Noble Blood - The Thrift-Shop Pope

Episode Date: October 24, 2023

After Vatican II, many traditionalist Catholics around the world decided that the heresies of the Pope meant that the papal throne was actually empty. For one member of that group, the only solution was to fill the position himself.Support Noble Blood:— Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon— Merch!— Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHart Podcast presents soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. Yeah. This is my best friend, Janet. Hey. And we have been joined at the hips since high school.

Absolutely. A redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips. This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drinks. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? They hit a bogo. Well, then you got them. Listen to soccer moms on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. On April 20, 2003, Elon Musk unverified the Pope. I bet that was a sentence you never thought you'd hear on this podcast. Musk, the eccentric billionaire who bought the website formerly known as Twitter, seemingly for the laughs, had changed his policy on verification. Previously, verification had been subject to a rigorous evaluation to, you know, verify the accounts of public figures and organizations. But now the coveted blue check was available to anyone with $8 a month to spare. The end result was that, at least temporarily, a blue check mark for public figures and organizations

no longer conferred any meaningful marker of identity. Those unwilling to pay for it, like Pope Francis, were simply unceremoniously stripped of their blue check. If you were, like me, someone who often found yourself on the history nerd side of Twitter, you might have noticed a couple of odd terms trending as the verification mayhem unfolded, namely Avignon and Western Shism. In the early 14th century, Pope Clement V had moved his court from Rome to Avignon in what is now France. The papacy would remain there unchallenged for over 70 years and through six more popes, until Gregory the 11th moved his court back to Rome in 1376.

What does this have to do with Elon Musk, you ask? The answer lies in a third trending term, anti-Pope. When Gregory the 11th died in 1378, the College of Cardinals in Rome set about their usual business of electing a new pope, which they did, Urban the 6th. But some cardinals opposed the move from Avignon back to Rome. So they elected a pope of their own in Avignon,

who would become known as the anti-pope Clement the seventh, though they just called him Pope Clement the seventh. A total of three antipopes would be elected and reign from Avignon, and two more from Pisa. From June 1409 to May 1415, there were popes in all three cities, each believing wholeheartedly that he alone was the world's singular direct line to God. Twitter historians argued, mostly jokingly,

that Musk's decision to unverify Pope Francis was akin to a modern-day Western schism. With the Pope in Rome stripped of the mark that made it clear he was the one and only Pope, Musk was leaving the door open for someone else to claim the papal throne, at least on Twitter. The brief unverification of Pope Francis was many things, a technological oversight, a notable day in Twitter's slow downfall, an opportunity to laugh, perhaps nervously, at the idea of Elon Musk accidentally taking control of the Catholic Church. but it was not, in fact, a crisis in the Vatican. The papal experts of Twitter.com, however, were quick to point out that a Twitter verification schism, funny as it was, would not have even given us the first modern Antipope.

In the last 60 or so years, at least 10 men have claimed the Holy See, each girded by a variable number of followers, but an equally fervent belief in the righteousness of their pontificate. Most of these were clergy associated with specific offshoot of the Catholic Church before they claimed an appointment to the papal throne. But Twitter that day was almost entirely focused on a man named David Bowden, a former real estate agent and furniture maker, originally from Oklahoma, who, in the year of Our Lord 1990, decided that he was the only one who could lead the church in the right direction. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. In order for any religious organization to endure, it has to strike a delicate, mysterious balance between holding on to its

central tenets and traditions and updating itself as the world around it, inevitable. changes. In January 1959, when Pope John the 23rd announced his intention to convene a second Vatican Council, the world had been irrevocably changed by the horrors of the world wars, by the trepidation of the rebuilding and globalization that followed, and by the tension that came with the brewing Cold War. We're about to get into some complicated religious bureaucracy, So before we get any further, I figure it would be helpful to explain some terms. The Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, as it's often called, was an ecumenical council, which is the term they used to describe a gathering of all bishops and other church authorities,

during which they consider and rule on questions of doctrine, administration, church practice, and the like. Despite its name, Vatican II was not the second ever ecumenical council, just the second to take place in the Vatican City. There have been 27 ecumenical councils in total, dating all the way back to the 4th century CE, with different sects of Christianity, accepting the conclusions of some and not others, as they saw fit. The Catholic Church accepts 21 of them. When Pope John called the Ecumenical Council that would be known as Vatican 2, there had not been an ecumenical council in nearly 100 years since the first Vatican Council had concluded in 1870. It took roughly three years to prepare for the second Vatican Council.

