History’s Wild Side: From Papal Corpses to Birthday Surprises on April 4th

Pope Formosus died on April fourth, 896. Nine months later, his corpse was dug up, dressed in papal robes, and put on trial for perjury and heresy. This is not a metaphor. It’s called the Cadaver Synod, and it is one of the most gloriously, profoundly bizarre episodes in the entire history of the papacy. They had a deacon squat behind the corpse to speak for the defense. Unsurprisingly, the dead pope lost the case. His reign was declared null, his fingers of consecration were chopped off, and his body was thrown into the Tiber river. Looking back, we can see it wasn't really about the dead pope at all.

It was a vicious, theatrical power play by his successor. But it tells you everything about how desperately we want to control the narrative of the past… sometimes, even by putting it on trial. And that impulse—that need to reach back and re-litigate, re-frame, and re-fight old battles—is all over this one, single day in history. Because April fourth is a day crowded with ghosts and legacies. In 1814, it was part of the week Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France, finally abdicated his throne. After a decade of dominating Europe, he was being sent away to the tiny island of Elba.

The world breathed a sigh of relief, thinking the great man was finally finished. We now know that was just the intermission before his final act—the Hundred Days. On that same day, centuries earlier, died Isidore of Seville. He was a scholar who decided to compile all of human knowledge into a single work, an encyclopedia, centuries before the printing press. An act of breathtaking, beautiful arrogance. And on that day in 1589, St. Benedict the Black died. The son of enslaved Africans in Sicily, an illiterate Franciscan lay brother who was so revered for his wisdom that he was made the superior of his monastery, leading the educated priests who were technically above him.

But perhaps the most resonant April fourth, the one that still echoes with the force of a slammed door, happened in 1968. In Indianapolis, Robert Kennedy stood on the back of a flatbed truck and told a mostly Black crowd that Martin Luther King Junior had just been assassinated. And for a few minutes, he held a city back from the brink of chaos. We also have lighter moments! The first Saturday in April is International Pillow Fight Day. Which feels… necessary, after all that. A day for catharsis of a much softer kind. But I want to go back to Indianapolis. To that flatbed truck.

Because looking back from where we are now, we can see something happening in that moment that no one there could have possibly understood. We can see a city deciding its own future. Robert Kennedy was in town for a campaign rally. He was running for president. The news of King’s murder in Memphis hadn't broken publicly yet. The police warned him not to go to the rally. They told him they couldn't protect him, that the crowd would riot when they heard. His advisors told him to release a sterile, written statement. But he went anyway. He climbed onto that truck, no microphone, just his own voice.

And he looked out at the crowd, and he started with, "I have some very sad news for all of you." He didn't give a political speech. He gave… a eulogy. He talked about his own family’s experience with assassination. He said, "For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man." Think about that. He didn't hide from the anger he knew was coming. He met it.

He stood inside it with them. He quoted Aeschylus, from memory, a Greek poet he loved. "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." That night, riots erupted in more than one hundred American cities. Washington D.C. burned. Chicago burned. Baltimore burned. But Indianapolis did not. Historians, sociologists, everyone who studies this period—they all point to those five minutes. To that one speech. It wasn’t inevitable. It was a choice. A choice to show up. A choice to be vulnerable instead of powerful.

A choice to speak of shared pain instead of division. And the crowd made a choice, too. To listen. And here’s what we can see now, from our vantage point. In 2026, the city of Indianapolis unveiled a multi-million dollar expansion to the park where he spoke. The Landmark for Peace memorial, which shows King and Kennedy reaching toward one another, became the center of this renewed public space. What looked like just another tragic stop on a map of national grief became something else entirely. It became a city’s origin story for its modern identity. A place that chose peace when it could have chosen fire.

That memorial isn't just about what was lost that day. It's about what was found. It’s a monument to a moment of grace. So when we look at a day like April fourth, it’s easy to see it as a collection of disconnected events. The bizarre trial of a dead pope. The quiet death of a humble saint. The exile of an emperor. The murder of a prophet. But they aren't disconnected. They're all about the same thing. They're about what we do in the face of an ending. Do we put the past on trial to try and control it? Do we retreat, thinking the fight is over? Or do we stand on the back of a truck, with no script, and speak from the one place that can actually bridge the divide—the human heart.

History isn't a list of things that happened. It’s the echo of choices made in rooms we can no longer enter, and the foundation of the world we're building today.