Did The Pope Want You to Kill Your Cats?
That’s a face that’s planning your murder
Popes can be weird, especially popes from centuries ago.
There’s the anti-Semitic and proud of it, Pope Paul IV, from 1555; then there’s the pope who threatened to burn Galileo at the stake for figuring out the earth revolves around the sun, Pope Urban VIII in 1633. There’s also Pope Leo X in 1513 who sold spots to heaven.
There’s even a whole Wikipedia page on bad popes but today we’re talking about a pope who created an urban legend… Pope Gregory IX who declared the war on cats!
Today we’re looking at the urban legend of Pope Gregory IX's hatred of cats that led to the mass extermination of the furry little guys.
Pope Gregory IX
Let’s start this story with the urban legend that is actually propagated on a few different websites and books, mainly because of misinterpretations or assumptions.
The legend starts with Pope Gregory IX issuing a Vox in Rama, which is a papal bull, or like a really angry tweet from a verified account. It condemned devil worshipping since a sect of heretics had been found in Germany who worshipped the devil, black cats, and performed witchcraft. The letter authorized a crusade against all those who perform these acts. That means death.
Following this, people freaked out! They started killing all the cats, lowering their population to almost nothing. But problems arose when the plague hit. Because of the reduced numbers of cats, plague-carrying rats grew rampant.
The plague spread far and wide killing millions all because Pope Gregory IX condemned black cats.
Except… that didn’t happen.
Germany and Cats
Here’s the true story. In 1233 Pope Gregory IX did authorize the persecution of heretics, or anyone turning away from the Catholic faith. He sent an inquisitor to Germany, Conrad Von Marburg.
Conrad was like Jack Bauer in the last few episodes of a season with a bomb still out there and a suspect in front of him. He liked torture is what I’m trying to say.
Basically, when you torture someone you can get them to say anything if it stops the pain, so really not an effective approach but hey, it was the middle ages. I feel like I’m going to write that a lot.
Conrad returns and tells Pope Gregory what he’s discovered; a sect of heretics who worship the devil! He even got someone to “volunteer” the information about how the rituals work.
I’ll summarize: the group stands in a dark room and an animal appears, could be a frog or toad, sometimes a goose, or even a duck as large as an oven. The group kisses the animal in its rear (AKA the butt) and its mouth, swapping spit.
That’s not even the weirdest it’s going to get.
After the butt-kissing, a man with black eyes appears and kisses any new recruits making them instantly forget the catholic religion. Essentially the memory-wiping kisses of Superman 2.
Afterward, everyone eats, and once they’re done the statue of a black cat appears or descends and everyone kisses its butt. Finally, Lucifer appears, he’s described as normal in his top half but his bottom half is covered in coarse cat fur.
Conrad tells Pope Greg all of this and instead of asking Conrad if he hit his head REALLY hard recently, Pope Greg is like “Yea that checks out, you did use torture to get the whole truth right?”
A Vox in Rama
Pope Greg issues his Vox in Rama but sends it to the King of Germany and a few other officials in Germany, not the entire catholic loving population. It’s nothing like an angry tweet from a verified profile at all, it’s more of an angry DM from a verified profile.
So already that’s a few things debunked. Here’s another; the Vox in Rama didn’t condemn witchcraft. At the time in the eyes of the Catholic church, witchcraft either didn’t exist or wasn’t considered heresy. To a point where 25 years after Pope Greg’s Vox in Rama, Pope Alexander IV in 1258 issued a papal bull prohibiting the killing of witches.
It wasn’t until almost 100 years after Pope Greg’s papal bull, in 1320, Pope John XXII, (Were they just picking these numbers randomly?) authorized the inquisition to consider anyone practicing witchcraft as heretics. This meant investigation and trial so not full-blown mass witch hysteria… yet
The Plague
But you know what else happened 100 years after the Vox in Rama? The black plague. This means even if everyone went on a black cat murder spree in 1233 it wouldn’t really have affected the plague a hundred years later. Also, the plague was spread by fleas and you know what else gets fleas? Cats.
So did Pope Gregory’s Vox in Rama cause people to kill cats in masse? There’s no evidence of that. Especially since pets weren’t really a thing until the 17th century and even then it was limited to the rich until around the 19th century. And it’s doubtful people were just going around “Elmer Fudding” cats.
What Really Happened?
The only evidence of mass cat killing in the 1200s are the skeletons of 79 cats found in a well in Cambridge, England. Some articles use this as possible proof that the mass cat killings happened but the University of Cambridge studied this back in 1995 and found another reason.
After reading through the research paper, it turns out the most likely reason for the cats being dumped in a well, was that they were skinned for fur and food as evidence of the absence of butchery marks, showing a highly skilled skinner performed the action.
The paper states, “Certainly there is no doubt that the Bene’t Court cats were skinned.”
Hey, middle ages right?
Festival of the Cats
Another event people point to as proof of mass cat killing, is the Festival of the Cats in Belgium, where in the middle ages, people threw cats out of the bell tower toward the town center killing them as a way to get rid of evil spirits. But here’s the thing, that also didn’t start till well after Pope Greg IV’s note.
It started after Pope Innocent VIII's papal bull in 1484 taking Pope John XXII witchcraft heresy letter a step further by full out condemning anyone practicing witchcraft, male or female, as having abandoned themselves to the devil. That officially put a bullseye on witches, leading to thousands upon thousands of accusations and deaths. So I’m not sure Pope Innocent deserves the “innocent” name.
This led to full-on black cat killings in the following centuries because of their association with witches. So in the end, nope, Pope Gregory the 9th did not condemn cats to death with his Vox in Rama, it was more of a gradual change directly tied to the catholic church’s view on witchcraft.
