Introduction

This book is about the oldest living institution in the Western world, an institution that began some two thousand years ago but that is as vital today as perhaps ever in its history. The papacy, which traces its origins to Saint Peter, Jesus’s chief disciple, is embodied today in Pope Benedict XVI. In between Peter and Benedict there have been some 265 individuals who claimed to be Peter’s successors and whose claim is today generally recognized as legitimate. Some were saints; some were sinners. Pope Leo the Great and Pope Gregory the Great were men of heroic stature, but Pope John XII, who became pope at the age of eighteen, led such a debauched life that he was a scandal even in the debauched Roman society of the tenth century. There were, besides, many other individuals who claimed to be pope, but whose claims contemporaries or posterity rejected as invalid, the “anti-popes.” They figure heavily in some parts of our story.

The popes differed among themselves in social class. Pope Callistus I was a former slave, and Pope Pius IX a noble. Pope Pius XII was from the Roman aristocracy, but his successor, Pope John XXIII, came from peasant stock. Popes have been Greek, Syrian, African, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, and of course Italian. There has been only one English pope, Hadrian IV, and only one Polish, John Paul II. None has been Portuguese, Irish, Scandinavian, Slovak, Slovenian, Bohemian, Hungarian—or American. A fair number were not priests when they were elected. Pope Leo X, for instance, was a deacon, and Benedict VIII, Benedict IX, as well as others, were laymen. Popes were not always elected in Rome. As late as 1800 Pope Pius VII was elected in Venice.

If you are at all interested in either religion or history, you have to be interested in the papacy. Within our own lifetimes, popes have been front-page news. Pope John Paul II is sometimes spoken of as the Man of the Century. The popes were players in virtually all the great dramas of the Western world in the last two thousand years, and in those dramas they were often major protagonists. The history of the popes is not a history told in a sacristy.

In this book I tell the popes’ story as a historian, not as a theologian, but by the very nature of the subject theology must at times enter it. Indeed, the whole edifice of the papacy is built upon a theological interpretation of what we may take as historical fact: Peter’s preeminence among “the Twelve,” Jesus’s closest disciples, and his subsequent ministry and death in Rome. Peter was thus the first bishop of Rome and therefore the first pope. All the popes since then claim to be his successors and to have inherited his leadership role. I tell their story neither to justify nor challenge that theological claim, and I tell it neither to defend nor to condemn the popes and their actions. I tell it to make clear what happened and how the institution got to be the way it is.

We need to keep the story in perspective. The history of the popes is not a history of Catholicism, which is a much, much bigger reality. The popes are only a part of that history. We might easily confuse the two because, especially for the past hundred years, the papacy has played a larger role in Catholics’ self-definition than ever before. This new preeminence is due to many factors, but among them the modern means of communication like radio, television, and now the Internet are especially important. In the year 1200, for instance, perhaps 2 percent of the population knew there was such an institution as the papacy or believed it had anything significant to do with their religion. How would they have known about it? The papacy was not mentioned in any creed, and it did not appear in any catechism until the sixteenth century. With Protestant rejection of it at that time came Catholic preoccupation with it, and both positions got relatively widely broadcast by the new invention of the printing press. Soon thereafter to be Catholic was to define oneself as a papist.

The history of the popes is not always pretty. The popes were human beings. Even the saints among them had their dark sides. While a few were reprehensible from almost every viewpoint, most of them strove to lead a good life according to their lights. But their weaknesses showed up glaringly because of the responsibilities they bore.

The popes as bishops of Rome faced a particular temptation almost from the earliest days. Devout Christians in and around the city made donations in land or goods to “Saint Peter,” that is, to the Church of Rome. The bishops of Rome, though they would face hard times, tended to be wealthy, and this fact made the office attractive to the wrong people, who sometimes succeeded in obtaining the office. Moreover, the real estate held by Saint Peter eventually expanded into the Papal States. Of that vast territory that stretched almost from Naples north and east across the peninsula to Venice, the pope was monarch. As ruler of a state he was easily distracted from his religious duties and drawn into political schemes. That was a situation that prevailed from the eighth century until 1860–1870, when the Papal States were confiscated by Italian forces and incorporated into the new kingdom of Italy.

For most of the periods covered by this book, therefore, the popes had a notably different job description than popes of more recent times. Today popes appoint bishops. They did not always do that. They write encyclicals. That is a development of the past hundred and fifty years. The popes speak to huge crowds and travel the globe. That was not possible until the era of trains, planes, and automobiles.

Popes of earlier eras conceived their job differently. Among the major tasks they set themselves was to guard and protect the tombs of saints Peter and Paul against profanation; to make sure the great basilicas and other churches of Rome had dignified services; to provide for orphans, widows, and other needy persons in the city; to intervene to settle doctrinal disputes among bishops; to protect Rome and the surrounding territories from foreign enemies, which meant maintaining an army and navy; to rally Christian monarchs to lead crusades; to govern the city of Rome, to tend to its provisioning, and to enhance it with churches, fountains, and public buildings of various kinds; and to rule the Papal States—to be a monarch and the maker of monarchs.

The complications that arose from such tasks can make this book seem as if the papacy did nothing but careen from one crisis to another. Readers must remind themselves, therefore, that the book skips over relatively long periods of “business as usual.” Even those periods are interesting, and I pass them over with regret because business as usual was rarely perfectly usual. My hope is that the drastically pared down story I tell will be enough to whet the appetite to pursue the subject further and especially to delve into those eras slighted in this telling.

