What could go wrong?

I expected to end up at jt's blog, but googling it from work actually took me directly to a Wikipedia article on the saeculum obscurum.

my assumption was that the pornocracy was Austin shorthand and not, you know, the actual name of something.

how about that.

Not much to say. A bunch of lecherous bad guys became pope. A couple of folks tried to fix it without a lot of success. Probably one of the greatest testaments to the Church's claim of divine institution. If it was anything other than that, 150 years of that kind of management would have destroyed it.

didn't we talk once about the Holy Spirit guiding the college of cardinals in their selection of men who, while perhaps some were of questionable motivation, would become so moved by the office or guided by the Holy Spirit as to protect it from such sinful occupation?

The Holy Spirit guides the conclave but they don't necessarily have to listen.

On the other bit, the theory is that the Pope can never be a heretic, with Vigilius usually cited as the example. He was a Monophysite (or at least very sympathetic to them) but became orthodox upon his election. An alternative to this theory is that God would use other means to keep the Pope from binding the Church to heresy, including killing him which was the subject of an absurd amount of controversy in a past PBR thread.

Notice that this doesn't apply to the Pope being sinful. Just a heretic.

those aren't Church mistakes (or, things the church has done wrong) those are human sins, right?

how is an incident of a papal sin an example of a Church mistake?

(you first mentioned the pornocracy in saying, I think, "there are plenty of things the chuch has done wrong." I'm operating off of base memory here, so apologies if I've misconstrued anything).

papal indiscretions. The whole Roman hierarchy had basically been hijacked by a clan of whores. Sure, the sins of the individual guys were bad, but the decay that came out of it without anyone really putting up a fight was the mistake I was talking about. I would consider that as a mistake by the Church.

To clarify, I admittedly used terms like "mistake" and "screwups" intentionally in the prior thread, as opposed to the term "sin." The Church, as the Mystical Body of Christ, can't sin of itself.

thank you for your insight!

Deadwood blows

You were right, but Jiminy Cricket that was a train wreck.