THE KEYS TO THE PAPACY

Given this almost sempiternal perseverance over two thousand years, one wonders why publishers in the one year of 1997 felt compelled to present American readers with three new papal histories. This sudden gusher increases the number of “Lives of the Popes” during the last century by about 20 percent.

The answer, I think, lies in the extraordinary importance of Pope John Paul II as the end of the millennium approaches. Even ignoring his discussions with non-Catholic Christians, his improvement of relations with Jews, and his great spiritual importance for Catholics (through his encyclicals, his personal appearances around the world, and his promotion of a new catechism), this Polish priest’s influence on the Cold War alone places the papacy at the center of contemporary history: Beginning in 1978, at the depths of the Cold War, John Paul II’s pontificate had as one of its express aims the breaking of communism, which it achieved, astonishingly, within its first dozen years. Is there anyone — Catholic or non-Catholic or even anti-Catholic — who does not admit that the papacy is an institution very much to be reckoned with? It’s been a long time since anyone repeated Stalin’s mocking question about how many army divisions a pope possesses.

These three new books take three very different approaches to the immensity of their historical task. There have been 262 popes, and to give even a page or two to each would itself fill a book. That is essentially the path chosen by P G. MaxwellStuart in Chronicle of the Popes and Richard McBrien in Lives of the Popes. In the third history, Saints & Sinners: A History of the Popes, Eamon Duffy describes groups of popes in their historical contexts.

The volume by Maxwell-Stuart, a research fellow at the University of Aberdeen, is succinct in its biographical accounts. A Protestant writing in large part for Protestants, he nonetheless seems able to present the papacy in the ways both Catholics and Protestants see it, without lingering over those points at which they diverge. His aim — like Duffy’s and unlike McBrien’s — is history rather than theology, and his technique is to mention almost in passing how Protestants have reacted to this or that historical moment in the papacy, without asking the reader to argue the underlying theological issues.

Maxwell-Stuart turns out to be particularly good at conveying the historical fascination of the papacy: There can scarcely be a place on earth, he observes, that has not at some time been changed, for better or worse, by a pope’s words or actions. And he manages to convey as well the sheer fun of studying papal history:

Seventy-eight [popes] have been declared saints as well as, oddly enough, two antipopes; eight have been pronounced “Blessed.” There have been seventy- seven Roman popes, one hundred Italian, fourteen French, eleven Greek, six German, six Syrian, three Sicilian, two Sardinian, two Spanish, two African, one English, one Dutch, one Portuguese, and one Polish. Fifteen have been monks, four friars, two laymen, and one a hermit. Four have abdicated, five have been imprisoned, four murdered, one openly assassinated, one deposed, and one subjected to a public flogging. One died of wounds he received in the midst of battle, and another after a ceiling collapsed and fell on him. The sheer variety of the ways they began and ended is riveting in itself.

With his charts, maps, timelines, and illustrations, he finds highly imaginative ways to compress immense amounts of information for the reader. Decorating his pages with quotations from diffcult-to-find sources, as well as with fascinating catalogs of popes arranged by nationality, background, and length of pontificate — Maxwell-Stuart has produced what is in many ways (particularly for beginners and for classroom use) the most successful of the three new papal histories.

Nonetheless, for readers able to purchase only one of these books, the best, hands-down, is the work of Eamon Duffy. It is an astonishingly beautiful volume, the color, workmanship, and paper stock of unusually high quality. But the main triumph comes in Duffy’s six masterful long essays about the papacy — each conveying an overriding sense of the author’s historical competence and his uncanny knack for telling detail.

So, for instance, Duffy brings together a wealth of historical detail to show how self-conscious Rome was even in the first century about its special place in the universal church. And so, for another instance, he manages to sketch convincingly Plus X (1903-1914): conveying the man’s personal holiness, even while showing how — as a self-conscious peasant and man-of-the-people – – he did much damage to Catholic intellectual life. (I regret to point out, however, that Duffy begins his book with a whopping typo: “Nearly 90 million human beings, the largest single collective of people the world has ever known, look to the Pope as their spiritual leader.” He no doubt meant 900 million, although other sources now place the number at over one billion.)

