17. He once ordained a deacon… in a stable
According to his former employees in the Lateran Council, John was always accepting cash for offices, which he needed to buy booze, gamble, and hire prostitutes. But an even worse offence than ordaining a 10 year old boy was his decision to ordain a deacon in his stable of horses. As far as we can tell, the Bishop of Todi was made a bishop in a church with all due pomp and ceremony – his proud parents would have demanded nothing less, given how much they had to pay for the office – but a horse’s stable really was the lowest ebb.
There was nothing sacred about the stables John chose for the ceremony. Ordaining a deacon outside of a church undermined the whole point of churches as a sacred space and the house of God Himself. Besides, one of John’s main failings as Pope was his obsession with hunting, and the incident presents his priorities in microcosm. The medieval church fought unsuccessfully against hunting, which it saw as an idle pastime which encouraged sin and wasted time which could have been spent praying. John didn’t care what they thought, and brazenly performed the sacrilegious ceremony in front of high-ranking Catholic priests.