Eamon Duffy, Yale University Press, 2006 (2nd ed.)No Pope is impeccable, even if, by virtue of their office, they are at times infallible – or, more precisely, a few of their statements are. Every Pope is a sinner, as well, during their life, a potential saint. Some 81 of them have been officially canonized, about one-third of the 266, so far. And most of those saints were in the Church’s first millennium. Only twelve have been canonized since the 11th century, and four of them are in the twentieth: Pius X, John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II. Make of that what you will.
Hence, the title Eamon Duffy’s 2006 book, Saints & Sinners: A History of the Popes, is fitting. Dr. Duffy is perhaps best known for his 1992 magnum opus on the English ‘Reformation’, The Stripping of the Altars, where the author strips away many of the historical inaccuracies – we may as well call them lies – told of this era. One of the biggest is that the English people wanted the Anglicanism that was foisted upon them by the full coercive power of the state. The precise opposite is true, as evinced by the fact that the power of the state was necessary to enforce the radical transformation, and deformation, of the so-called reformation.
His more recent work has a similar theme. Sure enough, he peels apart some of the myths told of the Popes, and what we have left are a panoply of more or less flawed men, doing in some way the work of God, even if indirectly. For the Almighty can work through a saint as well as a sinner – things just take longer, and more indirectly, with the latter. As the saying goes, God writes straight with crooked lines, as well as crooked souls. But His ultimate will is always done, in the end.