480

1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456

BOOK REVIEWS

General

The Chair of Saint Peter: A History of the Papacy. By William J. La Due. (Mary-knoll, New York: Orbis Books. 1999. Pp. x, 374. $35.00.)

Any attempt to capture the history of the world’s oldest functioning institu-tion in a single volume must be reckoned an act of rare courage or toweringhubris. La Due is braver than he is proud. This is,on balance,a pretty successfulvolume: comprehensive,balanced,and readable. But it is also a book with an ar-gument. In advancing his case,La Due is never shrill,never angry,but always de-termined and confident.

His thesis, then. According to La Due, the New Testament offered no fewerthan five different, and to some extent mutually exclusive, models of ecclesialorganization. None of these accorded much place to a pope (as popes came tobe known) or to a Petrine office. The growth of monarchical bishops, in Romeor elsewhere, was by no means a sure thing and was hotly contested. In antiq-uity, as a church with a growing sense of its corporate identity graduallyemerged, that church tended toward a collegial model of organization that ex-pressed itself most vividly in great ecumenical councils. Bishops tended to re-gard themselves as equal inheritors of the apostolic office. To be sure, somebishops of Rome, especially Leo I, articulated grand claims for the authority ofthe bishops of Rome, but those claims were not widely accepted and the ac-tual powers of the popes were limited and local in practice. In the interminablytransient political and diplomatic worlds of late antiquity and the early MiddleAges, some popes made bold claims for their office and some struggled to sur-vive. Only with the Gregorian revolution of the eleventh century did popesbegin to sense the real powers of their office. The popes of the twelfth andthirteen centuries translated that sense into reality by creating legal doctrinesand institutional frameworks that tended in the direction of absolutism. InLa Due’s telling, the papacy had, by the time of Boniface VIII, gotten hopelesslyout of step with the times. Through the crises of Avignon, the Great Schism,conciliarism, and the Reformation, the popes routinely found themselves un-equipped to respond effectively or imaginatively to the swirl of change allaround them. By the time the Council of Trent assembled, the popes beganbuilding a genuinely absolutist model of government within the Church thatgrew in inverse proportion to the papacy’s ability to influence the world

BOOK REVIEWS 481

1111111111222222222233333333334444444

around it. By the time of Pius IX a timorous and besieged papacy withdrew intothe Vatican, declared itself infallible, claimed universal ordinary jurisdictionthroughout the world, and declined any dialogue with the moral or intellec-tual forces of the modern world. Twentieth-century challenges such as com-munism, Nazism, and the World Wars did not provide promising frameworksfor rethinking the certainties of the nineteenth century. John XXIII unexpect-edly sought aggiornamento, and Paul VI bravely followed him in that quest.But curial centralists defeated progressive attempts to effect change. The longreign of the current pontiff has witnessed an unprecedented growth in the vis-ibility and prestige of the pope but has also cemented and consolidated the ab-solutist leanings of the Church since Trent. There was, in other words, onepapacy in the first millennium that was pastoral and collegial and there hasbeen another papacy in the last millennium that has been juridical and monar-chical.

La Due’s thesis is not new. Progressives will think he has not gone far enoughin censuring the high medieval and modern papacy, while conservatives willthink he has either got it wrong altogether or else historicized the immutabletheological reality of the Petrine office. This is a battle one cannot win. La Duemakes a respectable case for a legitimate point of view, but he is not going toconvince anyone on either of his flanks.

One could easily make all sorts of minor and specific criticism of a book likethis. La Due admits that he has not really read the primary sources. He thusrelies on modern scholars and often cites passages from this or that historianto “clinch” his points. On a more careful and fuller assessment of the evi-dence, he might well have, for example, handled the Petrine dimension ofthe New Testament differently, or looked more carefully into the monarchicaland pentarchal models of late antique ecclesiology, or dealt more subtly withthe widely diverging views of the high medieval canonists, or handled concil-iarism with more finesse, or situated high medieval papal monarchism withinthe context of the growth of medieval monarchy generally, or looked at papalabsolutism in the framework of seventeenth-century political ideas, or devel-oped a more nuanced picture of the intense ideological and cultural battlesof the nineteenth century, or reflected more deeply on the paradoxes in apontificate like the present one when a strong-arm pope who is a theologicaltraditionalist is also the most socially and economically progressive man everto sit on Peter’s throne. But that is the problem of a modestly sized book witha big agenda. One has to leave out all the discussion that would place individ-ual issues into sharper relief. Clement XI was no intellectual giant and Unigeni-tus remains one of the poorest of all major papal encyclicals, but La Due’sdiscussion is so brief as to be confusing. The same can be said for his handlingof the Modernist controversy in the time of Pius X and of the relevant encycli-cal Pascendi or for his treatment of the “New Theologians” in Pius XII’s Hu-mani generis. It is not my view that what La Due says is wrong. I would simply

482 BOOK REVIEWS

1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456

insist that he does not say enough, or enough of the right things, to get it quiteright.

Still, because his tone is neither angry nor smug, La Due deserves a hear-ing.

THOMAS F. X. NOBLE

University of Virginia