man up after the death of Pius XII in 1958 had been described as “pastor et nauta,” shepherd and sailor, Spellman is alleged to have hired a boat, filled it with sheep and sailed it up and down the Tiber, all in the hope of a rub of the relic.

Angelo Roncalli was crowned John XXIII instead. John XXIII convened Vatican II, the famous pastoral summit of the sixties. Before being crowned pope, Roncalli was Patriarch of Venice, a town noted for boats and maritime activity.

John XXIII was succeeded by Paul VI, who sported a fleur-de-lis on his papal arms. Malachy describes him as “flos florum” – flower of flowers.

John Paul I’s papacy lasted 33 days. Slightly longer than a half-moon (“de meditate lunae”), but a pretty short spell nonetheless.

John Paul II was born during a solar eclipse. His tag is “de labore solis” – of the eclipse of the sun.

Benedict’s XVI description in the prophesy is “gloria olivae,” the glory of the olive. The olive is the symbol of the Benedictine order.

And now, Peter the Roman. Whatever about the Roman part, it’s deliciously interesting to note that one of the early favourites to succeed Benedict XVI is the current President of the Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace, His Eminence Cardinal Peter Turkson.

I don’t know about you, but I’m dressing for showers of frogs, locusts and assorted pestilence from here on in.

FOCAL SCOIR: If anyone is degenerate enough to bet on a conclave, my tenner is going on Angelo Scola, former Patriarch of Venice and current Archbishop of Milan, at 8/1 or so. That’s good pedigree in a papal election and, like Kerry in any given year, the Italians want their birthright title back.