Word: vi
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...went in the cold Roman dusk to take his place among the Popes buried in the crypt of St. Peter's, to lie between his two namesakes, John XXIII and Paul VI. As the plain cypress coffin was borne through the portals of the great basilica, the huge, tearful crowd standing in the rainswept square burst into applause. At the Requiem Mass that preceded the burial, it rained intermittently. As if to counteract the rain clouds, in his funeral address 85-year-old Carlo Cardinal Confalonieri compared Pope John Paul to "a meteor that unexpectedly lights up the heavens...
John Paul had died so abruptly that he left no funeral instructions, but the Cardinals quickly decided upon the style of simple, stately rites that had been held for Pope Paul VI eight weeks ago. They kept to an open-air Mass in St. Peter's Square, despite the virtual certainty of rain, so as not to disappoint the more than 50,000 people who, rain or shine, desired to attend. At one point during the Requiem, a downpour drenched the solitary coffin, and aides rushed up with umbrellas to shield the 90 white-mitered Cardinals...
Beginning in 896, there was a veritable epidemic of papal brevity: four Popes in 20 months. Boniface VI, who died after 15 days, was a rascal who had been dismissed from several ecclesiastical offices. His successor, Stephen VI (or VII), had the decomposing body of his predecessor-but-one, Formosus I, disinterred, clothed in papal robes, and set on the throne in St. Peter's; whereupon Stephen called a synod to "depose" him, had the dead man's blessing forefinger cut off, and the corpse flung into the Tiber...
Resisting the power of the Holy Roman Emperors in the tenth century, various Roman noble families, especially the Crescentii, opposed imperial-backed candidates for the papacy with their own candidates, with disastrous results. Benedict V was deposed by the Emperor in 964 after a month. Benedict VI, the Emperor's papal candidate, was thrown into prison in 974 by the Crescentii. Then the family set up an antiPope, Boniface VII, who had Benedict strangled in prison...
...late 15th and early 16th centuries, the Borgia family brought the papacy to its nadir. After the death of the notorious Alexander VI in 1503, Cardinal Sforza succeeded in frustrating Borgia ambitions by having decrepit Cardinal Piccolomini elected Pius III. Rapacious Vatican bureaucrats, accustomed to plundering the apartments of every new Pope on the assumption that the Holy Father would need no further worldly goods, so stripped Pius' cell that he even had to buy back the bed in which he died of gout just 25 days later...