Napoleon personally arrests Pope Pius the Seventh and drags him into five years of captivity. The emperor who crowned himself demonstrates that papal spiritual claims provide no protection against military force when imperial ambitions are at stake.

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The Catholic Church strikes back with the Council of Trent, militant Jesuit shock troops, and a brutal Inquisition. The Counter-Reformation saves papal Christianity from Protestant conquest but transforms the church into a centralized, authoritarian empire.

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Calvin transforms Geneva into a theocratic police state while Henry the Eighth breaks England away from Rome to solve his marriage problems. Protestant ideas explode across Europe like wildfire, consuming the religious unity that had defined medieval Christendom.

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Martin Luther's hammer blows against a church door in Wittenberg echo across Europe, shattering the Catholic monopoly on Christianity forever. The German monk's challenge to papal authority ignites the Protestant Reformation and splits Western Christianity permanently.

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Alexander the Sixth transforms the Vatican into a criminal enterprise run by his murderous children Cesare and Lucrezia. Orgies in the papal apartments, systematic poisoning of enemies, and the sale of church offices turn the throne of Saint Peter into the seat of a Renaissance crime family.

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Julius the Second trades his papal robes for armor and personally leads armies into battle. The pope who commissioned Michelangelo also commanded cannons, proving that Renaissance papal power meant wielding both sword and paintbrush in pursuit of territorial conquest and artistic glory.

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In 955, eighteen-year-old Octavian became Pope John XII, the grandson of the notorious Marozia and the ultimate product of the corrupt Pornocracy system. Contemporary sources describe a pope who turned the Lateran Palace into a brothel, ordained bishops for money, and allegedly toasted the devil while gambling. This episode examines the most scandalous pope in history and the dramatic confrontation with Holy Roman Emperor Otto I that would finally break the cycle of corruption plaguing the papacy.

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The Cadaver Synod of 897, where Pope Stephen VI put his predecessor's rotting corpse on trial, marked the beginning of the most corrupt period in papal history. For the next sixty years, the papal office became a prize fought over by Roman aristocratic families through murder, seduction, and betrayal. This episode explores the era when powerful women like Theodora and Marozia used sex and violence to control the successors of Saint Peter, transforming spiritual leadership into hereditary political property.

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Carlo Acutis, the 15-year-old computer prodigy known as “God’s influencer,” has been canonized in Rome as the Catholic Church’s first millennial saint. Also, hundreds of LGBTQ Catholics joined a historic Jubilee pilgrimage through the Holy Door at St. Peter’s Basilica, marking a dramatic shift from decades past. And Pope Leo taps Chicago’s own Art Smith and Phil Stefani to launch a farm-to-table restaurant at the Papal Villas of Castel Gandolfo.

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In 778, Pope Adrian I made a remarkable historical claim in a letter to Charlemagne, referencing how Emperor Constantine had granted the western Roman Empire to the papacy centuries earlier. What Adrian didn't mention was that this "Donation of Constantine" was a complete fabrication - one of history's most successful frauds. This episode explores how a forged medieval document became the legal foundation for papal territorial claims and shaped European politics for nearly 700 years, despite its obviously fabricated nature.

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