Page:The Church, by John Huss.pdf/20

xvi historical data upon the Chronicles of Ranulph Higden, Martinus Polonus, and Rudolph Glaber.

Repeatedly did Huss return to the list of popes heretical and popes flagitious. The rudest layman, a woman, a heretic, yea antichrist himself may be a pope. But in none of these lists does the name of Honorius I appear, the pontiff on whose case Bishop Hefele, in 1870, rested the argument against the doctrine of papal infallibility.

Among the heretical popes Huss included Boniface VIII and Clement VII of the fourteenth century and, as more recent cases of papal errors, he cited the acts of Boniface IX setting aside Wenzel as king of the Romans and Sigismund as king of Hungary. During his trial Huss had another instance at hand of a disreputable pontiff in John XXIII, accepted by almost the whole of Western Christendom and then deposed for crimes and iniquities unspeakable. Huss also recalled that Gregory XII and Benedict XIII were pronounced heretics by the council of Pisa.

But the case on which Huss laid most stress was the papissa Agnes who, according to the universal opinion of his time, occupied under the name of John VIII the papal office for more than two years. Gerson used her as a proof that it is possible for the church to err. It was monstrous, so Huss thought, for a female to rule Christendom, and such a female—a woman of unsavory repute before she was made pope and revealing her sex by the sudden birth of a child on one of the streets of the holy city.