An “Author’s Note” closes this book. Above it Christopher Lascelles quotes Bertrand Russell saying, “Look only, and solely, at what are the facts.” Lascelles regards this, I think we are meant to understand, as a statement about what he believes he has been doing in the pages of his “short history” of the papacy. But this claim is highly questionable. For example, chapter 20, “Restoration,” is introduced with a quote from a letter sent by Lord Acton to, as Lascelles writes, “the Catholic archbishop, Mandell Creighton.” Creighton, a distinguished 19th-century church historian, was not an archbishop. More to the point in this instance, neither was he a Catholic—not even as an adherent to the Catholic party within the Church of England. Indeed, he tended to regard British Roman Catholics, of whom Acton was of course one, as disloyal subjects of the Crown. Creighton is one of Lascelles’s favored sources (along with another 19th-century Protestant historian, Philip Schaff), so his misapprehension is not unimportant in a book about a central feature of Roman Catholicism.
Many such mistakes pepper the pages of this volume. The author apparently believes that it was the papacy that invented the Index and that it was a pope who first consigned Jews to a ghetto, neither of which is true. He attributes the “Two Swords” theory of government to Pope Damasus, which is also inaccurate. He claims that the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, was founded to teach and to combat Protestantism, neither of which is true, as a glance at any history of the Society would reveal. Though both goals emerged in the lifetime of the Society’s founder, they were no part of Ignatius’s original intention. He also goes on to claim that the Jesuits amassed considerable wealth. When Louis XV suppressed the Society in France in November 1764 its enemies no doubt expected to find these riches; instead they found only debts. And speaking of the Jesuits, one would not think, when reading in these pages about the divine right of kings, that the Society’s theologians had been teaching from the 16thcentury that although all authority came ultimately from God, that of a monarch was derived via the people.
While there are many more “facts” that Lascelles gets wrong, there are also many facts he simply ignores. When writing of the illiberal popes of the 19th century, he does not ask what “liberalism” meant to the various pontiffs—namely anti-clericalism and atheism. He finds the Council of Trent “a distinct disappointment” (215), which is not a fact but a judgment, and one at odds with that of many historians of the period. He condemns Sixtus V but makes no mention of his thoroughgoing reform of the papal curia. He warms slightly to Leo XIII and Pius XI, but dwells on their failings and omits any mention of their important social encyclicals. He is not enamored of canonizations but is wrong to claim there is no definitive list of saints: he appears not to have heard of the Martyrologium Romanum. He resorts to innuendo, apparently suggesting that Paul Marcinckus was rewarded in 1981 for his failure at the Vatican Bank by promotion to the rank of Archbishop. This is nonsense. He was created an Archbishop in 1969.
This book, then, is in no way a history of the papacy as a scholar would understand it. It is rather a polemic against the papacy as it has been exercised down the ages. It is therefore something of a relief to discover a reference, when Lascelles is discussing Leo X, to The Oxford Dictionary of Popes (Oxford University Press, 1986) as “generally an unbiased source of information” (196). Full disclosure: since the death of its begetter, Professor J. N. D. Kelly, I have been responsible for revisions of this work, and for additional material. I am therefore curious about the use of the word “generally” and would be grateful for enlightenment. But The Oxford Dictionary of Popes is, as the name suggests, in dictionary format and is not a narrative account. In place of Lascelles’s distinctly biased version, I suggest those wanting a narrative history should turn rather to Professor Eamon Duffy’s Saints and Sinners (Yale University Press, 2002). Lascelles mentions it in his bibliography. He should have paid it more attention.
Michael J. Walsh is Fellow of Heythrop College at the University of London.
Michael J. Walsh
Date Of Review:
August 20, 2018
