McBrien - Lives of the popes: the pontiffs from St. Peter to Benedict XVI

In grateful memory of

J OHN XXIII (19581963),

the most beloved pope in history

THIS BOOK IS IN THE NATURE OF A SPIN-OFF FROM THE ONE -volume HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, published in 1995, for which I served as general editor. One of the many popular features of that encyclopedia is its twenty-page list of popes, containing not only their names and years in office (the only information contained in the usual phone directorystyle lists), but also a brief thumbnail sketch of each pontificate. Many readers found it fascinating, even fun, to scan these highly compressed summaries not only because they provide a convenient overview of church history, but also because they open a window onto the great variety of men who have actually occupied the Chair of Peter over the course of almost twenty centuries, warriors and peacemakers, saints and scoundrels, politicians and pastors, reformers and nepotists alike.

This book not only greatly expands those thumbnail sketches of each pontificate, but also includes features that provide a wider historical and theological context: a time line of important papal and ecclesiastical personalities and events, on the one hand, and of correspondingly important secular personalities and events, on the other; an introductory explanation of the papacy and of the two major papal dogmas (primacy and infallibility); introductions to each of the seven historical periods in which the lives of the popes are clustered; a history of papal conclaves and a summary of the latest rules for papal elections, promulgated by Pope John Paul II in 1996; an explanation of how popes can, or have been, removed from office other than by death; a rating of the popes, from outstanding to worst; a reflection, by way of an epilogue, on the future of the papacy; a series of tables, including a chronological list of popes, calculations of the longest and shortest pontificates, a list of papal firsts and lasts, a listing of key papal encyclicals, and a list of antipopes; a glossary of terms; a select bibliography of popular and scholarly resources; a sixteen-page section of photos of popes and other persons, events, and monuments related to the papacy; and an index of popes along with the usual indexes of personal names and subjects.

No reader should be under any illusion that this is a work of primary historical scholarship. If so, I hasten to issue a disclaimer to the contrary. Indeed, I cannot imagine any individual historian today writing a truly complete and comprehensive history of each of the more than 260 pontificates spread over the course of almost two thousand years. It would be the work of more than one lifetime, and probably of several. For example, the great Ludwig von Pastors forty-volume History of the Papacy (in English translation) covers only the popes from the close of the Middle Ages. Horace K. Manns eighteen-volume Lives of the Popes covers only the early Middle Ages. Why, then, this one-volume review of the lives and pontificates of all the popes? Has not this type of summary already been done? Yes and no. Yes, there are several recent compendia that serve very well as encyclopedic dictionaries or simply dictionaries of the popes. One thinks immediately of J. N. D. Kellys The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, published in 1986. It is undoubtedly the best one-volume work of its kind in the English language. The careful reader of this book will know that I have relied on Kelly throughout, just as he relied upon Franz Xaver Seppelts five-volume Geschichte der Ppste (195459). But this book differs from Kellys in that it offers more than summaries of each popes life and pontificate. It provides the reader with a theological context within which to locate and interpret these summaries. As an Anglican scholar who has been active in ecumenical dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church (he accompanied the archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, on his visit to Pope Paul VI in 1966), Canon Kelly may have been under greater constraint than a tenured Roman Catholic theologian, lest he cross the line of ecumenical propriety by raising awkward questions regarding papal claims or the implications of actions taken by individual popes, ecumenical councils, and other authoritative agencies of the Church. In any case, the aforementioned features of this bookover and above the summaries of the lives of each pope and of their pontificatesare not part of Canon Kellys otherwise splendid and useful volume.

There are also encyclopedic dictionaries (or simply dictionaries) of the papacy in other languages. In Italian there is an excellent, richly illustrated, two-volume Storia dei Papi, by Francesco Gligora and Biagia Catanzaro (1989) and a more compressed, but substantive, one-volume Dizionario Enciclopedico dei Papi, by Battista Mondin (1995). In German there is a one-volume Die Ppste in Lebensbildern, by Josef Gelmi (1989), which, unlike the others, situates the popes within various historical periods (for example, the early Middle Ages, the Renaissance, from the French Revolution to the First World War) and introduces each section with a brief historical commentary. But a number of the entries in that volume are extraordinarily brief. Finally, in French there is an impressively wide-ranging, one-volume Dictionnaire historique de la papaut, a collective effort of more than two hundred scholars under the direction of Philippe Levillain (1994). It includes many entries on topics listed in the glossary of this book and contains a rich assortment of attractive color photos and maps. A drawback is that, unlike the other volumes mentioned above, the material on the popes had to be arranged alphabetically rather than chronologically. One loses, therefore, the sense of historical development. It becomes instead a reference work alone rather than a book that one might conceivably read from cover to cover. In addition, the entries are written by a large and very diverse group of authors. What is gained in terms of more concentrated depth and expertise may be lost in terms of coherence and consistency of style and content. But for those who read French, it is an excellent and supremely valuable reference work. Indeed, in the writing of my own book, I have relied upon all of these works, to one degree or another, and also upon the individual entries on each of the popes in the monumental New Catholic Encyclopedia (fourteen volumes, plus one index volume and four supplementary volumes), originally published under copyright of The Catholic University of America in 1967. This last resource, however, reflects in more than a few of the entries on the popes a preVatican II, almost triumphalistic portrayal of the papacy. There is a tendency to explain away papal misdeeds and disastrous papal policies and initiatives and to avoid addressing their crucially important theological implications. But some of the entries are outstanding and the encyclopedia as a whole is a marvelous achievement.

Two other sources also deserve special mention. I have a vested interest in the first, as its general editor. That is the above-mentioned HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, which proved itself time and time again as an extraordinarily valuable reference work, not only for material concerning the papacy but also for many other related theological and historical topics. Without this resourcethe product of so many excellent scholars and students with whom I was proud to workI could not have completed this book within the time allotted to me by the publisher. The other source to which I made constant reference is the virtual classic