NO NEED FOR HYSTERIA ABOUT TODAY'S PAPACY

The papal conclave of 1492 and the pope that got elected, Pope Alexander VI, perhaps one of the most corrupt popes ever and I mean ever, saw no Second Coming of Christ and the Church merrily progressing to the Council of Trent almost 200 years later. So perspective is always welcomed in papal history and hysteria!

From Wikipedia: Papal conclave, 1492

There was change in the constitution of the College of Cardinals during the course of the fifteenth century-especially under Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII. Of the twenty-seven cardinals alive in the closing months of the reign of Innocent VIII no fewer than ten were cardinal-nephews, eight were crown nominees, four were Roman nobles and one other had been given the cardinalate in recompense for his family's service to the Holy See; only four were able career churchmen.^[5]

On the death of Pope Innocent VIII on 25 July 1492, the three likely candidates for the Papacy were the sixty-seven year old Borgia,^[5] seen as an independent candidate, Ascanio Sforza for the Milanese, and Giuliano della Rovere seen as a pro-French candidate. It was rumoured but not substantiated that Borgia succeeded in buying the largest number of votes and Sforza, in particular, was bribed with four mule-loads of silver.^[11] Although this was portrayed in the Showtime TV series The Borgias (2011) it is a popular falsehood about Pope Alexander. Mallett shows that Borgia was in the lead from the start and that the rumours of bribery began after the election with the distribution of benefices; Sforza and della Rovere were just as willing and able to bribe as anyone else.^[12] The benefices and offices granted to Sforza, moreover, would be worth considerably more than four mule-loads of silver. Johann Burchard, the conclave's master of ceremonies and a leading figure of the papal household under several popes, recorded in his diary that the 1492 conclave was a particularly expensive campaign. Della Rovere was bankrolled to the cost of 200,000 gold ducats by King Charles VIII of France, with another 100,000 supplied by the Republic of Genoa.^[13] Borgia was elected on 11 August 1492, assuming the name of Alexander VI (due to confusion about the status of Pope Alexander V elected by the Council of Pisa).

In contrast to the preceding pontificate, Pope Alexander VI adhered initially to strict administration of justice and orderly government. Before long, he began endowing his relatives at the church's and at his neighbours' expense. Cesare Borgia, his son, while a youth of seventeen and a student at Pisa, was made Archbishop of Valencia, and Giovanni Borgia inherited the Spanish Dukedom of Gandia, the Borgias' ancestral home in Spain. For the Duke of Gandia and for Gioffre, also known as Goffredo, the Pope proposed to carve fiefs out of the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples. Among the fiefs destined for the duke of Gandia were Cerveteri and Anguillara, lately acquired by Virginio Orsini, head of that powerful house. This policy brought Ferdinand I, King of Naples, into conflict with Pope Alexander VI, who was also opposed by Cardinal della Rovere, whose candidature for the papacy had been backed by Ferdinand. Della Rovere fortified himself in his bishopric of Ostia at the Tiber's mouth as Pope Alexander VI formed a league against Naples (25 April 1493) and prepared for war.^[

My Final Comment: Things may be disconcerting today. But hey, these are great today when one looks at the history of things and how the Holy Spirit sees us through!