Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition

by Eamon Duffy

  On the French Revolution and the Church: Latreille, L’Eglise Catholique et la Revolution Française (above); A. Dansette, Religious History of Modern France, Edinburgh and London 1961, (volume 1 is good for the whole Napoleonic episode); J. McManners, The French Revolution and the Church, London 1969. For Pius VII, in addition to Hales, Revolution and Papacy (above), see J. Leflon, Pie VII: Des Abbayes Bénédictines à la Papauté, Paris 1958.

  Apart from the general histories and the material in Nielsen, Hales and Chadwick, there is no specialist study of the pontificates of Leo XII or Gregory XVI in English. J. D. Holmes, The Triumph of the Holy See: A Short History of the Papacy in the Nineteenth Century, London 1978, is slight but covers the ground. For the Liberal Catholic Movement and its condemnation, A. R. Vidler, Prophecy and Papacy: A Study of Lamennais, the Church and the Revolution, London 1954. The theological basis of Ultramontanism is studied in Bernard Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition:Aspects of Catholic Theology in Nineteenth-Century France, Cambridge 1975. For a fascinating and illuminating contemporary source, see N. Wiseman, Recollections of the Last Four Popes and of Rome in Their Times, London 1858 (the popes concerned are Pius VII, Leo XII, Pius VIII and Gregory XVI).

  For Pius IX, on whom again Chadwick should be consulted, there are four good specialist studies, two of which are in English. The fullest biography is by G. Martina, Pio Nono, Rome 1974–90 (3 volumes); the most readable, particularly good on the political context, is E. E. Y. Hales, Pio Nono, London 1954; Frank Coppa, Pope Pius IX: Crusader in a Secular Age, Boston 1979, is a workmanlike survey; the best integrated into an overview of the nineteenth-century Church is R. Aubert, Le Pontificat de Pie IX 1846–1878, Paris 1952. Aubert edited volume 5 of The Christian Centuries (above, section A) under the title The Church in a Secularised Society, covering all aspects of the Church in the period. Hales’s The Catholic Church in the Modern World, London 1958, provides a brisk and readable survey of the century. A fascinating perspective on the Roman Question is offered by the despatches of the British Government’s man in Rome, Odo Russell, recording many interviews with Pio Nono. They were edited by N. Blakiston, The Roman Question, London 1962. For a vivid picture of Rome under Pio Nono, R. De Cesare, The Last days of Papal Rome 1850–1870, London 1909. For a poignant episode in the fall of the Papal States, G. F.-H. Berkeley, The Irish Battalion in the Papal Army of 1860, Dublin and Cork 1929. For the First Vatican Council, the best account remains C. Butler, The Vatican Council 1869–1870, London 1962; for a hostile and tendentious account, containing some interesting material, A. B. Hasler, How the Pope Became Infallible: Pius IX and the Politics of Persuasion, New York 1981. For an account by a key player at the Council, see H. E. Manning, The True Story of the Vatican Council, London 1877. Manning’s correspondence with Pio Nono’s deranged confidant Monsignor George Talbot makes up much of volume 2 of E. S. Purcell’s notorious Life of Cardinal Manning, London 1896, and throws a flood of light on Ultramontane attitudes. The essays ‘The Forgotten Council’ and ‘The Primacy: The Small Print of Vatican I’ by Garrett Sweeney in A. Hastings (ed.), Bishops and Writers, Wheathampstead 1977, offer helpful theological comment on Ultramontanism and the First Vatican Council: the statistics on papal appointments of bishops in my chapter are taken from Sweeney’s essay ‘The Wound in the Right Foot’, in the same collection. The Mortara affair is the subject of David I. Kertzer’s The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, New York 1997.

  For the Kulturkampf, in addition to the material in volume 9 of Jedin and Dolan, History of the Church: G. Goyau, Bismarck et l’Eglise: Le Culturkampf 1870–78, Paris 1911–13 (4 volumes); M. L. Anderson, Windhorst, Oxford 1981, pp. 130–200; David Blackbourn’s study Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany, Oxford 1993, offers wonderful insight into the frictions between Ultramontane Catholicism and the Prussian state. R. J. Ross, The Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf: Catholics and State Power in Germany 1871–87, Washington 1998. E. Helmreich (ed.), A Free Church in a Free State?, Boston 1964, is a collection of sourcematerial and essays which juxtaposes the Risorgimento and the Kulturkampf. The standard treatment of the Roman question after 1870 is A. C. Jemolo, Church and State in Italy 1850–1950, Oxford 1960.

