Legend holds that in the heat of the wars of orthodoxy
Heads were caged and hung with bodies along monastery walls
The priests and the monks of war, the cult of necro-idolaters
Vultures tearing eyes from sockets and picking flesh from bone
Graveyards were emptied out, overturned, the bodies put on trial
Those unrecognized to the Church hung, dissected, and defiled
Stripped of dignity and reburied in a nameless, unmarked grave
Plenitudo potestatis: Extra ecclesiam nulla salus
He who escapes our judgment in life
He will still face our judgment in death
He who is buried with all solemn rites
He will be placed in the court of death
Pope Stephen VI convened the Cadavar Synod in 897 AD
The corpse of Pope Formosus disinterred for a posthumous trial
Damnatio Memoriae was the guilty verdict decreed
The priests stripped him, removed his fingers, disposed in a river
Pope Sergius III found and exhumed Formosus again for retrial
This time he would be beheaded and his body dismembered
Re-buried for only three days in an unmarked stranger's grave
Until dragged through the streets and tied with weights and thrown into the Tiber
He who escapes our judgment in life
He will still face our judgment in death
He who is buried with all solemn rites
He will be placed in the court of death
The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1752
Thousands massacred in Paris to purge heresy from France
Admiral Coligny of the Huguenots beheaded and shipped to Rome
Where Pope Gregory XIII condemned the head in a celebratory mass

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