528
pages, Random House, ISBN-13: 978-1400067152
Reporting
the history of a two-thousand year old institution in a single volume is a
daunting task that can only be accomplished by skimming the highlights, but in Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy
author John Julius Norwich has done an excellent job of doing just that.
Knowing when to skim and when to dive in is a knack that he demonstrates with
aplomb. From St. Peter to Benedict XVI this book introduces us to the men who
have led the Catholic Church – for better or for worse – over the course of two
millennia.
What
I appreciated the most in this book is Norwich’s clear delineation of various
eras: The Pornocracy; The Reformation; The Counterreformation; The Renaissance;
and so on. Individual popes might have been undistinguished and/or unremarkable
(and some outright corrupt, especially by modern standards), but when grouped
together in eras, we get a clear sense of the evolution of the papacy, both as
a spiritual and as a political institution. It is interesting to see that the
institution wasn’t always as austere and as highly regarded as today, but was
often contested as any other political office. Rival Italian factions would
often resort to underhanded tactics like bribery and violence to install their
favorite candidate, and many popes would openly favor their family members by appointing
them to influential offices.
As
a self-proclaimed Agnostic Protestant (?) Norwich claims to have no agenda to
push, and while he does express opinions throughout the work, he does seem to
be true to his word – until we come to the more recent Popes when his opinions
can be easily ascertained. I caution the reader to recognize that Norwich
presents only one side to each accusation he brings up, as when He accuses Pius
X of maintaining a police state to reign in free thinking (I have read the same
from various Church historians who both support and take issue with this
characterization). Norwich also comes down hard on Pius XII for alleged
indifference to the plight of Jews during World War II (I will only say that
there are two sides to this story, both widely presented and which claim to
document persuasive support). As he proceeds from John XXIII through Benedict
XVI he points out the highlights of each, and in this part of the book Norwich
identifies issues on which he thinks that the laity and many clergy have been
disappointed by the lack of reform. In so doing, I think that the author views
doctrine as something to be determined by majority opinion, not revealed truth
as taught by the Catholic Church. In this I believe that he displays a
misunderstanding of the nature of the Church and its mission, that being to
preach the Gospel, not to present a popular program.
I
do have an issue with the title, however. One thing this book makes clear is
the popes may have been a lot of things, but absolute monarchs they absolutely
were not. Again and again we read lengthy descriptions of various emperors and
dictators bullying the popes into giving up more and more land and more and
more power. It seems as if the Holy Roman Empire was almost perpetually at war
with the papacy over any number of things, some serious, some petty. Later
European power-brokers, like the French kings, Napoleon, etc. too continued
this tradition of jostling with the pope. Often this ended very badly for the
Holy See, and there are numerous instances where Popes were physically
assaulted.
Overall,
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The information which the author presents is
interesting and enriching, and while I would not use this book as a definitive
authority on the Papacy, it manages to weave European and, to a lesser point,
Middle Eastern History throughout. I enjoyed his overall view of the Papacy as
a temporal power and how the institution retained that power.