  There is no adequate biography of Leo XIII. Those by C. de T’Serclaes, Le Pape Léon XIII, Lille 1894–1906 (3 volumes), and by E. Soderini, Il Pontificato di Leone XIII, Milan 1932–3 are more or less ‘official’ lives with little critical distance from their subject (Leo XIII read the proofs of T’Serclaes book), though both present much valuable material. The first two volumes only of Soderini have been translated into English. Lillian P. Wallace, Leo XIII and the Rise of Socialism, Durham, North Carolina 1966, is an intelligent study, of wider interest than the title suggests; E. T. Gargan (ed.), Leo XIII and the Modern World, New York 1961, a valuable collection of essays. For Catholic social teaching, Paul Misner, Social Catholicism in Europe, London 1991; M. P. Fogarty, Christian Democracy in Western Europe 1820–1953, London 1957; A. R. Vidler, A Century of Social Catholicism 1820–1920, London 1964; P. Furlong and D. Curtis (eds.), The Church Faces the Modern World: Rerum Novarum and its Impact, Hull 1994. Joe Holland, Modern Catholic Social Teaching:The Popes Confront the Industrial Age 1740–1958, New York 2003. Useful selection of Leo XIII’s encyclicals: H. Parkinson (ed.), The Pope and the People: Select Letters and Addresses on Social Questions by Pope Leo XIII, London 1920, and a fuller selection (thirty, including Apostolicae Curae) was edited by J. J. Wynne, The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII, New York 1903. For a survey of the alienation between the Church and the working classes in nineteenth-century Europe, H. McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe 1789–1970, Oxford 1981.

  For France and the Ralliement: volume 2 of A. Dansette, Religious History of Modern France, and especially J. McManners, Church and State in France 1870–1914, London 1972. For the opening of the Vatican archives: W. O. Chadwick, Catholicism and History: The Opening of the Vatican Archives, Cambridge 1978; for intellectual liberalisation and Americanism, see volume 9 of Jedin and Dolan, History of the Church, pp. 307– 34, and Hales, The Catholic Church in the Modern World, pp. 179–88; for the condemnation of Anglican orders, J. J. Hughes, Absolutely Null and Utterly Void: The Papal Condemnation of Anglican Orders 1896, London 1968.

  CHAPTER SIX: ‘THE ORACLES OF GOD’

  For every aspect of the twentieth-century papacy volumes 9 and 10 of Jedin and Dolan, History of the Church are invaluable, as is Aubert, Christian Centuries Volume 5: The Church in a Secularised Society. J. D. Holmes, The Papacy in the Modern World 1914–78, London 1981, is a reliable short survey. Carlo Falconi’s The Popes in the Twentieth Century, London 1967, is acerbic and sometimes bilious, but very well-informed and consistently challenging. R. A. Graham, Vatican Diplomacy: A Study of the Church and State on the International Plane, Princeton, New Jersey and London 1960, explores an area of relevance for the whole century, while H. E. Cardinale, The Holy See and the International Order, Gerrards Cross 1976, is an account of the rationale of papal diplomacy by a senior papal diplomat. F. J. Coppa, Controversial Concordats: the Vatican’s relations with Napoleon, Mussolini and Hitler, Washington 1999, explores a vital aspect of papal diplomacy. John Pollard’s invaluable Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy: Financing the Vatican 1850–1950, Cambridge 2005, throws light on many issues other than the merely financial. For the late nineteenth and twentieth-century conclaves, Francis Burkle-Young, Papal Elections in the Age of Transition 1878–1922 , Lanham 2000, and Passing the Keys: Modern Cardinals, Conclaves and the Election of the Next Pope, Lanham 2001.

  There is as yet no satisfactory life of Pius X. R. Bazin, Pius X, London 1928, and I. Giordani, Pius X: A Country Priest, Milwaukee 1954, both have a good deal of material swamped in cloying piety. C. Ledré, Pie X, Paris 1952, covers most of the features of the pontificate but is uncritical, as is H. Dal-Gal, Pius X, Dublin 1953. I have not seen G. Romanato, La Vita di Papa Sarto, Milan 1992.

  On Modernism:
J. Rivière, Le Modernisme dans l’Eglise, Paris 1929; E. Poulat, Histoire, Dogme et Critique dans la Crise Moderniste, Paris 1979; A. R. Vidler, The Modernist Movement in the Roman Church, Cambridge 1934, and A Variety of Catholic Modernists, Cambridge 1970; good anthology of source-material, including large selections from Pascendi and Lamentabili, in B. M. G. Reardon, Roman Catholic Modernism, London 1970. The most searching theological analysis (strongly anti-papal) is G. Daly, Transcendence and Immanence:A Study of Catholic Modernism and Integralism, Oxford 1980. For the anti-modernist campaign and the Pope’s part in it, E. Poulat, Intégrisme at Catholicisme Intégral, Tournai-Paris 1969.

  For the separation of Church and State in France, McManners, Church and State, and H. W. Paul, The Second Ralliement:The Rapprochement Between Church and State in France in the Twentieth Century, Washington 1967, chapter 1.

