I'll stick with Alexander VI Borgia, who helped make the Spanish Inquisition into an art form, fathered Lucretia and Cesare Borgia, and no doubt conspired with Ferdinand and Isabella to expel the Jews AND the Moors from Spain.

The others on Raedwulf's list are certainly contenders, but I think history will show Steve Shaw's list to be Hitchens bullshit propaganda. John Paul ignored the sex abuse scandal due to blindness, not malfeasance. I didn't like John Paul II because of his regressive conservativism, but I don't think he was a bad guy. Pius XII and his predecessor Pius XI dealt with the reality of Fascism in quiet, prudent ways - ways that may well have saved tens of thousands of lives. In his infallible hindsight, St. Hitchens would have preferred papal grandstanding - but then Hitchens (and Shaw) would have found fault with that, too.

-Joe Offer-