Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes.

In the spring of 1996, when Umberto Bossi's Northern League began to agitate for the separation of northern Italy from the rest of the nation and the formation of an independent state called Padania, the Italian bishops' conference was meeting in Rome. When the news reached them several bishops at once called news conferences to defend the unity of the Italian nation, and later in the week the pope added his voice to theirs. How different things were in the nineteenth century! The popes were militant foes of the revolutionary movement to unite the people of the Italian peninsula in a single state. A unified Italy would certainly mean the dissolution of the Papal States, a vast territory that included Rome and much of central Italy, and the end of the temporal power of the papacy. This is of course what happened. Even in the early twentieth century, the saintly and pastoral Pius X (1903-14) "detested the Italian state," says Duffy. It was not until Pius XI (1922-39) that a pope opened a window toward Italy and gave the blessing Urbi et Orbi from the balcony in Saint Peter's Square.

The loss of the papal states to France at the time of the French Revolution, their restoration at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and then their absorption into the new republic of Italy in 1869 is the background for any understanding of the modern papacy, and one of the merits of this fine book is that Duffy tells this story in great detail. For the nineteenth century is the great turning point in the history of the papacy. From the time of the Merovingian kings in the eighth century the pope was not simply the bishop of Rome and the spiritual leader of the churches of the West, he was also a prince and a monarch ruling a huge territory in Italy. In the minds of the popes and other Christian leaders the spiritual independence of the church was dependent on the pope's temporal power. With the loss of the Papal States the papacy faced an uncertain future.

Saints and Sinners (an unhappy title that I suspect is not Duffy's doing) grew out of a series of television programs for British and Irish television that will also be broadcast on the History Channel in the United States in 1998, and in Canada on TV Ontario and the Knowledge Network beginning this month. Eamon Duffy, a Catholic layman, is Reader in Church History and a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and the author of the acclaimed Stripping of the Altars, a study of the English Reformation. This new book offers the most comprehensive one-volume history in English of the popes from ancient times to the pontificate of John Paul II. It is not an original work of interpretation; Duffy's task is to present a balanced and continuous narrative with as much personal and historical detail as possible. This he does admirably with an eye for lively anecdotes and apt quotations. At the same time he is sensitive to conflicting views, and his account is judicious and fair throughout. Only when he comes to the more recent popes, especially Paul VI and John Paul II, about whom opinions are deeply divided, will some readers have reason to quarrel with his judgments.

The book is beautifully produced (though the print is painfully small), and the text is accompanied by 150 magnificent photos, a rich bibliographical essay, glossary, index, and chronological list of the popes. With all this it dismays me to say that in the first line of the preface there is an embarrassing error that escaped the proofreaders. "Nearly 90 million human beings ... look to the pope as their spiritual leader." I take it Duffy had written 900 million.

The book divides the history of the popes into six large periods. The first, titled "upon this rock," treats the early centuries up to the reign of Leo the Great (d. 461), the first pope to have an almost mystical identification with the person of Peter. The second section, "between two empires," tells the story of the gradual turning of the popes away from the East (after the collapse of the Byzantine Empire in Italy) and the orientation of the papacy to Europe and its kings. In the first thousand years this turning to the West is the single most important development. Until very recent times, the character of the papacy and most of the actions of the popes have been shaped by this Western orientation. The third section, "set above the nations," begins with the the great reforming popes (most of whom were monks) of the Middle Ages, for example, Gregory VII (1037-85), and ends in the decline of the papacy and schism in the early sixteenth century. By that time the popes were definitely not "above the nations," and the next period, "protest and division," begins with an account of the Renaissance papacy (including an insightful discussion of Nicholas [1447-55]) and ends mordantly with the pusillanimous and servile Clement XIV (1769 - 74). Along the way Duffy includes a full account of the popes during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.

Fully one-third of the book, the two final sections, is devoted to the last two hundred years. In the period from the French Revolution through Leo XIII, the struggle of the popes to hold onto the temporal sovereignty of the papacy colored their approach to all other questions. But, argues Duffy, resistance to the new political and intellectual developments (for example, in the Syllabus of Errors) was not simply a matter of nostalgia or intransigence; there were sound reasons for opposition to the new forces. The world that was being born was hostile to Christianity, and the European monarchs wanted to run the church and use it for their own ends. Holding onto temporal power was one way to preserve the church's independence. Indeed, there are interesting parallels between opposition by popes in the eleventh century to lay investiture and the defense of papal prerogatives in the nineteenth century. Duffy also shows that the more the church was forced to accommodate to the new political realities, the more the pope assumed new authority within the church itself. When the territory of the Papal States came under the rule of the Italian republic, the new nation surrendered any claim to the appointment of bishops. As a consequence, the pope took over this responsibility, "a move of enormous significance," writes Duffy.

In the twentieth century, the papacy, freed of the burden of temporal power, was reborn. It still had the responsibility of making concordats with the European nations, France, Germany, Italy, and, of course, confronting fascism (Duffy has some good words in defense of Pius XII's efforts on behalf of the Jews) and communism; but what comes through in this account is the pastoral orientation of the popes (beginning with Plus X who held catechism classes in the courtyard of San Damaso every Sunday afternoon), and the renewal of the church's interior life through papal initiative, not only Vatican II, but earlier in the century through reforms in canon law, liturgy, seminary education, and attention to the younger churches, especially under Pius XI. At the accession of Pius XI not one missionary diocese in the Catholic church was led by an indigenous bishop. By 1939 there were forty, and the number of local-born priests had trebled to over 7,000. At the beginning of this century the fortunes of the papacy seemed at an all-time low, but by the end of the century the pope has a "spiritual status ... greater than at any time since the high Middle Ages." In large measure Duffy attributes this to the "personality and patent Christian goodness of so many of the recent popes."

If there is an overall theme to Duffy's account of the popes, it is that the "mere existence of the papacy, and even its most self-aggrandizing claims, have again and again helped ensure that the local churches of Christendom retained something of a universal Christian vision, that they did not entirely collapse back into the narrowness of religious nationalism, or become entirely subordinated to the will of the powerful secular leaders." Often in the course of the long history of the papacy the popes themselves hardly pointed to such a transcendent vision. Yet, Duffy is surely correct, and it is a measure of his historical imagination and theological astuteness that he would come to that conclusion after examining the lives and works of the popes in such detail.

Robert Louis Wilken is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Virgin ia. His most recent book is Remembering the Christian Past (Wm. B. Eerdmans).