Customer Reviews

Lives of the Popes : The Pontiffs from St. Peter to John Paul II

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is a great book if you're curious about the basics of the life of a particular pontiff, or about papal statistics (i.e., shortest reign, longest reign, dates of reigns, etc.). It is not a history, and does not advertise to be one. It is a reference book from which history can be extracted (there are sections on papal history and the book is divided up into sections or epochs). You can literally pull up the name of a pope and get a glimpse of what his rule was like, as well as the highlights and relevant dates for each pope.

This book was perfect for me, coming from a non-catholic background. Since it does not read like a book laden with catholicism, I wasn't turned away by the language or structure of the book. Not once did I feel the author was trying to proselytize me (something sadly lacking in some other books about the catholic church). What I found was an honest, objective look at the papacy: there have clearly been good and bad popes (some, though very few, have been downright loathsome people), and there have been popes who were incredible men. This book is honest in its appraisal of the men who held the highest earthly order of the catholic church.

There is a slant, and the author hits you in the face with it, but not until the very end of the book. It is not laced throughout the text. Depending upon your perspective, it will either horribly offend you or surprise you with its candor. I personally found it refreshing.

In short, if you're curious about the papacy from a historical perspective, this is a good place to start.

I found it to be a remarkable book, giving me a greater insight as to the process that led to our current Pope. Despite the views of many, I found the frank admission that not all of the 260 Popes were spiritually enlightened to grant his work a greater veracity, coming from a follower of Catholicism. I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in such studies.

Let's be honest, if you hate the Papacy and you see nothing good in it you will not like this book because it points to much good on the side of Papacy. If you are a die-hard Catholic who beleives in Papal infallability and all the catholic dogmas, you won't like this book because it also points out bad things that came out of the papacy. If you are neutral on Catholicism, and want't a neutral view of the Lives of Popes throughout history, then this is an excellent book. The author is not affraid to talk about the good and the bad of each individual Pope. It is clearly A very honest overview! The previous reviews I have read were either anti-Catholic or Pro-Catholic. it is nice every now and then to see something objective.

If you don't know a great deal about the papacy, its history, and the history of the early Catholic/Christian church, this will be an interesting read through the first three or four parts of the books, basically, up through to the middle ages. Beware, though, if you are Catholic and devout in your faith. The author, as much as possible, tries to take the stance of an outsider with a great deal of Catholic knowledge. I would not, however, call the author entirely objective. You may be disturbed by the frank nature in which he approaches the humanity of the men who have been the leaders of the Catholic Church.

Mr. McBrien clearly has his favorites and his least favorites in the list. He makes a pretty good attempt at not over-villifying the bad popes (and yes, there were some awful ones), but his judgment is often less than glowing for popes that other historians or Catholics have deemed good leaders of the faith. The most glaring example of this is his reviews of John Paul II and John XXIII. The latter is listed in his "Outstanding Popes" list, and even the dust jacket exudes his subjectiveness: "John XXIII, perhaps the most beloved, ecumenical, and open-hearted pope in all of history. Every pope, before and after him, is to be measured against the standard he set." Nevermind the great strides taken by such early popes as Gregory the Great and Leo the Great. By contrast, John Paul II was not even included in the "Good or Above Average" list, when many contemporary Catholics would say that he was far more loved and respected than almost all popes before him. His work against Communism alone should be enough to get him in this "second tier" list (maybe he was elevated in the later edition of the book)?

My biggest problem is not that the book was designed more to be a reference material than a straight-through novel-like read (though the latter certainly is possible), but that it is highly redundant. Every one of the seven parts, which are chronological divisions of the papacy, starts with a lengthy preview of the highlights of that time period. This is a pretty neat feature in that it acts like a Cliff Notes version of the section, but is ultimately all repeated when the individual popes are discussed. Far worse is how many times he mentions that contrary to popular belief, most often the next pope elected is the opposite of the one before. I guess if you are reading the book as a reference and just grab a pope in the middle to read about, then it wouldn't seem as bad. But when this is mentioned for more than half of the popes, yes, we get it!

The other big problem I have with the book is that its attempt to be a reference material means that it gets entirely too bogged down in historical minutiae that the average reader of the book wouldn't care about. How the voting in the conclaves went, the details of the political wrangling, a description of every religious post the pope held before he became the pontiff. Sometimes this would be relevant, for instance, when a pope emerged as a candidate only after 30 ballots and only then as a compromise. But the rest of the time, I found myself skipping over that section for each pope, especially during the middle ages and beyond. I'm not very familiar with the geography of Rome and Italy, and what it means to be the title of this or the leader of that. For instance, it means little to me when someone is described as "appointed ... as nuncio of Bavaria and titular archbishop of Sardes".

To summarize: if you know very little about the formation of the early church, this will be an eye-opener when you see the origins and timeline of thinks like the Nicene Creed, dogmas on the Assumption and Immaculate Conception of Mary, and other things. However, you will find yourself relatively bored for over half of the book. Since there have been so many popes, most of them did little to nothing of interest. I'm glad I read it once, but I would only recommend it to someone that was VERY interested in this subject.

This book is excellent historical information that places each pope into the historical context of the secular world. It gives the reader a general sense of each popes accomplishments and try's to infer each popes personality traits based on those accomplishments. I did find it lacking in things more spiritual and humane. The book leaves me wondering what sacrifices did these men make. How much did they truly suffer for their faith. In many cases Popes are made out to look like power hungry spiteful old men whose whole pontificate was spent making life miserable for everyone else. While this might be true of many popes I am convinced we don't get the whole story. Only the more sensational and controversial elements that sell books. It was overall a very enjoyable book. Well worth reading for those interested in Papel history, but take it with a grain of salt and realize that there might be more to the story than meets the reader.

Fr. Richard McBrien is a well-known cleric who has made a career of public dissent in the Church. If this is the position he wishes to take, that is his business. However, when he purports to write a history of the papacy, is it too much to expect precisely that?

Instead, McBrien has provided several hundred pages of typical, tiresome "Catholic" dissent badly disguised as a history book. As a non-Roman Catholic clergyman, historian and theologian, I find that very unfortunate.

For a far better book from an academic perspective, I would suggest Dr. Owen Chadwick's Oxford Dictionary of the Popes as a much more valuable reference tool.