https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2023/03/16/the-avignon-presidency-or-the-american-schism-n1679061
When one surveys the American scene today, socially, culturally, politically, and economically, what may come to mind is a historical analog with what is known as the Western Schism that divided the 14th-century papacy between Rome and Avignon. Of course, analogical correlates are almost never fully cognate, yet they will often provide instructive parallels between past and present. What we are currently observing in the U.S. is a case in point.
A brief survey of the Schism may be helpful. The Western Schism refers to the fissure within the Catholic Church that saw pontiffs residing in Rome and Avignon, both claiming to be the true pope. As Edwin Mullins meticulously documents in The Popes of Avignon: A Century in Exile, the situation involving rival claimants to the Holy See was as complex as it was ferocious, the seat of theological power alternating between Rome and Avignon and leading eventually to the removal of the papal enclave to Avignon for forty years.
Altogether there were nine Avignon Popes, many of whom were called antipopes, but only two of whom, Clement VII and Benedict XIII, were canonically known as antipopes. Both, as P.G. Maxwell-Stuart writes in Chronicle of the Popes, were unsavory characters: Clement, a weak and unscrupulous man, who collaborated in the destruction of the Knights Templar, and Benedict who refused to resign, barricading himself in his castle and continuing to fraudulently elect new cardinals. The Council of Constance finally put an end to the reign of the Avignon popes in 1418.
Similarly, the political schism in the U.S. can be regarded as equally disruptive, entailing historic consequences that may ultimately destroy the life and continuity of a great nation. The presidential election of 2020 is frequently described as “irregular.” This is a patent euphemism. As many have come to believe, and as considerable evidence suggests, the election was mired in corruption, scandal, and covert manipulation. A system involving vote harvesting, absentee ballots, mysterious closures of voting stations in the dead of night, malfunctioning tabulators, suppression of critical information by the major digital platforms “to warp an election,” in the words of Victor Davis Hanson, and the furtive operation of hired mules, occurring especially in swing states, cannot be said by any stretch of the imagination to ensure an indisputable or reliable electoral outcome.