A reader in church history and fellow at Cambridge (and author of the highly acclaimed history of the Reformation in England, The Stripping of the Altars), Duffy knows how to take advantage of the best scholarship, and his notes and bibliographies give the reader considerable confidence in his judgments. Regarding the most recent four or five popes, to be sure, he relies too much at critical points — at least twice for suspiciously clever lines — on the axegrinding journalist Peter Hebblethwaite, whose highly colored reporting was for many years Britain’s main source for Vatican news. Yet Duffy himself warns the reader against assigning his last chapter the same weight as his earlier ones, noting how close to its events we are and how partial our access to sources.

After P. G. Maxwell-Stuart’s quite good book and Eamon Duffy’s outstanding one, the new history by Richard McBrien seems painfully bad. A theologian at Notre Dame and a widely published author on Catholic topics in America, McBrien manages to come across in his latest work as unpleasantly didactic and superior, continually warning his readers against “naive views” few of them are likely ever to have held.

So, for example, we are warned at least four times that not until Pope Plus I around the year 144 did there emerge a “monoepiscopal” form of church government. Duffy, thinking about much the same point, proposes — in explanation for the slow emergence of a single leader in Rome — that, for some time, Christians came disproportionately from the Jewish community and organized themselves along the lines of local synagogues. But McBrien offers neither explanation nor evidence for his assertion, and seems in fact not to grasp the notion of the continuing office of an apostle that the Book of Acts tells us was present even in the first generation of Christians (with, for example, the election of Matthias to fill the office of Judas).

McBrien’s main passion in Lives of the Popes is to debunk, as constantly revealed in his officious announcements of what the papacy is not: “Before the beginning of the second millennium and of the pontificate of Gregory VII in particular (1073-85), popes . . . did not claim for themselves the title of “Vicar of Christ.’ They did not appoint bishops. They did not govern the universal church through the Roman curia. They did not impose or enforce clerical celibacy. They did not write encyclicals or authorize catechisms for the whole church. They did not retain for themselves alone the power of canonization,” etc. Indeed, McBrien’s last lines before his epilogue are: “Few, if any, traditions associated with the papacy have anything at all to do with the Apostle Peter, or with the Lord himself for that matter. If nothing else is clear from this lengthy review of more than 260 popes, at least that should be clear.”

But at various points McBrien reveals as well his second passion: to undo the work of the present pope and return to the wildest days that followed the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. The author would have to shout to make any plainer his devout hope that the next pope will be the opposite of John Paul II, and he dedicates his book to the pope who initiated Vatican II, John XXIII (1958-1963), “the most beloved pope in history.” In fact, “Good Pope John” was much loved. But he was also very limited, and he knew it. He was often quite conservative (which McBrien ignores), and his posthumous Journal of a Soul proved mediocre in its piety and quite traditional in its sentiments.

The problem with McBrien’s passions is that they force him to read church history ahistorically — verything seen backward through the lens of the Second Vatican Council (as he chooses to interpret that Council). Passionately engaged in the politics of the papacy, he gives disproportionate attention to how many ballots there were in papal elections, and who may have said what to sway which votes. McBrien’s church is divided politically between those white hats whose theology is “progressive” and those black hats who are “conservative,” “ultraconservative,” “reactionary,” or — yen worse in his lexicon — “restorationist.” He may add “Let the arguments begin!” after writing “Those, for example, who regard Boniface VIII as one of the church’s best popes rather than one of its worst, as this book claims, are evidently working out of a different ecclesiology from those who agree with this book’s judgment that Pope John XXIII is the most outstanding pope in all of history.” But self-declared tendentiousness hardly makes for a recommendable guide to the history of the papacy.

