Have you ever heard of the Cadaver Synod? After Pope Formosus kicked the bucket, Pope Stephen VI sought revenge against Formosus. So once Stephen got promoted to head honcho, he wasted no time in going medieval on his ass. After a little shoveling and a lotta grave-robbing, Stephen hauled the corpse straight to the cathedral. Stephen dressed the body in papal garb and propped Formosus up on a chair. So as to not make the conservation too one-sided, Stephen gave Formosus a voice for his trial: a young deacon who camped out behind the corpse, no doubt choking on his own vomit. Stephen hurled a bunch of charges at Formosus, like usurping the papacy, perjury, and pretending to be a bishop when he wasn't one. When asked why Formosus did it, his spokesman confessed: “Because I was EVIL!” And with that, Stephen pronounced the verdict: guilty. As punishment, the cadaver was stripped of all his papal bling, had his three blessing fingers lopped off, and all his deeds as pope were erased. Including, oddly enough, the appointment of Stephen as bishop. Which would seem to make Stephen also guilty of the same thing, but honestly, logic had walked out the door long ago. Next, Formosus was buried in a graveyard for foreigners. Then his fragile remains were exhumed yet again, bound up with weights and drowned in the Tiber. Stephen was finally satisfied that he had proven Formosus guilty as sin. But the trial really only proved that Stephen was insane. Yet seeing how Stephen dealt with the dead, nobody dared to cross him, so they hushed up. That is, until rumors spread that Formosus had washed up on the riverbank, where his rancid flesh worked some miracles. This caused the people to rise up against Stephen. In the end, Stephen ran out of both luck and oxygen. The Romans retrieved what was left of Formosus and gave him a dignified burial in St. Peter’s Basilica. The Catholic Church then banned putting cadavers on trial, as if we actually needed a rule on this.
