Why was there the antipope?

[Kts1816]

Antipope?
Give explanation and detailes please

 

[TK421]

This doesn’t necessarily involve schism or obstinacy to the bitter end btw. There is an antipope who is also a saint (St Hippolytus), at least via the informal process of sainthood in early centuries.

Settling matters in Rome hasn’t always been easy.

The tale behind the two, Sts Hippolytus and Pontian, is actually quite interesting:

The Antipope Who Became a Saint | Catholic Answers Magazine

 

[Sir2v4]

I only have a sketchy idea of how the Church came to have not one but two anti-popes at the same time. It seemed to come about because they were not elected in the correct manner, which is to say if I remember correctly, that these were not elected by all the eligible papal electors. They were not valid elections.

Of course, that only points to what you might call “politics” in the Church, of some sort.

 

[po18guy]

Concupiscence. Ego. Internal squabbling. Envy. Power struggles. Back stabbing. Politics. In short, almost every negative human trait.

As they say, the truth will out. It was solved.

 

[Zaccheus]

Why was there an antipope?

Well, why did the United States have a Civil War? Why do nations sometimes have rebellions?

 

[CRM_Brother]

The turmoil which caused the Western Schism out of which Antipopes rose began in 1309 when Pope Clement V was elected. The papacy and the King of France had been in a political deadlock for years and Clement, a Frenchman, sought to alleviate this. He decided not to move to Rome after being elected Pope and instead set up his papal court in Avignon, in the southeastern corner of what is now France, to appease the tensions and promote better political dialogue. Until 1376, Clement and his successors stayed in Avignon until Pope Gregory XI returned to Rome at the requests of St. Catherine of Sienna. During the Avignon Papacy, however, an extremely large number of French cardinals were elevated and the Church in Rome fell into disrepair. After the death of Gregory, the Cardinals convened and subsequently came to a deadlock. The conclave, held in Santa Maria in Ariacoeli in the center of Rome on the Capitoline hill, went on so long that the people of Rome rioted, wanting a decision on the new pope. The city guard began to ring all the bells in the city to try and communicate the gravity of the situation to the Cardinals inside the church who were officially forbidden from having external contact. The cardinals, fearing that the city was under attack, quickly came to a compromise and elected the Italian Pope Urban VI. The French cardinals, after learning that Rome wasn’t under attack from a foreign power, quickly fled back to Avignon, where they declared the conclave invalid because they felt that they had been coerced into electing Urban. They elected Robert of Geneva as an Antipope and the succession carried the schism onward for forty-one years until a Council was convened and Martin V was elected. During this time, the various factions of dissent splintered and there were times when you had two different antipopes in addition to the actual pope. There were a few antipopes before the Western Schism, but they were generally created by personal factions and quickly dismissed. It was only in the Western Schism that whole nations gave their fealty to one pope over the other.