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As of Thursday, for the first time in the nation’s history, the bonkers worry that there might be a pope-president is, technically, a live possibility: Pope Leo XIV, a native-born American citizen of the correct age and more than 14 years’ residency, really could—if he ever wanted to give up or split time with his “popedom”—run for president of the United States.

An American so intrepid as to make himself eligible for both offices would be unlikely to “give up his popedom for our presidency.”

It was at this point that Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams, "I join you therefore in sincere congratulations that this den of the priesthood is at length broken up, and that a protestant popedom is no longer to disgrace the American history and character."

To the ambitious it was the portal to bishoprics, and, after the monk St. Gregory, not unfrequently to the Popedom.

From the earliest period a long succession of Councils as well as such men as St. Boniface, St. Gregory the Great, St. Peter Damiani, St. Dunstan, St. Anselm, Hildebrand and his successors in the Popedom, denounced priestly marriage or concubinage as an atrocious crime, and the habitual life of the priests was, in theory at least, generally recognised as a life of sin.