popedom

It was at this point that Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams, "I join you therefore in sincere congratulations that this den of the priesthood is at length broken up, and that a protestant popedom is no longer to disgrace the American history and character."

To the ambitious it was the portal to bishoprics, and, after the monk St. Gregory, not unfrequently to the Popedom.

From the earliest period a long succession of Councils as well as such men as St. Boniface, St. Gregory the Great, St. Peter Damiani, St. Dunstan, St. Anselm, Hildebrand and his successors in the Popedom, denounced priestly marriage or concubinage as an atrocious crime, and the habitual life of the priests was, in theory at least, generally recognised as a life of sin.

The exterior and interior of the building appear to me more like an apotheosis of the popedom than a glorification of Christianity and its doctrine.

At this time there was a vacancy in the popedom, and the brothers remained in Venice two years before it was filled.