Here’s the Bestselling Erotic Novel One of the Popes Wrote

I’ll admit that I’m not thoroughly familiar with the details of the papal conclave. I know there’s voting and colored smoke, but the nomination process is far beyond me. Specifically, how much, if any, vetting is done before someone is up for the big hat itself. 

Being the head of an entire religion seems like something that would require a fairly squeaky clean record, or at least a thorough salvation from former sins. So it makes you wonder how the Vatican felt about a deceased Pope’s secret erotic novel becoming a bestseller three years after he kicked the bucket.

Outside of some seriously sacrilegious corners of the internet, the Pope isn’t a sexual figure — by necessity. When one of the main downsides of your job is celibacy, it seems like being a particularly horny dude would be tough. 

But Pope Pius II was indeed a man familiar with the sins of lust, having reportedly borne multiple children without a marriage in sight before he became a man of the cloth. This same appetite seemingly inspired him to author an erotic novel titled The Tales of Two Lovers. Thankfully for the Vatican’s reputation, it was secular in its subject, instead focusing on a classic “married woman and representative of the Duke of Austria” romance.

Coming out after his death, already with the selling point of being a Pope’s secret dirty story, everyone was eager to read it — and they did. Which I understand, because I also read it as soon as I heard about it.

Here are some things a future pope wrote while horned up at his desk:

• “A small and well-shaped mouth, coral lips made to be bitten.”
• “And your ring will never leave my finger, where I make it wet with many kisses, instead of you.”
• “Come, my chief delight, fountain of my pleasures, my spring of happiness, my honeycomb.”
• “She was deep-bosomed, and her breasts swelled out on either side like two pomegranates, so that one longed to touch them.”
• “And sometimes, raising the blanket, he gazed at those secret parts he had not seen before, and cried: ‘I find more than I had expected. Thus must Diana have appeared to Actaeon, when she bathed in the spring. Could anything be lovelier or whiter than your body? Now I am rewarded for all perils. What would I not suffer for your sake? Oh lovely bosom, most glorious breasts! Can it be that I touch you, possess you, hold you in my hands? Smooth limbs, sweet-scented body, are you really mine? Now it were well to die, with such a joy still fresh, before any misfortune could befall.”

You definitely can’t read any of that in church, last time I checked.