The Popes – Every Question Answered

 

The Popes – Every Question Answered – Ruppert Matthews

OK. All 267 popes. One book.  So “every question answered” is a blatant lie.  I’m not sure why this is the subtitle.  It’s not accurate, but fortunately doesn’t really hinder the enjoyment of the book.  What this book is, is a very nice compendium of all popes that features some nice illustrations as well as timelines (separate) that give the reader a bit of the picture of what has been going on in the world during the various times of European History.

My guess is the vast majority of historians, even the most devout Roman Catholics, couldn’t tell you much about the majority of the 267 Popes that have held the title since the time of Christ.  In fact, this book is honest when it discusses the earliest pontiffs. Some popes during the first couple of centuries may get a paragraph or so, and that’s about it.  We simply know very little. The most notable popes may get 4-6 pages on average, some perhaps 8-10, but even that is rare.  So a very concise history that talks about the man, the times, and the events.

Ah the events.  Sadly, this is where we discover that the papal history hasn’t always been squeaky clean, yet one really shouldn’t expect that when Western Europe essentially existed as a theocracy.  We mainly read about the relations of each pope with various emperors and kings, the rivals, the factions, and the ugly wars. It’s essentially all political. As depressing as such events are to read, it’s also a bit of a hindrance that history basically repeated itself for the mass majority of time during the last two centuries.  It seemed as though it wasn’t until around the 18^th century or so that popes started to act…you know…Christlike as opposed to wielding political power and waging inquisitions and crusades against the infidel Muslims or the pesky Protestants.  It doesn’t help when it seemed every pope had the name Innocent, Gregory, Benedict or Pious.   Every emperor and king seemed to have the name Charles, Louis, or Henry. So it was very easy to get lost when going though thousands of years of history at quite the rapid pace with all of these repeated names. It’s so much easier to read all this history if you have a significant difference in people’s names such as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and John Kennedy.

This book might be better served as a reference book as opposed to a straightforward historical account.  As stated though, since each pope only gets a few pages, it might be better to research a Wikipedia entry if one is really curious about a particular pontiff.  It was still overall interesting, and I also found it refreshing that the author was not an apologist for many of the “bad” popes, yet he doesn’t have a malodorous feeling towards these individuals as what tends to happen in modern, evangelical Christianity. It was a balanced retrospective.

I’m not sure if it was because I read the book on a Kindle, but the illustrations were rather tiny, and I think a book such as this could be much more rewarding with more illustrations such as paintings and pictures of the various places where the popes hailed from, or served in a significant capacity.  I’m sure such “illustrated” books actually exist, and that might be more to one’s liking. When reading about so many unfamiliar people and places, it’s nice to have illustrations to give the reader more of a feeling – even if many of the illustrations are quite primitive due to the early time period.

The book goes all the way to Pope Francis, so at some point, unless future editions are released, a book like this might not be as complete 50 years in the future.  But if you’re reading any time around the time I’m writing (2022), it’s updated and fresh. 

The last section of this book has various Papal Bulls and teachings of the many popes.  It’s a bit laborious of a read (I actually just skimmed most of them), but it does serve, again, as a somewhat nice reference. “Every question answered?”  Definitely not. But a good quick handy reference of two thousand years of popes.