The Cadaver Synod

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a great door, a bell, a procession that should not be happening)
Rome. January, eight hundred and ninety-seven. The trial of a corpse.

[Verse 1]
Pope Stephen the Sixth has his predecessor exhumed.
Formosus has been dead for nine months. They dig him up.
They dress the body in the papal vestments. They seat it on a throne.
They appoint a deacon to stand beside it and answer on its behalf,
because the accused must be permitted to respond to the charges,
and the accused is a corpse, and so the corpse is given counsel.

[Chorus]
The Cadaver Synod! The trial of a dead man!
The court is real! The charges are real! The judge is the Pope!
And Stephen shouts the accusations at the body in the chair
and the deacon answers for it, and the body is found GUILTY.
The Cadaver Synod. It is in the record. It is documented.
This is not a legend. This was a procedure.

[Verse 2]
The sentence: all his acts annulled, all his ordinations void,
which unmade the priesthood of every man he had ever ordained,
throwing the whole Church into a legal chaos that took years.
They cut off the three fingers of his right hand — the blessing fingers —
stripped the vestments, and threw what was left into the Tiber.
A monk fished him out. Somebody always fishes them out.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And within the year there was an earthquake that dropped the basilica,
which the people of Rome took as an opinion on the proceedings,
and Stephen was deposed, imprisoned, and strangled in his cell,
and the next Pope reversed it, and the one after reversed the reversal,
and Formosus was reburied, and dug up, and reburied again.
He was tried once and moved four times. He never said a word.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the bell, once, and the river)
The deacon answered for him.
Somebody had to speak. Somebody was assigned.