Before putting together the Council, the Vatican first needed to come. conduct an evaluation of the Catholic world, from bishops to the faculty of Catholic universities. Thousands of individuals and institutions replied with their wishes for the future of the church, and immediately the conflict was clear. This ecumenical council would be divided between those who believed it was the duty of the church to remain steadfast, to resist change, because to change would be to give in to the pressure from an increasingly secularized world, and those who believed equally strongly that change was necessary for the church to continue to thrive in that world. The council opened on October 11, 1962, and met in four sessions over the course of a little

over three years. Pope John the 23rd died in 1963. So the final, three sessions were overseen by his successor, Paul the 6th. He closed the council on December 8th, 1965. Vatican 2 is remembered as the most significant event in the history of the Catholic Church since the Reformation. It enacted change to an extent unseen in the church's history, and on a global scale not possible in prior centuries. To read out and explain every time, every time, change would take too much of our time, but some changes that might stand out. This was the moment the church stopped conducting liturgy in Latin, and when priests began to be allowed to preach facing the congregation. For the first time in hundreds of years, lay people were widely

allowed to take communion under both kinds. That is, they could receive both consecrated bread and the wine that previously had been limited to members of the clergy. Of course, these were only a few of many changes, some of which went to matters of much greater importance to the doctrine than did the issue of in which direction a priest could stand. But it's hard to understate how important a shift Vatican II was for the Catholic world and how divisive. The conclusion of the second day,

Vatican Council and all the change that accompanied it did little to quell the dissension that had been bubbling over the past several years, if not longer. Many people, both lay and clergy, continue to believe steadfastly in traditionalist Catholicism, and some went so far as to espouse the belief that by changing the church and its practices, Pope John the 13th, committed heresies that effectively nullified his 1958 appointment to the papacy. This belief became known as sedivacantism, coming from the Latin phrase, Cedevacante, meaning with the seat being empty. The phrase was generally used to indicate the interregnal period of the papacy,

after one pope had died, but before a new one was elected. The set of a cantist's adoption of the papacy, the term went to their central claim, that the nullification of Pope John's appointment meant that, in fact, the Holy See had remained vacant since 1958. But what do you do when you believe the Holy Sea to be vacant, but the Vatican doesn't agree? Some set of acantists saw an obvious solution to the problem of the empty papal throne, to take matters into their own hands. and elect a pope themselves. David Bodden's life started out

about as unremarkably as a life can start out for someone who would later claim to be the rightful pope for decades. David was born in 1959, the very year Pope John the 13th called for an ecumenical council in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. His parents, Kenneth and Clara,

also known as Tickey, Bodden, were devout conservative Catholics, and Vatican II, which concluded when David was only six years old, felt like a betrayal of their faith. The result was a traditionalist upbringing for David and his brother Brian that sowed the seeds of set of vacantism. Eventually, the Baden family became involved with the Society of Saint Pius X, an international fraternity of traditionalist Catholic priests, which was founded in 1970 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who had been one of the leading clerical voices of opposition during Vatican II. The society acknowledged the Pope in Rome,

but took enough issue with the reforms of Vatican II that it was still considered schismatic by the Vatican. David Bodden entered. the Society's Seminary in 1977, moving to Econ, Switzerland to begin his spiritual training before transferring to a location in Michigan later that year. By the time David was dismissed from the seminary in 1978, it's possible he had heard of someone named Clemente Dominguez I. Gomez. Known to his followers as Pope Gregory the 17th, Gomez was a controversial Spanish bishop who proclaimed that Christ had come to him in a series of visions,

promising that he would be Pope and return the church to its former glory. Gomez cobbled together his own College of Cardinals and crowned himself on August 15, 1978, in Seville, Spain, founding what would become known as the Pomerian Christian Church. David Bauden couldn't have been particularly satisfied by that papal alternative. The Palmarian Christian Church has long been widely considered something of a cult. But that would have been the first significant example in David's lifetime of some kind of conclavist-ad adjacent movement. A little bit more messy theology, there are several different distinct kinds of antipopes. And the differences really boil down to how those antipopes came into their claims.