One serious lacuna weakens all three of these new papal histories, for all three are so focused on personalities that they have little space to discuss the significance of the very institution of the papacy. The reader would scarcely learn, for example, that scholars have begun in recent years to explore the importance of ultimate Roman jurisdiction for the development of European economics, philosophy, and international law. The universality of canon law, these scholars note, was vital in resolving disputes among abbots, bishops, aristocrats, kings, and emperors — and more than that, in creating the abstract sense that there is such a thing as law. Just as the thousands of cellbate men and women in religious communities often played vital economic roles (in the wool trade in England, for instance, and the iron industry in France), so the great monasteries — which were under the direct protection of the pope, not the local bishops — helped produced new technologies for water power, sea travel, clocks, harnessing horses, mining, and smelting, not to mention the brewing of beers and liqueurs. Not merely in the arts but in technology and science, the papacy played a key institutional role.

Being for two thousand years a primary mover in the economic and social development of Europe may have been a consequence of the papacy; but it was, of course, hardly its primary purpose. The papacy existed fundamentally for the sake of protecting the integrity of the chain of evidence concerning Jesus Christ and his church. From the beginning, various brilliant and highly trained preachers (as, for example, the eloquent impostors Marcion, Valentinus, and Tatian in the second century) tampered with that evidence, often to great popular acclaim. Possibly more than any other factor, the acute need to prevent such perversions of the gospel led the early church of Rome to issue public condemnations — and thus gradually to assume its premier place among Christian churches.

This was a matter of moral seriousness and fidelity to truth, and it may have been as well a matter of survival, since spies of the emperor were collecting all sorts of rumors, scandals, and whisperings against Christians as reasons for torture and killings. The early Christians were prepared to die for what they held as true, but not for false substitutes.

And yet, however it came about, this concern with doctrine — with preserving the teaching of Jesus — is what most distinguishes the papacy. For more than two generations, the infant church lacked a complete Bible, and throughout the Roman Empire it lived under constant threat of persecution. Yet, slowly, the Christian community proved capable of keeping its identity intact at a very high level, recruiting to its cause highly trained minds in love with the pursuit of truth and willing to die in that pursuit. The existence of a bishopric in Rome that stood for doctrinal authenticity allowed this geographically dispersed community to become a “catholic” church — not merely a local Roman or Ephesian or Colossian branch of Judaism.

All three authors of the 1997 papal histories are unsparing of the scoundrel popes during the two especially bad stretches (one in the early middle ages, the other in the late). One hates to suggest it, for fear Hollywood might take it up, but some occupants of the papal throne make modern soap-opera characters seem innocent children. That popes may (under certain strict conditions) speak infallibly has never prevented them from gargantuan sins. It does not even prevent them from making theological mistakes and needing correction by later popes. Duffy calls his book Sinners & Saints, and it must be said that the sinners sometimes seem more colorful, even when smelling of sulfur. But the fact remains that “At the heart of Christianity is the sinner,” as the French poet Charles Peguy used to say. And even sinners are capable of being instruments of God’s purposes — to say nothing of doing things of considerable human beauty and importance: building great libraries, for instance, and sponsoring the beginnings of a dozen new sciences, and commissioning breathtaking works of art.

All three of last year’s authors tend to see the history of the papacy in three stages: an early, chiefly spiritual office becoming ever more heavily burdened with worldly concerns; moving through opposition and conflict to surrender, usually reluctantly and suspiciously, worldly power; and thence back toward its beginnings, this time self-conscious about its necessary liberties and rights. Perhaps not so oddly, after the loss of the papal states and the reduction of the Vatican to a few acres, the office of the papacy may be more universally influential today than it has ever been before.

When papal leadership is poor, as often enough it has been, Catholics look elsewhere for spiritual leadership (to such holy persons as St. Catherine of Siena, for example, at the time of the Avignon captivity of the papacy). But they do still maintain the pope, even then, as the reference point for their unity and the guarantor of the integrity of their faith — a faith already given, not invented by anyone holding the office of pope in the Holy, Roman, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. That office, solely by the grace of God, is guaranteed against the furies of the gates of Hell. Or so Catholics have believed, without regret, for almost two thousand years.

Michael Novak holds the George Jewett Chair in religion and public policy at the American Enterprise Institute. The Rocky History of St.