“Okay boys… let’s lynch him now for his non-trad link!”

Touché AMDG!

The “buffoon” just struck me initially as excessive and perhaps a PM may have struck home the point more effectively?

While you might dispute one or two details, it's a simple fact that not a few popes were degenerates, and likely a handful of sodomites.  But you missed the entire point of the comparison, that if Bergoglio had been ORTHODOX, i..e not a heretic, then his personal sins pale by comparison, and are between him and God, i.e. at least these others didn't wreck the faith and in some cases admirably defended it despite their personal deparavity.

So you're going to pretend now that every Catholic pope who'se ever lived was a saint?  I wouldn't be surprised ift he majority of them were in hell for one reason or another.

In fact, there's a story where a man was trying to convert someone to Catholicism (during one of thoese times when the Vatican was anything but edifying), and the potential convert proposed a trip to Rome.  So the Catholic became alarmed and tried to dissuade him, knowing what was going on there.  But the man insisted and the Catholic lost all hope for his conversion.  Much to his astonishment, however, the man returned declaring his intention to convert.  So the Catholic asked him how he was still interested in converting, and the man responded, "Any institution that could withstand such depravity and even keep sound doctrine must certainly have been established by God.  There's no other natural explanation for it."

Dante placed no less than four pope in hell, one of which was still alive at the time he was writing the Inferno.
They were so wicked and corrupt that his contemporaries probably didn't even raise an eyebrow. Nor was Dante ever
condemned by the Church, in fact just the opposite, one pope wrote an encyclical just to honor him.

Again, you're compltely missing the point ... as one case suffices to for it (see my post above).  At the same time, the more you cling with white knuckles to some invented principles that Pope are all walking saints as if by some guarantee, the more you set that false principle up for falsification in case where their degeneracy has been proven, an easy strawman that you're helping erect so that the non-Catholics can slap it down.  You're actually assistintin in their strawman attack against the Church.  It's the same when various Traditional Catholics exaggerate the scope of papal infallibility, since it takes merely a single course reversal on one point for the Prots to claim that (their strawman of) papal infallibility has been flasified.

In actuality you are the one who is creating a strawman. I never said that all popes were necessarily saints, just that many were actually good men and have been defamed mostly by prots and several disingenuous catholics. As I said, Alexander VI is a prime example. His name today is synonymous with evil. Errors and lies were spread about him by Protestants and in turn, ill informed Catholics, such as yourself, have spread misinformation about him for centuries. In truth he was actually a good pope who DID NOT have illegitimate children.