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Pope facts

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Pope facts

Pope facts

  • Pope Adrian I was the oldest ever at the time of his election, being 80 years old when he became pope in 772.

  • Pope Adrian II, who took the post from 867 to 872, was the last pope to have a wife. Having married before his election, he refused to give up his wife Stephania and they lived in the Lateran Palace with their daughter.

  • Due to a clerical balls up, there was no Pope John XX. Pope John XIX was pope from 1024 to 1032, and the next John to be pope was Pope John XXI, who held the position from 1276 to 1277.

  • Arguably the worst pope in history was Pope John XII, who was charged by Holy Roman Emperor Otto I in 963 of ordaining a deacon in a stable, making a 10-year-old boy a bishop, turning the Lateran Palace into a brothel, raping female pilgrims and stealing church offerings. Needless to say he was deposed.

  • In 1147 Pope Eugenius III decided there were two Thursdays in one week. He had travelled to Paris, scheduled to arrive on a Friday, which is typically a day of fasting. Just so the Parisians could hold a celebration on Friday, Eugenius decreed that day to also be a Thursday.

  • Sixteenth Century Pope Clement VII was so fond of mushrooms that he made it illegal for anyone else to eat those growing in the Papal States, so that there would never be a shortage for his own table. He died in 1534 from eating a poisonous mushroom. Oh the irony.

  • When Pope Paul VI made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1964, he was the first reigning pope in over 150 years to travel outside Italy. In sharp contrast, Pope John Paul II visited 129 countries during his reign, which ended in 2005.
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