We've looked at popes from both sides now.

Have a spate of recent books on the papacy been robbing Peter to pay for publicity? Or do they chronicle the development of a modern style of church leadership?

MARTIN LUTHER, WHO HAD HIS OWN STRUGGLES with the papacy, believed that all Christians were both sinners and saints (simul iustus et peccator). No doubt he would have thought the same thing about popes, particularly if he were alive today. In the last couple of years there's been a storm gathering around the Vatican regarding good and bad pontiffs, a storm that came to a head in September when John Paul II beatified both John XXIII and Pius IX. Many Catholics and other interested pope-watchers were astounded and disappointed at this odd coupling: of the engaging and optimistic pope who opened Vatican II with the 19th-century prelate who instituted the infamous Syllabus of Errors, pushed papal infallibility on the church, and declared war on modern culture, politics, and thought.

Still, the recent papal fuss has not been limited to "Good Pope John" and "Plo Nono." Recent years have seen a spate of bestselling books praising and condemning modern popes--some of them giving the papacy credit for ending the Cold War and bringing the church into the third millennium, some of them blaming popes for collaborating with the Holocaust and attempting to drag the church back into a medieval past. Some popes have been held up as courageous, compassionate, and ecumenical, extolled for acknowledging past sins and opening doors to reform, renewal, and reconciliation. Meanwhile, other pontiffs (or sometimes the very same ones) have been vilified as anti-modern--and sometimes anti-Semitic--autocrats unfit to wear the "shoes of the fisherman."

Twenty-two years into the longest pontificate of the 20th century, John Paul II has been the focus of dozens of books, with (at least) four major and largely complimentary biographies on Karol Wojtyla appearing in the last five years. New York Times reporter Tad Szulc's solid and highly readable Pope John Paul II: The Biography (Pocket Books, 1996) traces the Polish roots of Wojtyla's life and thought, examining the complex relationship the young cleric--and later archbishop and pontiff--had with his country's communist regime. Szulc also reports on the pope's significant efforts to improve church relations with Judaism and the state of Israel.

In Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi's more sensational and less convincing His Holiness: John Paul II and the History of Our Time (Penguin, 1996), the two investigative reporters examine--and probably exaggerate--the pope's secret role in Poland's Solidarity movement and the demise of Soviet communism. Along the way they also offer the now-standard criticisms of the pope's unbending defense of the church's ban on contraception and abortion as well as his forceful reaction to internal and theological criticism and dissent.

IT'S CLEAR FROM THE TITLE OF JONATHAN KWITNY'S Man of the Century: The Life and Times of Pope John Paul II (Henry Holt, 1997) that the former Wall Street Journal reporter also sees Wojtyla as the person most responsible for bringing down the Iron Curtain, albeit through moral vision and activist leadership that inspired those who eventually undermined Soviet domination. At the same time, the author is not uncritical of the pope's response to internal dissent or of his fierce defense of official teachings on sexuality, gender, and celibacy.

It is, however, in George Weigel's impressive (even massive) Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (HarperCollins, 1999) that the pope receives his most thorough and flattering treatment. Weigel, invited by Wojtyla to write this work, has amassed a nearly staggering amount of information about the life, career, and thought of one of the most prolific and activist popes of all time. But unlike Szulc and the others, Weigel has come to praise not only John Paul II's struggles against communism and his formidable efforts at improved relations with Judaism--but also to argue that the pope has been correct in his dealings with dissenting voices from liberation, feminist, and other theologians. According to Weigel, these critics have not adequately understood the thought or mission of this modern-day pope.

More recently, the modern papacy much rougher treatment at the hands of Garry Wills in his recent and controversial Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit (Doubleday, 2000).

Beginning with Pius IX, Wills contends, the popes of the past century and a half have subordinated the truth to papal concerns or agendas, creating and sustaining sinful structures of deceit." Wills complains about the Vatican's inability to admit to mistakes, its tendency to make overblown claims about papal authority or equally exaggerated complaints against modern society and thought, as well as its entrenched positions on several questions relating to sex, gender, and celibacy. According to the author, these tendencies or "sins" have undermined the church's credibility among intelligent Catholics, forcing clergy and theologians to articulate completely untenable positions and resulting in structural dishonesty in a church committed to "The Splendor of Truth."

THE PAPAL SINS ARE PERSONAL, NOT social, in John Cornwell's controversial bestseller Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pope Plus XII (Viking, 1999). Claiming to have discovered secret information from extensive visits to the Vatican archives, Cornwell makes two accusations against this wartime pontiff: that he could and should have done more to condemn and resist the Holocaust, and that he failed to oppose the Nazis in part because collaboration and silence advanced his personal goal of enhancing papal authority and in part because he was himself an anti-Semite.

Such charges are hotly denied in Pierre Blet's Pius XII and the Second World War: According to the Archives of the Vatican (Paulist, 1999), which offers a synthesis of 12 volumes of Vatican archival materials. According to Blet, the pope did all he could have to help Holocaust victims, and there is no reason to be ashamed of his record. That is more or less the argument offered in two other recent texts, Margherita Marchione's Pope Pius XII: Architect for Peace (Paulist, 2000) and Ronald Rychlak's Hitler, the War and the Pope (Genesis, 2000).

Still, Michael Phayer's well-regarded and scholarly volume The Catholic Church and the Holocaust: 1930-1965 (Indiana University, 2000) is quite critical of Pius XII's failure to do more for Jewish victims, before and after the Holocaust, and takes the postwar Vatican to task for helping Nazi and fascist war criminals escape prosecution.

The cast of good and not-so-good pontiffs is much broader in Eamon Duffy's Saints & Sinners: A History of the Popes (Yale, 1997) and Richard McBrien's Lives of the Popes: The Pontiffs from St. Peter to John Paul II (HarperSanFrancisco, 1999). Duffy has produced a rich and masterful pilgrimage through papal history, giving us a glimpse of the growth, development, and occasional decay of this holy office and the men under the tiara. The encyclopedic McBrien offers readers a fascinating gallery of papal portraits, introducing us to the many saints and occasional scoundrels among Peter's 261 successors--and even providing us with a rating of the best and worst prelates down through the years.

In the end, whether we think a particular pope is a saint or sinner, there's little doubt that the papacy has been transformed over the years. In two recent pieces in America magazine, Jesuit historian John O'Malley argues that the most important change to take place in the church over the past millennium has been "the papalization of Catholicism." His fellow Jesuit, Avery Dulles, has argued that our global church requires a pope who can be pastor to the whole planet and that Vatican structures need to be big enough and effective enough to reach out to Catholics everywhere. Not too surprisingly, John Paul II's activist style of leadership suits Dulles' (and George Weigel's) vision of the church pretty well.

Others, however, like Eamon Duffy, Richard McBrien, Archbishop Rembert Weakland, and retired Archbishop John Quinn are concerned that the growth of the papacy and the Roman curia needs to be balanced by the legitimate authority of bishops and councils. In The Reform of the Papacy: The Costly Call to Christian Unity (Crossroad, 2000), Quinn expands on his 1996 Oxford lecture and argues persuasively that there is a need for "reform and change in the papal office." These arguments are all the more serious as they come from someone who has a deep respect and affection for the present pope, and for the office he holds.

By Patrick McCORMICK, an associate professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane Washington.