Pope Stephen VI ordered the nine-month-old corpse of his predecessor, Pope Formosus, to be dug up, dressed in papal vestments, and put on trial in 897.

Why Formosus’s election could be challenged

The spectacle in 897 grew out of a real dispute over whether Formosus had been entitled to become pope. Before his election, he had been bishop of Porto, a nearby city. Critics argued that moving from one bishopric to another violated church rules—and that his rise to the papacy was therefore illegitimate. The charge gave Stephen VI a way to attack not just a dead predecessor, but the authority Formosus had exercised while alive.

The setting mattered. Late ninth-century Rome was marked by competing political factions and rapid changes in papal power. A judgment against Formosus could weaken the people and church officials whose standing depended on his decisions.

A verdict with living targets

The court’s most consequential move was to declare Formosus’s acts invalid. That threatened appointments and ordinations made during his papacy. An ordination is the church rite that makes someone a priest, deacon, or bishop; treating it as void could leave clergy unsure whether their offices—and the religious authority attached to them—still counted.

The trial thus turned a procedural accusation into a weapon against an entire set of relationships. If Formosus had never been a legitimate pope, Stephen’s faction could argue that his decisions carried no lasting force. The corpse was the defendant, but the verdict reached the living.

The ruling did not settle the argument

Stephen’s judgment proved unstable. Later popes reversed or condemned the proceedings, and church authorities reaffirmed Formosus’s acts. That reversal shows the limits of trying to erase a rival’s legacy by decree: successors could reject the verdict, but the episode had already exposed how vulnerable offices and appointments were to political change.

The trial’s lasting significance is not that a corpse could meaningfully defend itself. It is that the papacy’s authority was contested through institutions as well as spectacle—and that even a grotesque courtroom scene could be used to decide whose appointments counted.