John XXII elected pope at Avignon

August 1316

After a two-year conclave locked in Lyon, a wizened seventy-two-year-old canon lawyer emerged as John XXII, defying those who expected a younger, more pliable pontiff. He would reign eighteen years, quarrel bitterly with Franciscan radicals over apostolic poverty, centralize church finance into an Avignon machine, and declare the mystical Beatific Vision a matter still to be debated.