Permanently Deleted
Papal Numberwang
…the heck is an antipope, and does he have special abilities?
An important tool for medieval European power struggles, at a time when state & church worked hand in hand, especially with the protestants being generally annoying toward the catholic involvement with the state.
And no, though that would’ve been cool
Most antipopes were a thing before :posting: happened. Post-Luther, if you disagreed with Rome, you could just become protestant and start your own state religion that preached whatever was convenient for your kingdom. So there wasn’t really a need for antipopes anymore.
There were still political struggles between catholicism and secular rulers, in fact Germany had one at the end of the 19th century were the Kaiser went as far as locking up unruly priests, but that was not a struggle between political actors on equal footing, it was more of a culture war thing - it was even called the Kulturkampf, and catholics as a social group were framed as disloyal to the crown due to their “transmontane” allegiances (“transmontane” meaning “beyond the mountains”, as Rome is located beyond the Alps when viewed from Germany). It’s worth noting that many German catholics at the time were either working class people with Polish roots who made up large numbers of the early proletarian class in the Ruhr area and were not as fully integrated into German society as they were just one or two generations later, or citizens of southern German states with seperatist leanings like Bavaria which have always struggled with federal authorities in Germany and continue to do so until this day. But what i’m getting at is, there was no need to install an antipope in Cologne because of that, as the pope didn’t have that much influence anymore to make that necessary.
can you imagine being John XXI and realising too late that you fucked up and counted XIV twice but now it’s too late to go back in front of everyone and go ‘woopsie’
honestly i think that’s amazing and we shouldn’t try to correct it