Many modern antipopes simply claim that God told them that they were pope. Such was the case in the Apostles of Infinite Love, an early traditionalist Catholic movement that began in the 30s, but picked up some momentum following Vatican II. Its first two popes claimed that they had been mystically made so, without any need for an election or outside consideration. That's not entirely dissimilar to what Dominguez E Gomez did, and that would become clear that he didn't actually care much for the practice of electing a pope by conclave,

when in 1995 he suppressed the cardinalet and single-handedly appointed his own successor. But in the decades since Vatican II, many had come to, genuinely believe that although the throne of St. Peter was vacant, the process by which a Pope was chosen was still important. One needed a conclave to elect a new head of church. These people became known as conclavists, espousing the belief that not only was a conclave important, but that one could or even should convene their own conclave to elect a rightful hope outside of the Vatican. Despite David's dismissal from the seminary, which he maintained was due to infighting in

the institution rather than any wrongdoing on his part, David Bodden initially remained loyal to the Society of St. Pius X. The Bodden family moved to St. Mary's, Kansas, where the Society ran St. Mary's Academy and College. David's brother Brian Bauden attended school there, and David took a job hoping to prove himself worthy of readmission to the seminary. But in 1981, several years and a failed seminary application later, David became disillusioned by the Society of St. Pius X, and he struck out on his own, with his family quickly following suit. Over the next few years, the Boddans became drawn to the Cetivacantist movement, and soon they believed firmly that every pope after Pius X was a heretic unfit for the papal throne. Because the society of St. Pius X, though traditionalist, still acknowledged the Pope in Rome,

who by this time was John Paul II, the Baudens deemed that society heretical too. As David continued to study under his own guidance and become more deeply involved with the set of a cantist movement, or at least as involved as one could be without being ordained, he began to reach a new conclusion that perhaps there was a solution to the problem of the empty papal throne, and before long another conclusion that perhaps he was the one to fill it. In 1987, David began campaigning for lack of a better word. According to his writings, which he uploaded to the online e-book service Scribbed, it was in September of that year that he received a letter that would solidify his conviction

that a new pope must be elected. The letter was otherwise unspecified, but he claimed that it included a quote from what he described as the only Vatican Council, that is the first Vatican Council, which stated that St. Peter, quote, would have perpetual successors in the papacy until the end of time, end quote. Apparently from that letter, David immediately knew that a new Pope must somehow be elected, and he decided to take up the cause personally. Around this time, David connected with Teresa Stanfill Ben. a Denver-based woman who shared his convictions around the state of the Catholic Church and the need to call a conclave.

Together, the two of them wrote a book, straightforwardly titled, Will the Catholic Church Survive the 20th Century? The book laid out numerous objections to Vatican II and their thoughts on how the church might be saved. One such thought stands out. because the actual college remained faithful to someone who they believed was a false pope, David and Teresa championed an apparent precedent within the Catholic Church for the election of a pope by, quote, true Catholics, that is, laypeople, instead of the usual college of cardinals, which generally consists of senior clerical officials in the Vatican.

With the path forward finally clear, David began planning to hold a papal election. He reportedly sent over 200 copies of his and Teresa's book to every set of a cantist priest and set of a cantist publication he could get a hold of, hoping to inflate the number of voters at the election and thereby its legitimacy. He was hopeful that at least one ordained priest would come and vote in his homespun papal election. A few, he said, expressed interest. But ultimately, in the end, none came. After months of planning and a handful of delays, putting together a papal election on your own is a logistical challenge after all, the big day finally rolled around on July 16th, 19th,

A day, which David would later note, was serendipitously also the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a liturgical feast which had come under some scrutiny from the Vatican, following Vatican 2. With no parish or church to speak of, David Bowden convened the conclave in the thrift store his family owned in Bellevue, Kansas. Out of second-hand furniture, the conclave made the best approximation they could of a chapel, homemade pews padded with leopard print cushions, a wicker papal throne, all atop some classic 90s shag carpeting. The conclave was composed of six lay believers, including Teresa Stanfield Benz, Kennett and Tickey Bowden, David's parents, and David himself,

along with a couple who traveled from Michigan for the occasion. It only took one round of voting by secret ballot before it was decided. David Bowden would fill the papal throne that had, according to the conclave, been vacant for over 30 years since Pius X-12th died the year before David's birth. The newly crowned pope chose the name Michael I, after St. Michael the Archangel. who was said to have battled the devil himself and defended the faith against heresy. In a staticy, shaky, blurry video taken on the day of the election, the videographer, presumably David's father, shows David kneeling before their homemade altar

in a white skull cap, a white stole with crosses on it, and a robe that looked like it may have once been a tablecloth. In a charming, somewhat mid-Atlantic accent, David's father Kenneth declares, Habemus Popham, we have a Pope. And then, like all proud dads have done since the invention of the video camera, he struggles to figure out how to zoom in on the new leader of his faith. A farmhouse for a palace, an attic for a chapel, a pickup truck for a Pope-Mobile.