Four defining moments of papal history can serve as milestones in what sometimes seems like a zigzag course. The first is around the year 64, which is when Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome during the persecution by Nero. As mentioned, all the subsequent claims of the papacy to its preeminent place in the Christian church are based on the ministry and martyrdom of Peter in Rome. The second defining moment is the reign of the Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century. He did more than tolerate Christianity and, as the expression goes, let it emerge from the catacombs. He favored it. He encouraged its bishops to assume public and civic responsibilities, so that the church got woven into the fabric of the sociopolitical order of society. The third is in the eighth and ninth centuries when the Papal States began to form as a more or less definable unit and the popes emerged as its temporal ruler. The fourth is 1860–1870 when the States came to an end and Rome became the capital of Italy. With the Lateran agreements in 1929 between the Holy See and the Italian government, the papacy surrendered all claims to the States and to Rome, and the Italians recognized Vatican City as an independent, sovereign state.

In a history of the popes a few terms and titles come up frequently. “The emperor” is the Roman emperor Constantine and those who claimed to be his descendants, whether in Europe or in Constantinople, present-day Istanbul. The emperor was at the peak of the secular hierarchy and was different from a king. In the West in the Middle Ages and early modern period, he might also be a king in his own right, but as emperor he was at least theoretically the king of kings. The point to keep in mind is that especially for the early part of our story the popes dealt on the highest level with the emperor and sometimes with two emperors at once, one in the East and one in the West.

Even today the words Rome and the Vatican are sometimes used interchangeably. That is because until 1870 the popes, although they had several palaces in the city of Rome, lived most often in the so-called Apostolic Palace in the Vatican area of the city. Since 1870 that Vatican palace has been the popes’ exclusive residence. From the earliest days the popes, although their cathedral was the basilica of Saint John Lateran, especially identified with the Vatican area because that is where Saint Peter was believed to have been buried after his martyrdom and over whose shrine Constantine built the magnificent basilica.

Among the cities of the ancient Roman world, Rome was unique in that it was the site of the preaching and death of two apostles—Peter and Paul. Rome’s “double apostolicity” allowed it to refer to itself as apostolic not only because of Peter’s leadership role among the disciples of Jesus but because the great Paul also came to Rome and died there. The bishopric of Rome became the “Apostolic See.” See is the English equivalent of the Latin sedes, meaning chair but by extension meaning residence or dwelling place. Thus see is where bishops are located. Bishops, moreover, preached seated in a chair—a sedes or a cathedra (hence, cathedral). Among the sees, the Apostolic See was obviously the most prestigious.

Popes have borne a number of titles, the most fundamental of which is bishop of Rome. A man is pope because he is bishop of Rome, not vice versa. He occupies the Apostolic See, and therefore is pope. Today the pope is the only bishop who bears the title pope, though in the early centuries of the church the term was applied to all bishops. Pope is the English-language form of the Latin papa, which means simply father. Beginning in the fifth century in the West, about the time of Pope Leo the Great, the title pope became increasingly reserved to the bishop of Rome.

As suggested above, though popes gloried in the double apostolicity of their city, they identified themselves not with Paul but with Peter. Some popes seemed incapable of distinguishing themselves from him, as if Peter and they were one mystical person. More commonly, however, they saw themselves as his agent in the world and referred to themselves as “the vicar of Peter,” vicarius Petri. That title appears prominently in Leo the Great and was taken up by his successors for the next eight centuries. Only rarely did popes refer to themselves as vicars of Peter and Paul, as did Pope John VIII in the ninth century.

Instead of vicar of Peter, popes today present themselves as “vicars of Christ.” Like pope, the term vicar of Christ in the early centuries was applied to all bishops because they had authority to govern the church and perform their functions in Christ’s name, but it was also applied to priests and to secular rulers. As late as the eleventh century, for instance, Emperor Henry IV loudly proclaimed himself the vicar of Christ. By the next century, partly through the agency of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the title came to refer exclusively to the pope, and at the beginning of the thirteenth century Pope Innocent III officially adopted it to express an authority more far-reaching than that of other bishops. Subsequent popes gladly followed his example.

In the early Middle Ages popes sometimes referred to themselves as “patriarch of Rome” and later as “patriarch of the West,” which in the nineteenth century entered the official lists of papal titles. It always had a somewhat vague meaning, however, and was dropped from the list in 2006. Papal documents today designate the pope as the Supreme Pontiff, Summus Pontifex. Like so many other papal titles, this one too once applied to all bishops. By the year 900, however, it appears in official papal documents to refer to the pope and within a few centuries it established itself as the title most frequently used in official documents to designate him.

The polar opposite of Supreme Pontiff is “Servant of the servants of God.” The term is found as early as the fifth century, but, again, was not applied exclusively to the popes until the thirteenth century. It is the most beloved of all the papal titles, and the one that expresses Christ’s message to Peter and the others at the Last Supper when he washed their feet and told them that they should do the same for others if they wanted to be his disciples. Because Vatican Council II, 1962–1965, laid great stress on the servant-quality of all leadership in the church, Pope Paul VI added the title to the official list.