The Scarperer: The Popes: A History...

Wednesday, 18 April 2012

The Popes: A History...

I'm reading The Popes: A History by John Julius Norwich. As you might surmise, it's a history of the 280 Popes; heads of the Catholic Church from St Peter to Benedict XVI. The book opens with the assertion, "What cannot be denied is that Roman Catholicism began with Christianity itself; all other Christian religions – and there are more than 22,000 of them – are offshoots or deviations from it." As the Guardian review states, this is a bit dismissive and cavalier of Norwich. However, his book doesn't suffer from this approach.

What drew me to this book was the write up on the back cover,

Of the 280-odd holders of the supreme office, some have unquestionably been saints; others have wallowed in unspeakable iniquity. One was said to have been a woman, her sex being revealed only when she improvidently gave birth to a baby during a papal procession. Almost as shocking was Formosus whose murdered corpse was exhumed, clothed in pontifical vestments, propped up on a throne and subjected to trial; or John XII, of whom Gibbon wrote 'his rapes of virgins and widows had deterred the female pilgrims from visiting the shrine of St Peter'.

And that's before you mention the Borgia Pope Alexander VI and his crimes of adultery, theft, rape, bribery, incest, and murder.

It's the more salacious passages that appeal to me (and, I dare say, many others). Norwich's style certainly plays to the gallery in this respect. Of Paul II: “He seems to have had two weaknesses, for good-looking young men and for melons; the stroke that killed him was said to have been brought on by a surfeit of both.” On John XXIII: “The most scandalous charges were suppressed; the Vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy and incest.”

Of course, the book is more than a romp through the Vatican's dirty laundry over the last 2,000 years; there is much here that is informative as well as entertaining. When Christ said to Peter, "And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church"; if claims that Peter was crucified then buried outside Rome on the Vatican Hill are true, then Peter is quite literally as well as figuratively the foundation stone.