30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A solid work with a few flaws, January 14, 2002
McBrien tries to compress almoat 2,000 years of religious, social and political history into one volume and does a pretty solid job. He gives anywhere from a few paragraphs to a few pages on the over 260 popes throughout history, with the bulk of his text spread out over the popes of the 20th century.
For the most part, McBrien looks at the popes with a scholarly and critical eye, describing how most of the popes throughout history were preoccupied with political and military matters rather than spiritual ones.
However, he does drift from a scholarly, critical examination from time to time. For example, I thought that he was improperly airing out his theological complaints against the current pope in his section on John Paul II (McBrien is theology chairman at Notre Dame), but I enjoyed his passage about the much-beloved pope, John XXIII. (can someone out there recommend any good books on this pope?)
McBrien ends this reference work with some papal facts, like "best and worst" and "firsts and lasts" and has a chronological list, as well as an alphabetical list, of the popes. However, my favorite parts of this book were the introductions to each chronological period of papal history. McBrien gives a general picture of the mood of the day and how each pope dealt with military, political (and sometimes spiritual) issues of the day. He also takes a look at internal church politics and stresses that throughout history, popes were sometimes under control of kings, emperors, powerful families and groups of bishops and clergy.
I've even used this book to settle barroom discussions over popes and in August, 2002, when the press began to ask if Pope John Paul II was going to resign, I referenced this book when people were asking me if other popes have resigned in the past (they did, BTW).
The book is a solid reference if you someone asks you who Pope Eugenius or Sixtus II was, and when they were popes. Since McBrien had 2,000 years of history to cover, it piqued my curiosity to learn more about these fascinating individuals and the times in which they lived.
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23 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
an interesting book, reab about a pope a day, February 20, 2003
Apparently the author is a dissenter in the catholic church, unbeknowngst to me. I picked this up in Italy to read about all the popes(most of which I knew nothing about). This book, with its short synopsis on each pope is a great read. It also illustrates the marvelous variety of personalities that inherited the throne of peter. From the smiling Pope John Paul I to the warrior pope Julious II. It details the roman persecutions and shows how few popes were killed in the period, details the schisms and also the sexual adventures of the popes. Shows how many popes were murdered, and how many had short periods in power. It also details the papal election process and its developments. A must read for those interested in a history of the Popes without the usual tenderness associated with some publications and the usual wordiness of academics.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Lots of ground to cover, January 12, 2007
This review is from: Lives of The Popes: The Pontiffs from St. Peter to John Paul II (Hardcover)
McBrien, as he states right in the introduction to this book, is the first to admit that it is impossible to adequately cover the lives of all 260+ popes in a single book - other reserchers have written multiple volume works and/or devoted their entire lives to the same task. So, his somewhat sparse treatment of the lives of all of the Popes, even the most historically significant or interesting ones, is understandable - there simply wasn't room (or time) to do so.
Given that qualifier, the book is a good general introduction to the lives of every pope up through the late John Paul II. Its value is primarily as a starting point for learning how the Popes [and Christian thought and institutions in general] have evolved over the centuries, and to help us grasp the papacy's significance and impact on world history.
I would not say that Richard McBrien is a world class wordsmith. Much of the text is repetitive - how many times, for instance, do I need to be told what a Pallium is, or that a newly elected pope is technically not a pope until he is made a Bishop of Rome? One gets the impression that most of these one paragraph to two or three page mini-biographies were written as stand-alone documents, then assembled into a single volume. Even then, you often see the same sentence or parenthetical comment repeated two or three times within the biography of a single Pope.
McBrien presents each Pope in chronological order, and often discusses schisms and controversies of the time, the subject's relationships and connections with other past or future Popes, and their interactions with other European rulers. He segments the 2000 year history of the papacy into several large spans of time, such as the Early Papacy, the Reformation era, and the Modern era. At the start of each section, he gives a summary of the general tone and direction of the popes who ruled in those periods, and of the times in which they lived, before diving into their individual biographies. While the introductions to each section are again a bit repetitive, they did give me a better sense of how each pope's reign fit into the overall historical picture and the great events of the time.
All in all, this is a worthwile book: even though it is not as well written as I'd like, is a bit dry, has alot of material to plow through, and was made longer by a fair amount of needless repetition (which I would suppose has resulted in other interesting material being omitted).
As well as filling-in many blanks, I did learn some new information in reading this book, and, by virtue of the papacy's natural focus on Southern Europe, also presented me with a historical perspective different from that of the England- and North European-centric authors I've read in the past.
One interesting thing I learned in reading this book was the papacy's very early and ongoing interest in missions to China (starting in around 1300 AD or so), and their ongoing attempts to reconcile standardization and control over that church and its worship with the need to minister (in an understandable, approachable way) to a people with a language and culture entirely unfamiliar to Europeans.
I recommend "Lives of the Popes" as a good starting point for those interested in European History or the evolution of the Roman Catholic Church; and as a good supplementary resource for those wishing to learn more about the empires and kingdoms that replaced the old Roman Empire - and how they evolved up to the present day.
Now that I've read it end to end, I think I'll keep it as a starting point and reference material for my future informal research into World History.
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