  For Benedict XV the most useful biographies are those by John Pollard, The Unknown Pope: Benedict XV (1914–1922) and the Pursuit of Peace, London 1999; H. E. G. Rope, Benedict XV: The Pope of Peace, London 1941; W. H. Peters, The Life of Benedict XV, Milwaukee 1959, and F. Hayward, Un Pape méconnu: Benoît XV, Tournai 1955; Falconi, Popes in the Twentieth Century, pp. 89–150, is a sympathetic sketch.

  For Pius XI there is no satisfactory biography: the two best are R. Fontenelle, His Holiness Pope Pius XI, London 1939, and P. Hughes, Pope Pius XI, London 1937. The latter is reverential and was written while its subject was still alive, but is accurate and reasonably comprehensive up to and including the great encyclicals of 1937. It sheds no light on the personality, for which see E. Pellegrinetti, Pio XI, l’uomo nel Papa e il Papa nell’uomo, Rome 1940. There is a collection of essays sponsored by the diocese of Milan, Pio XI nel Trentesimo della Morte, Milan 1969. A. Rhodes, The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators 1922–45, London 1973, has a good deal on Pius XI himself. For the Roman Question and the Fascist state: Jemolo, Church and State; D. A. Binchy, Church and State in Fascist Italy, Oxford 1941; P. C. Kent, The Pope and the Duce: the International Impact of the Lateran Agreements, New York 1981; J. F. Pollard, The Vatican and Italian Fascism, 1929–32: A Study in Conflict, Cambridge 1985. Humani Generis Unitas, Pius XI’s lost encyclical on the Jews, is reconstructed and analysed in Georges Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky, The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI, New York and London 1997.

  Modern writing about Pius XII is dominated by the question of his alleged ‘silence’ about the Nazi genocide against the Jews. In this debate, objectivity and balance are in notably short supply. The most recent biography, P. Chenaux, Pie XII: Diplomate et Pasteur, Paris 2003, adds surprisingly little to the older lives, of which the best are by O. Halecki, Pius XII:The Pope of Peace, London 1954, and N. Padellaro, Portrait of Pius XII, London 1956, though both of these are uncritical. D. Tardini, Memories of Pius XII, Westminster, Maryland 1961, is a testimony by one of Pacelli’s pro-secretaries of state. A. Riccardi (ed.), Pio XII, Rome 1985, is a collection of essays in Italian on various aspects of the pontificate. A. Spinosa, Pio XII: L’Ultimo Papa, Milan 1992, argues, tendentiously, that Pius XII was the last ‘real’ pope.

  The literature on the vexed question of Pius XII and the Holocaust is bewildering in its bulk, its virulence, and its lack of consensus. Owen Chadwick’s Britain and the Vatican During the Second World War, Cambridge 1986, which draws on the diaries of Darcy Osborne, the British Foreign Office’s man in the Vatican during the war, is probably the best place to start, full of insight on the characters of Pius XII and the future Paul VI. Chadwick’s lengthy review article ‘Weizsacker, the Vatican and the Jews of Rome’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 28 (1977), pp. 179–99, gets to the bottom of the incident round which Rolf Hochhuth based his notorious play The Deputy, New York 1964. John Cornwell’s hostile Hitler’s Pope:The Secret History of Pius XII, London and New York 1999, attributes Pius XII’s disastrous dealings with Germany to a subliminal antiSemitism, a defective theology of the Church, and an obsessive preoccupation with the Papacy and its prerogatives. The Vatican’s wartime dealings with the Jews are surveyed, unsympathetically but with impressive documentation, by Susan Zuccotti in Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy, New Haven and London 2000: Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, edited by Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, Leicester 2002, is a collection of papers (of varying merit) by Jewish and Christian contributors to a conference held in the wake of the controversy surrounding Cornwell’s book. José M. Sánchez, Pius XII and the Holocaust: Understanding the Controversy, Washington 2002, is a judicious review of the literature up to 2002. For the most part, the defences of Pius XII, such as Pierre Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War According to the Archives of the Vatican, Hereford 1997, which essentially recycles the editorial material to the Actes et Documents du Saint Siège Relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale noticed below, or M. Marchione’s uncritically adulatory Pope Pius XII: Architect for Peace, New Jersey 2000, have been unconvincing, or have not engaged with the specific concerns of his critics. G. Miccoli, I Dilemmi e i Silenzi di Pio XII, Milan 2000, contextualises the Pope’s inadequate response in an old-fashioned ecclesial outlook which found atrocity hard to credit, and placed too much trust in diplomacy. For the Nazis and the Church more generally, among older books G. Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, New York 1964, and J. S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933–45, London 1968, remain valuable. Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust 1930–1965, Bloomington, Indiana 2000, is a critical but balanced study by a Roman Catholic historian. The Vatican Archives are still, regrettably, closed for the entire pontificate of Pius XII, but the Vatican’s activities during the Second World War have been extensively documented in P. Blet, R. A. Graham, A. Martini and B. Schneider (eds.), Actes et Documents du Saint Siège Relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, Vatican City 1965–78 (11 volumes). For post-war attitudes, see Owen Chadwick’s The Christian Church in the Cold War, Harmondsworth 1993. E. O. Hanson, The Catholic Church in World Politics, Princeton, New Jersey 1987, is an important analysis, with a strong American emphasis. H. Stehle, Eastern Politics of the Vatican 1917–79, Athens, Ohio 1975, surveys the shifts in Vatican Ostpolitik (highly critical of Pius XII). The Memoirs of Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty, London 1974, are a fascinating testimony by a key figure in the confrontation with Communism.

