The accession of Leo XIV, the first American pope and the third successive non-Italian to lead the Catholic Church, brings to mind the illustrious career of Pope Germanian I, another outsider to the Holy See who reigned over a tumultuous era. Germanian began his career as the disputatious monk Martin Luther before ascending to the church’s highest office in the early 16th century, inaugurating a dramatic era of theological and institutional reform. His memory lives on in the relatively unadorned architecture of St. Peter’s Square, which reflects Germanian’s distaste for Roman pomp and his austere view of the Church’s teachings. 

Wait, no, that’s not right. Luther never became pope. He was excommunicated by Leo‘s namesake, Leo X, for beginning the Protestant Reformation. There is no “austere” wing of the Vatican. Germanian sprang from the inventive mind of Kingsley Amis, whose 1976 novel The Alteration follows the adventures of a young English choirboy in a late 20th-century world where Western Christendom never fell apart.