In 2011, an independent... dependent documentary was made about Pope Michael, detailing his rise to the thrift shop throne and the small but fervent movement that he had gathered around him. The film offers an intimate portrait of Pope Michael that one could never dream of getting for, say, Pope Francis. We see him eating dinner at home in Kansas with his mother, Tickey, and his seminarian and papal secretary, Phil Friedel. a young man from Chicago who had left a girlfriend and an engineering education behind after corresponding with Pope Michael and feeling called to his church. We see the Christmas lights Michael used to decorate his workspace slash chapel in his mother's attic,

the old computer he used to email with his followers and update his website, and the Aviator Sunny's off-white trench coat combo. he wore when he ran errands. We also hear about the struggles Pope Michael has faced over the years. A primary problem was that he was unordained for the first 21 years of his reign. He never did gain acceptance to a seminary after his dismissal in 1978, and he couldn't very well do so while both rejecting the Vatican and claiming to already be Pope. But his technically lay status meant that he could not perform any of the traditional duties of a pope or a priest for that matter.

That meant, among other things, that he could not offer Mass. So in order to preach his gospel and grow his following, Pope Michael turned to the newly minted Internet and started a blog, which he called Vatican in exile. He used it to maintain contact with his followers, who remained small in number, but who were based around the world. He also used it to solicit new followers to criticize the Vatican and to try to combat those who would seek to delegitimize his reign. For the entirety of Michael's reign, his blog and the Internet in general would be the primary tool of the papacy. I feel like I need to mention now, if you found yourself charmed by David's quirky underdog story, we cannot forget that Pope Michael fancied himself a traditionalist Catholic Pope.

His blog, along with his other writings, was full of vitriol against queer and trans people, it was full of anti-choice tirades, and particularly after COVID hit, anti-vaccine misinformation. In 2011, Pope Michael claimed to finally have been ordained and consecrated as a bishop by Bishop Robert Biarnison, who was part of the, quote, independent Catholic movement that saw clergy and laity break away from Rome and ordain and consecrate clergy without Vatican approval. It was an ordination that would never have stood up to scrutiny by church officials, but it should be clear by now how little that would have mattered to Michael. Soon after, Michael wrote and published another book titled 54 Years That Changed the Catholic Church, 1958 to 2012, in which he retold his own story and espoused his beliefs on a wide range of doctrinal issues

and perceived heresies and sins by the Church in the Vatican, not to mention the secular world at large. The other great struggle of Pope Michael's reign, perhaps unsurprisingly, was near constant criticism. He dealt with pushback not only from modern Catholics, but also from his fellow set of acantists, and even from former supporters and members of his own family. Teresa Stanfield-Benz, who had made up one-sixth of Michael's papal conclave, had denounced his papacy as a cult of personality several years prior to the 2011

documentary, including him on her list of anti-popes on her blog. David's own brother, Brian Bodden, had been shocked by the election itself and was quoted in the Miami Herald shortly after the election

saying, Oh my God, no, I don't know what to think. I don't follow the church in Rome. I don't go around electing popes either. We don't hear much about Brian after Pope Michael's election. From outside his circle, Pope Michael received ridicule from pro-Vatican Catholics, from non-Catholics, and of course from supporters of other anti-Popes. From a mixture of these he received his many nicknames, the junk store pope, the second-hand pope, and the thrift shop.

Pope, among others. He also claimed to have received many threats over the years, with one particularly colorful one promising to cut out his tongue and ship it to then-Pope John Paul II. The ridicule never seemed to bother Michael much. In one interview, he quipped, quote, they called Jesus a kook too, though he did file a police report after that tongue threat. In July 22, the Vatican in exile Twitter account shared that Pope Michael had been admitted to a hospital in Kansas City, Missouri for emergency surgery and was in a coma. He never recovered and died on August 2, 2002, at the age of 63. In another interview released shortly after his death, he claimed that his constant efforts online, had earned his church over 100 loyal members.

