 The popes did not in fact wish to take on the burdens of day-to-day government throughout the world. Their claim was that, while ruling was normally the business of secular rulers, the pope could intervene by full right in governmental matters whenever he saw good reason to do so. Canon lawyers drew up lists of circumstances in which the pope might intervene (for examples, see Tierney 1980: 153–4), but some items in the list were so comprehensive as to leave no area in which popes could not intervene. For example, intervention ratione peccati, “by reason of sin”, meant that if a secular ruler commits an injustice (which is a sin) then the pope might intervene.