Biggest of the Big Papas

[duckduckswan]

Hello oh rulers of the most fascinating of the CFC forums. I'm doing a medical study and during some down time at the clinic got sucked into a Dan Brown-esque novel which deals with a big catholic conspiracy.

This got me to thinking about Popes and their amazing history, I was wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of a good book/website about their past, both sordid and positive? Searching the forum I found an interesting tidbit about John XXIII being an ex-pirate, and I recall hearing a story about one Pope making his daughter his successor? I find the history fascinating and was hoping you guys could point out some interesting stories. I have only the faintest knowledge of the schism and anti-pope stuff, any enlightenment would be much appreciated.

Cheers,
Swan

 

[LightSpectra]

Papal history is one of the most difficult to deal with for the imaginative. Since the Papacy is such a sensitive issue to Christians, basically every myth you'll ever hear has been remolded into absurd Catholic lore. The one you mentioned was Pope Joan; conspiracy theorists love to harp on about that, since the absence of a Pope John XX has been cited as evidence that revisionist chroniclers have deleted her from Papal history. (In reality, it was almost certainly copyist error.)

In fact, even professional historians typically get a lot of things wrong. For instance, you'll still see in a lot of (otherwise) respectable texts that Pope Paul V persecuted Galileo because he was a hardcore geocentrist, or that Leo X authorized the selling of indulgences in order to remodel St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

 

[Cynovolans]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Joan

There is the story of the La Pappesa , Pope Joan. Though I don't think there is an inch of truth in that story.

 

[duckduckswan]

Very interesting, thanks guys. This is exactly the sort of stuff I'm curious about, any interesting stories whether they'er apocryphal or not. Granted, I'd rather it has historical fact backing it up, I'm not interested in fiction for fiction's sake. Any tips for looking at the Catholic hierarchy during the medieval age?

 

[Dachs]

Read about the pornocracy. It's smegtastic!

 

[LightSpectra]

Very interesting, thanks guys. This is exactly the sort of stuff I'm curious about, any interesting stories whether they'er apocryphal or not. Granted, I'd rather it has historical fact backing it up, I'm not interested in fiction for fiction's sake. Any tips for looking at the Catholic hierarchy during the medieval age?

Most of the apocryphal stories are so ridiculous that they aren't even worth the bother to listen to. Though I will admit that the posthumous trial of Pope Formosus is amusing, because that arguably actually happened.

In my opinion, it's really the saintly popes that are far more interesting than the ones who've been absorbed into mythology. Pope St. Gregory VII absolving Henry IV at Canossa is one of the most eye-popping events in medieval history, if you ask me. Pope Pius XII's actions during WWII saved between 500,000 and 700,000 lives; one man is responsible for all that. Pope St. Pius V had successfully organized a Holy League to confront the Ottomans, which resulted in the decisive victory in 1571 at Lepanto, their first naval defeat in almost two centuries.

 

[Dachs]

the decisive victory in 1571 at Lepanto, their first naval defeat in almost two centuries.

 

[LightSpectra]

Well if you want to count Tunis as a "battle", then be my guest.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Read about the pornocracy. It's smegtastic!

Well if you want to count Tunis as a "battle", then be my guest.

I believe the owl was questioning the decisiveness of Lepanto.

 

[Dachs]

Nah, it was the two centuries bit. But that part's irrelevant and off topic! I strongly recommend that the OP read more about Sergius III! And then if that depresses you with how terrible the papacy can be, read about Pius VII to hear about how pitiful things can get. And then maybe Greg I for an awesome one?

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Nah the glory days of Papal interestingness/amusement are more or less centered around Julius II.

 

[LightSpectra]

Julius II is a complicated figure. He was personally unpopular in the Papal States (tongue semi-twister!), so you hear the usual rumors about him (homosexuality, favoritism, simony, etc.); that makes it difficult to assess his actual figure. Patronage of the arts in this particular era was seen as perpendicular to (another tongue twister!) to gluttony and misuse of Church funds, though in retrospect, baroque arts often inspired spirituality. Nowadays, we have him to thank for the Sistine Chapel, even though Michelangelo personally thought he was a jerk.

Likewise, everybody who wrote about Sergius III absolutely despised him. The consensus perhaps verifies that he was rather immoral, though on the other hand, we have little in his defense. The anecdote about re-exhuming Formosus, re-trying him, beheading his corpse and dumping it in the river is almost certainly false, for instance. It's likely the writers of the day were using Formosus as a symbol to suggest that Sergius III was worse than everybody before him.

 

[duckduckswan]

Huh, never would have thought a pope would chose the name Greg. Or is that short for something? Please correct me if I've heard wrong but hasn't Pius XII been called "Hitler's Pope"?

 

[LightSpectra]

Huh, never would have thought a pope would chose the name Greg. Or is that short for something?

I'm assuming English isn't your first language, here; but his name was "Gregory," a name which is often shortened as "Greg" when speaking informally.

Please correct me if I've heard wrong but hasn't Pius XII been called "Hitler's Pope"?

