2. Benedict IX Liked the Occasional Bestiality Session to Spice Up His Sex Life
At only twenty years old, the election of Pope Benedict IX in 1032 elected one of the youngest popes to the throne of St. Peter. Already a wealthy man through the patronage of his two uncles, Pope Benedict VIII and Pope John XIX, Benedict IX’s father bought his papal crown, appointing an immature, licentious youth to the throne of St. Peter. Benedict IX’s sexual antics became the scandal of eleventh century Rome. You can’t be called “a demon from hell in the disguise of a priest” if you don’t engage in a little sinful behavior.
In addition to seducing young boys in the Lateran Palace, his contemporaries accused him of theft, rape, and murder. To spice things up, Benedict enjoyed orgies and bestiality sessions. The Romans tolerated him for twelve years before they exiled him from the city in 1044. Two months into the reign of his successor, Benedict returned to Rome. In the only example of the same man serving as pope more than once throughout history, Benedict excommunicated his replacement and took back the papacy, starting his second pontificate with as much sexual debauchery as the first.
By May 1045, the city of Rome hated the pope so much that he sold the papal chair to his godfather, who took the name Pope Gregory VI. Benedict retired from religious life, marrying his cousin. Two years later, the restless Benedict launched yet another return to the papacy. The people of Rome had enough of the pope’s antics the third time around, the memories of his first two terms recalling the “Pornocracy” of previous years. The population exiled him from the city permanently. One of Benedict’s successors, Pope Victor III criticized Benedict “as a pope was so vile, so foul, so execrable, that I shudder to think of it.”
