Five Hundred Years of the Changing Papacy

At the College of the Holy Cross one of my more popular history courses is called The Papacy in the Modern World. By ‘modern’ I mean since ca. 1500, and this is but the first of many surprises for students. Yet the very first time I offered this course, in 1997, one of the students actually wrote on an evaluation, “Fr. Worcester should be canonized, or at least beatified.” Though by no means have all evaluations been anywhere near as appreciative or laudatory, most of the students have found the course to challenge their assumptions about the papacy and to make them re-think their expectations of popes. I have also taught a graduate version of this course at Marquette University, where I was a visiting professor in 2008-09. Without ignoring continuities in papal history, I consistently emphasize how much changed between the papacy of Julius II and that of John Paul II.

Students and others whose lifetimes include popes no further back than the first non-Italian in more than 450 years may tend to think that the style of papacy that characterized John Paul II’s pontificate went all the way back to the apostles, or at least had existed a good number of centuries, in unbroken tradition, as it were. But a globe-trotting pope is in fact a very radical innovation; as recently as the early 1960s, popes simply did not travel outside Italy, and for much of the century or so before John Paul’s 1978 election popes only rarely ventured outside the Vatican at all. New technologies such as jet airplanes and television have altered the papacy as much or more than anything else ever has. For better or worse? Perhaps some of both.

My teaching of this topic has inspired me to co-edit a collection of essays entitled The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor (Cambridge University Press, September 2010 – see www.cambridge.org). My co-editor is James Corkery, S.J., an Irish systematic theologian and the author of Joseph Ratzinger’s Theological Ideas: Wise Cautions and Legitimate Hopes (Paulist Press, 2009). With essays by a variety of specialists, including church historians, art historians, and theologians, our book consists of twelve chapters plus introductory and concluding pieces. The book explores the complex evolution of the papacy in the last five centuries, from the age of popes as Renaissance princes, warriors, and lavish patrons of the arts, to a more recent time of the bishop of Rome as a universal pastor and very public persona concerned with the well-being and salvation of people everywhere. With attention to the varied reception of papal policies and actions, the book considers how the papacy has developed as popes adjusted, not without difficulty, to the changing political, cultural, technological, and socio-economic circumstances of their time.

Thomas Worcester, S.J.
Professor of History
College of the Holy Cross