Yes, and the author of the book "Hitler's Pope," John Cornwell, recanted his work and said that his thesis was completely wrong.

 

[Plotinus]

Gregory was an extremely popular name for Christians in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. It comes from the Greek for "awake", and was used because Christians believed they were called to watch, wakefully, for Christ's coming at all times (Mark 13:33-37). In fact Christians often took this literally; it was common for ancient Christians to get up in the middle of the night to pray, and monks typically tried to go without sleep as much as possible. When they did sleep, they would do so propped up against the wall. There are stories of some of them going without sleep for years, a feat made possible by the fact that they spent a lot of their time in a state of prayer that was effectively a form of self-hypnosis.

As for the medieval popes, yes, it is very hard to get reliable information. Pope Joan certainly didn't exist, as has already been mentioned. She is a good case in point, though, since I remember that when I first looked her up on Wikipedia I found that the article treated her as if she was a genuine historical figure! I rewrote it completely to be more reliable, and it looks from the link given above that the basic form of my revision has endured. There are a number of books on the popes or the history of the papacy, but I don't know which are most reliable. As a rule of thumb, I think that Catholic sources for this sort of thing tend to be the most reliable. You might think otherwise, since Catholic sources are obviously going to be biased in how they view the popes, but they are usually accurate on the facts even if they are pushing for a particular interpretation of those facts. Non-Catholic sources may be more biased. The most reliable source I know for church history, for example, is the New Catholic Encyclopaedia, but you'll have to look in a research library for it since it runs to over twenty big volumes. You can find the old Catholic Encyclopaedia online, and it too is fairly good on the facts, but it is a lot more biased than modern Catholic sources and also, of course, it is based on scholarship that is a century old. So use that one with caution.

 

[Verbose]

If apocrypha is OK, I guess the legends surrounding Gerbert of Aurillac (c. 946-1003), aka Pope Sylvester II, as a sorcerer would do?

 

[Lord Baal]

As a cheap excuse to subscribe to this thread, I'll mention that the Pope Joan story had part of its origin in the epithet "we have women for Popes" thrown at many Popes ruled by their mistresses.

 

[duckduckswan]

Stupid me, I don't know how such a common name escaped my tiny brain. Of course Gregory, I was thinking of something Greek sounding such as ending with an "-entous"

Thanks so much for the Catholic Encyclopedia link P! I'll definitely be wandering through it to learn more.

Baal brings up a really interesting point about mistresses. Was it not always that the Pope was a priest, or that they didn't take vows of celibacy? Or that they simply ignored such rules? Disregarding that St. Pete was numero uno and a Jew (maybe a Rabbi himself, does anyone know the answer to this?) was the Papacy something that evolved into/from a priest's job?

I'm not Catholic but I'm falling into quite the interesting rabbit hole here. One final question, I recently heard/read somewhere that Pope John Paul II canonized more people than all the other popes in history, but can't recall where. Any grain of truth to this?

 

[Lord Baal]

Popes often disregarded the celibacy rule - not surprising really, given how many other rules they disregarded. I have no idea if the early Popes had such a rule though.

 

[Plotinus]

It is true that John Paul II canonised more people than anyone else. He really liked canonising people.

St Peter was not a rabbi. Rabbis didn't even exist in his day - they were a post-70 development that emerged with rabbinical Judaism, towards the end of the first century or later - but Peter probably died in the mid-60s. The equivalent to a rabbi in Peter's day would have been a Pharisee or some other highly trained scholar of the law, but there is no reason to suppose that Peter was one - although Paul was, of course.

But it's obviously anachronistic to talk about Peter as a pope or even a bishop, at least if we mean by those anything like the usual later meaning. The episcopacy itself hadn't yet developed in Peter's day; it developed slowly and at different rates in different places, and there's even good reason to think that it developed relatively slowly in Rome itself, to the extent that there wasn't really "a" bishop of Rome until the end of the second century. We don't know what Peter's role in Rome was - in fact we don't even know for certain that he was there at all - but it seems most likely that he would have been a relatively informal leader of a group of Christians there - possibly all of them, or possibly just a faction. It would be a long time before this evolved into the papacy.

Clerical celibacy seems to have developed in late antiquity or the early Middle Ages. We know of a number of priests or even bishops who were married in antiquity (Gregory of Nyssa is a prominent example, although not a completely definite one). Popes were always priests, although they weren't necessarily priests before they became popes - in those days it was quite possible to be baptised as a Christian, ordained as a priest, and consecrated as a bishop all at the same time, or on consecutive days. The fact is that in the Middle Ages, for much of the time, priests and even bishops simply ignored the rules about clerical celibacy. Much of medieval church history can be categorised as an alternation between periods when people got slack about this sort of thing and periods of reform when they tried to stamp it out. Some of the most important medieval popes, such as Gregory VII, made their name as reformers who sought to enforce things like clerical celibacy or stamp out things like simony. However, I don't think there were many medieval popes who took the opposite approach and ignored the celibacy rules themselves - I think that was more of a Renaissance thing, and even there it wasn't really such a common practice as people like to think. But that's not something I know much about.