14. Scandalous Pope’s Biggest Scandal
The greatest controversy of Julius III’s papacy was the “Innocenzo Scandal”, named after a handsome thirteen-year-old beggar with whom the pope fell passionately in love. He had the street urchin adopted into his family, then made the uncouth and barely literate Innocenzo a cardinal and showered him with church offices and benefices. The boy shared the pope’s bed, and on the rare occasions when he was absent from Rome, Julius fretted until he returned with the impatience of a lover pining for a mistress.
The besotted Holy Father also openly boasted of Innocenzo’s prowess in bed, and ignored all advice that his unseemly passion for the teenager opened him to ridicule as a slimy old pervert. Innocenzo was not the first teenage lover made cardinal by this pope. That distinction went to another of his boy lovers, a sixteen-year-old whom Julius III made a cardinal as a reward for his bravery, because he did not cry after he was bitten by one of the pope’s pet monkeys. Contemporaries wrote that it was Julius’ “costume … to promote none to ecclesiastical livings, save only his buggerers“.
Read too: Most Scandalous Popes in History.