David Bodden's death did not make the waves one might expect from the death of a pope. His obituary is a curious testament to the precariousness of his position. He was named only as Father David Bowden, and his obituary never explicitly mentioned his claim to the papacy, naming him instead as a member of the St. Helens Catholic Mission Church in Topeka. It also gave him the titles of President of the Oakland Neighborhood Improvement Association and member of the Citizen Advisory Committee. Nevertheless, the obituary did note that he would be lying in state at St. Helens

in honor not afforded to just anyone, not even regular, quote, quote, priests. In death as in life, David embodied many of the tensions and contradictions that defined the Catholic world after Vatican II. The papacy in the Vatican, as we all know, continued on after Pope Michael's death, with Francis and the Cardinals and the bishops, and most of the world ignoring him, as they always had. But in the eyes of somewhere between 30 and 100 believers, the throne of St. Peter was vacant once again. That's the story of David Bodden's peculiar and contested papacy, but stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear about how his followers have continued his mission.

Readers Katie's finalists, publicists, we have an incredible new episode this week for you guys. We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode. They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. Video on demand. This guy's... 2 a.m. Whatever time it is. Lizzie McGuire. And I'm like...

Wild. A wild batch you were with. It was like a first closet moment from me where I was like... You're like, I don't feel like she's hot. Like the rest of that. No, no, no. I was like, she's beautiful. But I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are. I'm not like...

But listen to Los Calderistas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcast. Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists. We have an incredible. new episode this week for you guys. We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode. They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. Video on Demand. This guy's... 2 a.m. Lissie McGuire.

And I'm like... A wild batch you were with. It was like a first closet moment from me where I was like... You're like, I don't feel like she's hot, like the rest of that. No, no, no. I was like, she's beautiful. But I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are. I'm not like... But listen to Los Cal Jeristas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or

whenever you get your podcast. Normally here at Noble Blood, our episodes focus on a past, not always distant, but usually far back enough that by the time we press record, there aren't any updates. As in everything, David Bowden's story is a bit of an anomaly. His church never had very many followers, but he had some. And they have continued to try to honor his legacy and hold his church together in the time since his death. While this episode was being written in July 2023, they did so by doing exactly

what Pope Michael would have wanted, by convening a conclave and electing a new pope. Their conclave began on July 25, 2023. The Vatican in Exile newsletter reported the venue as being in Vienna, Austria, but several news outlets claimed the event took place in Kansas. The conclave consisted of two American priests and two bishops. The sessions of the conclave were chaired by Pope Michael's archbishop,

Rojelia Martinez, who had brought his pope's movement to his home parish in the Philippines. It's unclear whether Martinez was counted among those in the conclave, or whether his presence brought their number up to five. This new conclave elected an unnamed priest as their new pope rather quickly, but he didn't pick up the phone when they called to tell him he was the new pope. Martinez chose to give him a 48-hour grace period to accept the papacy, during which said priest did eventually call them back, but unfortunately rejected the position.

Just as their counterparts in the Vatican would have done, the conclave got back to work to elect someone else. And just like David Bowden did before him, on July 29, 2023, Roelho Martinez chaired the session that saw a handful of people, presumably including himself, elect him to the papacy. News outlets reported that his return to the Philippines as Pope, was celebrated with a motorcade and growing number of fervent followers, not to mention threats of excommunication from local Vatican officials, though Pope Francis has yet to acknowledge his competitor in any way.

Since Martinez's election, he has taken up the task of picking up where David Bowden left off, leading his faithful, building his following, and raging against the Vatican and its perceived heresies. And the pontifical name he chose? That would be His Holiness, Pope Michael II. Noble Blood is a production of I-Heart Radio, and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is created and hosted by me, Dana Schwartz,

with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and Rima Il Kali, with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick.

For more podcasts from IHartRadio, visit the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHart Podcast presents soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. Yeah. This is my best friend Janet. Hey.

And we have been joined at the hips since high school. Absolutely. A redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips. This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drinks. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? Oh, they hit a bogo.

Well, then you got them. Listen to soccer moms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human