Revisiting Pope v. Cats

In March of 1227, the Papacy chose a Pope who would go on to be the cause of the Bubonic Plague less than a century later, all because he bore mortal animosity against cats.

The Christ’s Vicar on Earth decided to take matters into his own hands and issued a royal diktat pronouncing cats as the instrument of Satan and creatures that deserved to be killed by all those who were faithful.

The Pope himself declared war on the furry creatures, a decree which has not yet found its due recognition in legal treatises.

Those who are interested in the development of legal history would often find themselves confounded with the range of powers that were conferred on the Church of yesteryears.

It exercised a typical jurisdiction unknown to any other religion, called ecclesiastical jurisdiction, through which the Church of the early ages dominated the will of the people. Those that acted against the specific dicta were either pronounced “heretics” or were excommunicated from the religion.

The papal conclave elected the Pope through an in–house voting procedure. Once elected, he would be the Archbishop of Rome, Christ’s Vicar on Earth and would wield tremendous power over lands that professed the Christian faith. This collegium of cardinals continue to this date, and has chosen Popes from the time of election of Pope Nicholas II in 1059 AD.

In 1227, Pope Gregory IX came to be elected when the papal supremacy was under conflict. The separation between Church and State was not known, with frequent inroads being made by the Pope into the administration of the Emperor Frederick II. This led to an obvious conflict between the Church and the King, with both trying their utmost to assert authority.

In retaliation, Pope Gregory excommunicated the King himself as being the very embodiment of the antichrist, leading to the King taking several cardinals as his prisoners.

But one might ask, where did the cats appear - and later disappear - in all of this mayhem?

Cats survived their turbulent journey from Persia to be introduced to European frontiers, and were an instant hit amongst the agrarian communities. Unlike their Egyptian counterparts, who revered them as the embodiment of the ancient goddess Bastet, Europeans treated them as a useful ally in their war against rodents.

Under ancient Egyptian law, the accidental killing of a cat was viewed very seriously and could also carry a death sentence. However, they did not enjoy the same socio–legal status in Europe, possibly due to their status as immigrants. There was no law known in Europe that would even impose a fine for a feline homicide. On the contrary, a law was thought of by the Papal chief Gregory to do away with cats.

Meanwhile, in 1231, Pope Gregory IX, with his exceptional understanding of legal procedures and canonical text, gave to the world a most depraved gift: inquisition. The process of inquisition involved investigating, judging and punishing individuals accused of heresy, often through inquisitorial courts which were under the direct control and supervision of Gregory.

The punishment for not following his dicta was death. While Gregory did not enjoy mob lynching as much, he had taken fondness to burning at the stake, which was regarded as an acceptable mode of corporal punishment. Heretics and other suspects were rounded up, guilts were confessed under the fear of torture, which would then become a ground to issue further dictas. Some of these confessions were manufactured and, almost always, illogical.

The case of the cat was no exception. The sole “evidence” produced before the canonical court was a confession in which a man was made to forget about the Church and its teachings merely because he had a nightmare of a creature whose upper body resembled that of a man, and the lower body was that of a cat. That sole testimony was sufficient to evoke the wrath of the Pope, who issued a notorious dicta to the effect that:

“All cats were instruments of Satan, carried his spirit around, and were not to be trusted.”

As a reaction to this dicta, every country in Europe carried out mass culling of the cats, whose only fault was that they had allegedly appeared in a confessor’s dream. In fact, during the years 1233–1234, there was mass extermination of cats by those loyal to the Church and the Pope.

Some historians believe that people killed so many cats to cause a wave of the Bubonic Plague which claimed an estimated 25 million lives in total, vanquishing over one-third of Europe’s total population.

But the staunch believers of the Church zealously believed that the Bubonic Plague was Satan’s vengeance for having killed his messengers. Such is the power of setting up a narrative. By the time the Bubonic Plague arrived, the Pope had met his maker. One wonders what his fate would have been if he were to knock on the doors of heaven, only to find the Egyptian feline god Bastet instead of Saint Peter to greet him.

I can only hope that the lawmakers of today draw a leaf from history, so that nature can maintain its precious balance.

Nipun Saxena is an advocate practicing at the Supreme Court of India.