Holy (and not-so-holy) Fathers

Saints and Sinners, by Eamon Duffy, Yale University Press, £16.95
IN 1517, ERASMUS, greatest of all Christian humanist scholars, published a withering satire on the recently deceased Pope Julius II, portraying him as a lecherous practitioner of the Black Arts who, denied access to Paradise by St Peter, threatened to storm the Gates of Heaven with his papal army. Yet within ten years Erasmus was supporting the papal office against the published assaults of Martin Luther and he was demanding the enforcement of anathemas against the disobedient and disagreeable German professor.
Criticising popes but believing in the papacy is thus a venerable and honourable tradition. Eamon Duffy is a rather tame descendant, but alongside an Erasmian brilliance and fertility of mind and scholarship, there is the same commitment to loyal opposition. I say this at the outset because some reviewers and commentators will no doubt take exception at the gleeful irreverence of some of the story-telling in his book on the papacy and in his cool assessment of the current pope. When he writes that "to many people Pope John Paul II seems a backwardlooking figure, a man attempting to force a cham pagne cork back into the bottle", few can doubt that Duffy sees himself as one of the many. But readers of this enjoyable and sumptuous book will also encounter a puzzled awe at how the papacy has acted as a focus of unity and inspiration for so many Christians despite the flawed humanity that so many of the 261 popes have brought to the office.
Saints and Sinners is a wonderful book. It reads well and it looks well, for it is first and foremost a considered reflection on the non-linear and unpredictable switchback ride of the 261 men who have found themselves called to exercise various kinds of leadership within Christendom.The wealth of detail and the twinkle in Duffy's eye make almost every section sparkle. Alexander VI may have been sexually profligate, but be was dietetically-challenged "living on a sparse and coarse diet (too many sardines)" while Julius III "revolted everyone by his passion for onions which he had delivered by the cartload". More earthy still, we are told that one eyewitness to the election of Pius II in 1458 was convinced that what settled it was "the endless plotting in the lavatory block". There is a higher wit and appeal in the magnificent illustrations (most on the page in full colour). Even the most humble of popes has inspired the most beautiful
of art and artefacts.
The book is, then, fun. But like Erasmus's much more biting satires there is a higher moral and intellectual purpose behind the fun.
It is divided into six chapters. Each chapter will be the basis of a TV programme.
Each chapter has a clear polemical thrust and a clear sense of the ambiguities and frustrated ambitions of successive popes both for good and ill. In the first (A.D.33-461), Duffy confronts the evidence that there was no Bishop of Rome for several decades after Peter's death, no immediate successor to Peter; that so many of the early popes refused to accept doctrinal statements in the creeds (for holding which many later popes were to torture and burn later generations of heretics); and that the Roman popes were in fact patriarchs of the West and not even first amongst equals when it came to setting the patriarchies of Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria side by side. In the second chapter (461-1000) Duffy continues the theme of the changing shape of the Christian world and the varying and often non-existent authority of the papacy within that world. And so on, through the years 1000-1447, 1447-1774, 1774-1903 and 1903-97. Lack of Faith, hope and charity have caused many to betray the Body of Christ whose servant they have purported to be; but Duffy is wonderful in finding hints of' redemption in some of the most unappealing of popes. And he is so good at recreating the dilemmas confronting flawed men and the pressures working on them, that many come out as heroic failures and a few as heroic successes.
Amongst his most graphic and persuasive assessments, made charitable by that sense of the limits of their possibilities, are his accounts of the papacies of Popes Pius IXXII; but it is not the least of his achievements to be equally capable of empathy with the popes of the desperate times after the fall of Rome or the epoch of the Great Schism as with the moral giants of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The final messages Duffy wishes to deliver are, I suppose, that modern ulramontanes cherish claims which owe little to the early centuries; that it is not the claims of recent popes but the ability and resources to make good those claims (in the wake of the communications revolution and a shrinking planet) that represents the new challenge; that traditions of collegiality and local selfdetermination within a loose federal structure are at least as vital and persistent as traditions of bureaucratic centralism; that the Holy Spirit is well able to work through the law of unintended consequences; and that if the papacy has developed its claims to a level dangerous to other benign forces and freedoms within the church, it is also one of the Church's most precious and irreplaceable assets.
Faced by the prevalence within the French Seminary in Rome of the ideas of the extreme Right-wing Action Franfaise movement, Pius X1 sent for the bearded and ineffectual superior of the Rector's Order and told him to sack the Rector. The old man replied "Yes, Holy Father, I'll see what I can do," upon which the Pope grabbed him by the beard and shouted "I didn't say see what you can do, I said fire him!"
Duffy's glee in this tale is a wonderful illustration of how he has come away from his research with his sense of the wisdom of God in instituting the papacy at once jolted and reaffirmed. If not semper eadem, then at least semper necessitatem!