All the Popes, good and bad

To describe this remarkable survey of 200 years of history in less than 300 pages as a miracle of compression - and it is that - would give a totally inadequate idea of Eamon Duffy's achievement. At none of the turns and twists of the labyrinthine tale does he appear to be making a long story short. Not every one of the 262 popes and 35 antipopes stands out from these pages with distinct clarity, but most of them do, and a very considerable number are profiled in some detail.

A gift for significant detail is in fact one of Dr Duffy's many valuable qualities, so that while he never lets us lose sight of the overarching shape of a papacy in constant evolution, his analysis is very rarely disfigured by generalisation. And as a committed Catholic writing for a highly diverse readership, he achieves an admirably critical objectivity. He is not writing to a thesis, as he very legitimately was in his previous study of popular religion in 16thcentury England, The Stripping of the Altars.

But a theme, if not a thesis, becomes evident as the papal story develops in Dr Duffy's six chapters, from the first, "Upon this Rock" (which takes us from the beginnings to the era of Ireland's conversion to Christianity), through the centuries of persecution and "establishment"; heresies, divisions and assertions of primacy; "barbarian" incursion, restoration and expansion; divisions in both east and west; revolution, institutional atheism, decline, and new expansion; democracy, dictatorships and world wars; culminating in "the way we live now".

Against this backdrop, some 300 saints and sinners have claimed to be heirs of Peter, and spent or squandered their inheritance in a variety of ways. Every Catholic schoolboy knows there were "bad" popes; just how many, and how they earned the epithet, may come as a surprise even to Dr Duffy's most sceptical readers.

For, above and beyond the more notoriously lurid and squalid debaucheries, peculations and murders of the "dark" 10th century, and again of the Renaissance years, there is a record of no less scandalous "political" crimes from the time of Constantine down to this century.

As well as those of dynastic struggles, of the Inquisitions, and mass "conversions", there are those internal injustices committed by and in the name of conscientious popes from Clement XIV to Pius X. The former, having suppressed the Jesuits (in 1773), allowed their blameless fathergeneral to spend his last years in the papal prison; the latter authorised a purge of "Modernists", which amounted to a cruel and degrading witch-hunt, ending only with his death in 1914.

In all of this, one can see the continuing corruption of a secularism, dating from the time of Constantine. Secular values - and especially that of power, institutional and personal - supplanted those of the Gospel, not least when they were invoked in its defence.

This has happened, not alone in the long, sad and often ludicrous story of papal alliances, political and military, but also in those "internal" actions noted above, when papal authority too often embraced un-Christian forms of discipline.

Still, through all and in spite of all, one might borrow the words apocryphally attributed to one of the papacy's most celebrated victims, Galileo, and say Eppur si muove. Whether, as believers, we see divine providence at work in preserving this incarnation of a vision of faith and unity, or simply recognise a uniquely influential cultural survival, the bishopric of Rome lives, and has lost nothing of the core of its extraordinary claims.

Saints and Sinners was written as a companion volume to the RTE television series. In his introduction, Dr Duffy pays tribute to Harri Pritchard Jones (who is well known in Dublin and Aran) as "onlie begetter" of the project; he might also have mentioned Mrs Margaret Thatcher, whose first "U-turn" as prime minister gave the green light to Welsh-language television, which initiated the original series .. .

Incidentally, the book"s superb illustrations combine with a scholarly but accessible narrative to provide a richer texture than television, despite its powerful visual impact, can achieve.

But Irish readers may be surprised at the meagre mention given to our "Golden Age" (references to Columbanus are laughably marginal) and to learn that the conversion of Ireland was a private venture, as "Patrick had no papal mandate".

Sean Mac Reamoinn is the author of Laylines 1980-1996: Partial Views of Church and Society