What was the Cadaver Synod, the trial of a dead pope?

The Cadaver Synod, also called the Cadaver Trial or Synodus Horrenda, was the posthumous ecclesiastical trial of Pope Formosus. It took place in the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome in January 897, about nine months after Formosus died. Pope Stephen VI had the corpse exhumed and brought before the papal court. Formosus was pronounced guilty and his papacy was retroactively declared null. [1] [2]

According to the accounts summarised by these sources, the corpse was propped up on a throne in its ecclesiastical robes, and a deacon was appointed to speak on its behalf. The charges were perjury, serving as a bishop while actually a layman, and moving from one see to another in violation of canon law. The historian J. N. D. Kelly, cited by Catholic Answers, notes that the main charge rested on the fifteenth canon of the Council of Nicaea, which forbade transferring a bishop between sees, and that Formosus was not accused of heresy. [1] [3] [4]

After the guilty verdict, Stephen declared Formosus's acts and ordinations void. Liutprand of Cremona and other sources say the body was stripped of its papal vestments and three fingers of the right hand, used for blessing, were cut off. The body was then buried in a graveyard for foreigners, dug up again and thrown into the Tiber. The Wikipedia article marks some of these details as needing citation, and Liutprand wrote in the tenth century, so the finer points rest on later testimony. [1] [3]

The trial is generally presumed to have been politically motivated, during a period of instability in Italy. The accusations echoed an earlier quarrel between Formosus and Pope John VIII in the 870s. Formosus had also crowned Lambert of Spoleto in 892 and later invited the Carolingian Arnulf of Carinthia to Italy, crowning him emperor in 896. [1]

Until the early twentieth century, the dominant view was that Formosus was always pro-Carolingian, that his crowning of Lambert was coerced, and that Lambert and his mother Angiltrude forced Stephen to hold the synod as revenge. Joseph Duhr argued against this in 1932, pointing out that Lambert attended the 898 Council of Ravenna, which revoked the synod's decrees with his approval. Duhr asked how Pope John IX could have raised the matter before the supposedly guilty parties. Girolamo Arnaldi agreed that Formosus was not exclusively pro-Carolingian and proposed that Guy IV of Spoleto, who entered Rome with Lambert and Angiltrude in January 897, provided the impetus. The older view is now considered obsolete. [1]

The spectacle turned Roman opinion against Stephen. He was deposed and imprisoned, and was strangled in prison in July or August 897. In December 897, Pope Theodore II convened a synod that annulled the Cadaver Synod and ordered Formosus reburied in St. Peter's in pontifical vestments. John IX nullified it again in 898 at synods in Rome and Ravenna, which ordered the acta destroyed and prohibited any trial of a corpse in the future. Pope Sergius III later nullified John IX's synod, reinstating the judgments against Formosus, so the question stayed unsettled for years. [1] [4]