Looking for a Brief History of the Papacy? ‘Ten Popes Who Shook the World’ is the Place to Start
A book review
If you are interested in the history of the popes of the Catholic Church, the reading options can be daunting, and not just because there have been 266 of them over the past 2,000 years. The sheer size of the volumes are enough to give the most committed reader pause: George Weigel’s definitive biography of Pope John Paul II, Witness to Hope, runs an eye-watering 1,056 pages, and Peter Seewald’s two-volume Benedict XVI: A Life is even longer at 1,088 pages. Elisabetta Pique’s 2015 biography, Pope Francis: Life and Revolution, seems tiny by comparison at 312 pages, though it only covers the first year of his papacy.
There are also books covering the entire history of the papacy, but they tend to either be heavy on illustrations and light on information or bigger than a cinder block. So what do you do if you want to dip your toe into this massive subject without jumping in headfirst? You start with Ten Popes Who Shook the World by Eamon Duffy.
As you can tell from the title, this is neither a biography of one pope nor a survey of all of them…
