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Legend holds that in the heat of the wars of orthodoxy

Heads were caged and hung with bodies along monastery walls

The priests and the monks of war, the cult of necro-idolaters

Vultures tearing eyes from sockets and picking flesh from bone

Graveyards were emptied out, overturned, the bodies put on trial

Those unrecognized to the Church hung, dissected, and defiled

Stripped of dignity and reburied in a nameless, unmarked grave

Plenitudo potestatis: Extra ecclesiam nulla salus

He who escapes our judgment in life

He will still face our judgment in death

He who is buried with all solemn rites

He will be placed in the court of death

Pope Stephen VI convened the Cadavar Synod in 897 AD

The corpse of Pope Formosus disinterred for a posthumous trial

Damnatio Memoriae was the guilty verdict decreed

The priests stripped him, removed his fingers, disposed in a river

Pope Sergius III found and exhumed Formosus again for retrial

This time he would be beheaded and his body dismembered

Re-buried for only three days in an unmarked stranger's grave

Until dragged through the streets and tied with weights and thrown into the Tiber

He who escapes our judgment in life

He will still face our judgment in death

He who is buried with all solemn rites

He will be placed in the court of death

The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1752

Thousands massacred in Paris to purge heresy from France

Admiral Coligny of the Huguenots beheaded and shipped to Rome

Where Pope Gregory XIII condemned the head in a celebratory mass