When the Church Had Three Popes

In any governing body, you run into a problem with any one person having ultimate authority. What do you do with an evil, incompetent, or otherwise disliked ruler? With monarchies, there's nothing to be done outside of all-out war. In modern governments, there are built-in systems to remove elected officials. But in the Catholic Church, you have the pope and his ultimate authority, but it's an elected position, and the cardinals have some say about who is qualified. These two ideas butted up against each other in the 14th century. The cardinals could elect a pope, but whether they can remove one against his will was another question. So the church ended up with three different popes! There was Urban VI in Rome, Clement VII in Avignon, and John XXII in Pisa. By the time John was named Pope, the title in Rome and Avignon had been passed to others, making the succession even more confusing. The story is simplified for modern audiences in this TED-Ed lesson from Joëlle Rollo-Koster. -via Nag on the Lake