Saturday, July 9, 2011
Papal Populism
Not quite sure about this one. The author, a self-described non-scholar and "agnostic Protestant" (that seems intended as oxymoron but it comes across more as swellingly proud redundancy) takes a drag race through 2000 years of Church history, coming around full circle to report, as the reviewer tells it, that "the popes who achieved greatness . . . were outnumbered by the corrupt, the inept, the venal, the lecherous, the ruthless, the mediocre and those who didn’t last long enough to make a mark." This finding is preceded by the reviewer's warning that "[i]f you were raised Catholic, you may find it disconcerting to see an institution you were taught to think of as the repository of the faith so thoroughly deconsecrated." I don't feel especially disconcerted or deconsecrated, but I haven't read the book. But I suppose the reviewer must believe in earnest that this book is really doing a great service by explaining the papacy to Catholics -- notoriously innocent as we are of both history and culture [eliminated, since there seemed to be confusion about whether I think Catholics don't know a lot about history and culture]. I'm reminded of Bernard-Henri Lévy's anthropological expedition through the American south; he, too, thought that America was best explained to Americans through the medium of realist popular zoology.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/07/papal-populism.html
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I have read almost all of John Julius Norwich's historical works, and they are wonderful. He is a fabulous writer, and his books appeal to a lot of people. They are not academic histories, but they do not claim to be. His work on the history of Byzantium, for example, is rife with the various scandals that shook the various courts throughout its long and often ignominious history.
I have obviously not read this book yet, as it comes out on Tuesday, although I have already ordered a copy. I have read a lot of books about the Popes of various eras, and they were a remarkable lot. (Think about Alexander VI, for example. Remarkable is not the right word for him, now that I think about it.) I think that Catholics can take some pride in the fact that the Church has survived as long as it has, whether its survival is because of its mundane leadership or despite it. I also think that Catholics tend (as Marc pointed out) not to know a lot about the history of the institution to which they belong. Teaching Papal history of the sixth through ninth centuries to Catholic college students for whom the period was entirely new was eye-opening for them and for me.
The Church is, after all, a worldly and political institution, run by very human people, a lot of whom, having fought their way to the top, are a lot more human than others. I don't know of many scholarly Catholics who would argue to the contrary.