  For the development of Catholic theology before the Council, surveys in volume 10 of Jedin and Dolan, History of the Church, pp. 260–98 and (especially) Aubert, Christian Centuries Volume 5:The Church in a Secularised Society, pp. 607– 23; E. O’Brien, Theology in Transition: A Bibliographical Evaluation of the ‘Decisive Decade’ 1954–1964, New York 1965; A. Nichols, The Shape of Catholic Theology, Edinburgh 1991, pp. 321– 48, especially 335 ff.

  W. A. Purdy, The Church on the Move, London 1966, is a wise insider’s reflection on the differences in style and substance between the pontificates of Pius XII and John XXIII, illuminating about both. For John XXIII there is an excellent biography by Peter Hebblethwaite, John XXIII: Pope of the Council, London 1984; E. E. Y. Hales, Pope John and His Revolution, London 1965 is a warm assessment by one of the best modern historians of the papacy. For those with Italian, Mario Benigni and Goffredo Zanchi, Giovanni XXIII, Biografia Ufficiale a Cura della Diocesi di Bergamo, Milan 2000. Edited selections from his diaries appeared as Journal of a Soul, London 1980, and in Letters to his Family, London 1969. Giuseppe Alberigo edited a special edition of the journal Cristianesimo nella storia, 25 (2005) dedicated to many aspects of John XXIII’s pontificate. Most of the essays are in Italian, but they have brief English résumés.

  For Paul VI, once again there is a first-class biography by Peter Hebblethwaite, Paul VI:The First Modern Pope, London 1993. The documents of Vatican II, and many of Paul’s most significant post-Conciliar utterances, including Humanae Vitae, have been edited by Austin Flannery as Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, Leominster 1981, and Vatican Council II: More Post-Conciliar Documents, Northport New York 1982
. Highly influential contemporary reporting of the four sessions of the Council by ‘Xavier Rynne’ (Fr. F. X. Murphy) in Letters from Vatican City, London 1963–6 (4 volumes); H. Vorgrimler (ed.), Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, Freiburg and London 1967– 9 (5 volumes); G. Alberigo and J. A. Komonchak (eds.), History of Vatican II, Maryknoll and Leuven 1995– (5 volumes in progress); G. Alberigo, J.-P. Jossua and J. A. Komonchak, The Reception of Vatican II, Washington 1987; A. Stacpoole (ed.), Vatican II byThoseWhoWereThere, London 1986; A. Hastings, Modern Catholicism: Vatican II and After, London 1991, presents a valuable if somewhat uneven collection of essays on most aspects of post-Conciliar Catholicism, and a useful review of the work of the Council and its documents.

  For the brief pontificate of John Paul I: P. Hebblethwaite, TheYear of Three Popes, London 1978; John Cornwell, A Thief in the Night:The Death of Pope John Paul I, Harmondsworth 1990, disposes convincingly of nearparanoid conspiracy theories about murder in the Vatican, replacing them with a sad tale of neglect and panic.

  For John Paul II, by far the fullest biography is by George Weigel, Witness to Hope:The biography of Pope John Paul II, New York 1999, massively full if uncritically laudatory: it is especially valuable for the Polish career. There is a more manageable (though equally laudatory) work by the theatrical biographer Garry O’Connor, Universal Father:A Life of Pope John Paul II, London 2005.

  J. M. Miller has edited The Encyclicals of John Paul II, Huntington, Indiana 1997. Other key writings of Karol Wojtyla are The Acting Person, Dordrecht 1979; Sources of Renewal:The Implementation of the Second Vatican Council, New York 1980; Sign of Contradiction, New York 1979; Collected Poems, London 1982; Collected Plays and Writing on Theater, Berkeley 1987; Crossing the Threshold of Hope, London 1994. For his thought, G. H. Williams, The Mind of John Paul II: Origins of His Thought and Action, New York 1981; J. M. McDermott (ed.), The Thought of John Paul II, Rome 1993; Avery Dulles, The Splendour of Faith: The Theological Vision of Pope John Paul II, New York 1999.