Rome, January 897. The pope has been dead for nine months, and he is about to stand trial.His successor has had the body of Pope Formosus dug up, dressed in its vestments and tied into a throne in the Lateran, to answer before a synod for crimes against the Church. A dead man cannot speak in his own defence. Someone has to speak for him.They choose Paschalis, a young deacon of the dead pope’s household. Formosus ordained him, and Formosus once helped him hide the one secret that could destroy him.In front of the whole city, Paschalis is asked a single question. He knows the answer that would end the trial. He gives another.What follows is larger than the synod: a corpse pulled from the Tiber at dawn, a child’s dead arm raised in a ruined chapel on Easter morning, and a city that comes to worship a saint Paschalis knows he invented. By the end of that summer, the pope who put a corpse on trial is locked in an oil store beneath his own palace, asking for a priest.Respondeo is told over a single night, eighteen years later, by a man saying all of it aloud for the first time. Drawn from the Cadaver Synod, one of the strangest true episodes in the history of the papacy, it is a novel about the people who stand closest to great crimes, and about what their silence costs. Read more