There have been 265 Roman Catholic popes, 266 if you count Pope Joan, who existed only in the popular imagination in the Middle Ages, and these don’t count various usurpers, interlopers and antipopes. To paraphrase Longfellow, some of the real popes were good, some were bad and some were horrid.

Regular readers of this blog are aware that my view of the modern Roman Catholic church and is somewhere south of horrid. The Holy See has utterly failed in dealing with its twin crises of the new millennium — the pedophile priest scandal and homosexuality in the priesthood and among the laity — while raising the church’s hypocrisy, and in some cases criminality, to unholy levels.

But I approached John Julius Norwich’s recently published Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy with a semi open mind and the prayerful hope that this esteemed British historian would provide an overview that might soften my animus. If you stick around to the end of this review, you’ll find out what I concluded.

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