Pontiffs: Popes Who Shaped History by John Jay Hughes (review)

BOOK REVIEWS General and Miscellaneous Pontiffs:Popes Who Shaped History. ByJohn Jay Hughes. (Huntington, Indiana: Our SundayVisitor Publishing Division. 1994. Pp. 320. $16.95 paperback.) This book is intended to let the reader know that, while popes may be "infallible ," they are not above making mistakes. In one readable volume, Father Hughes manages to include most of the major events in the past twenty centuries which concerned the Roman Catholic Church. He conveys a considerable amount of interesting and reliable historical information, gleaned from the best secondary sources. His method is to select eleven key popes—Peter, Leo the Great, Gregory the Great, GregoryVII, Innocent III, BonifaceVIII, Leo X, Pius V, PiusVII, Leo XIII, andJohn XXIII—and use their pontificates as a focus for discussion about events and issues which surrounded them in some way. The author wisely does not limit himself to the eleven popes involved, but casts his net far and wide. The chapter on PiusVII, for example, carries on into a treatment of Pius IX and Vatican Council I. In addition, Father Hughes also makes frequent (and delightful) excursions into parenthetical material, such as his description of the various ranks within the College of Cardinals. There is humor in this book, as when Cardinal Spellman is quoted on the election ofJohn XXIII, saying , "He is no pope; he should be selling bananas." The average lay Catholic, at whom this book is obviously intended, can learn much factual information from and be entertained by this book. Unfortunately, the very thing that seems to have motivated Father Hughes to write the book—a naïve belief on the part of "fundamentalist" Catholics that popes can do no wrong or can never display human tendencies—so preoccupies the author that he overstates his case. Popes are placed too easily into intransigent or conciliatory categories. Age-old stereotypes, such as that of a thoroughly decadent Leo X, are accepted by the author uncritically and inaccurately . Conversely,John XXIII, the obvious hero of this book, does not deserve the seventy pages of unqualified praise—nearly one-quarter of the entire book!—lavished on him by the author. One wonders if the other popes mentioned are simply foils for the Great Pope, John XXIII—judged harshly or benignly on their proximity to his pastoral genius. Whenever Anglicanism is mentioned, Father Hughes becomes quite protective . According to the author, Pius V was guilty of serious misjudgment in ex476 BOOK REVIEWS 477 communicating Queen Elizabeth, a controversial act about which the author brooks no debate. The current revisionist (and pro-Catholic) reading ofthe English Reformation, led by Eamon Duffy, Christopher Haigh, andJ. J. Scarisbrick, is not mentioned. Cardinal Newman's Second Spring—an admission that the Oxford Movement could not work—is never cited, although Catholic revivals in several countries besides England are given honorable mention. What is worse is the author's inability to resist the occasional irreverent remark , as when he mentions "mating calls"being emitted by cardinals at one conclave (p. 109), and the comment that Cardinal Spellman "owed [Sr. Pasqualina] more favors than we may ever know" (p. 258). This tendency is unfortunate and mars what should have been a helpful book. JohnVidmar, O.P Dominican House ofStudies Washington, D.C. The Irish Penitentials and Their Significance for the Sacrament ofPenance Today. By Hugh Connolly. (Blackrock, Co. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Distributed by International Specialized Book Services, Inc., 5804 N.E. Hassalo Street, Portland, OR 97213-3644. 1995. Pp. xii,256. $45.00.) In five chapters Father Connolly makes his case for the contemporary relevance and significance of the ancient Irish handbooks of penance. After placing the penitentials in their cultural and historical context he undertakes a lengthy textual analysis of the works from the point of view of one of their central organizing principles—the eight capital sins that were inherited from John Cassian (gluttony, avarice, anger, dejection, lust, languor, vainglory, and pride). The fourth chapter reads the penitentials through the perspective and within the framework afforded by the Ordopaenitentiae of the modern Irish Church. He puts it somewhat differently, "an analysis of the sacrament of penance and its parts passed through the filter, as it were, of Celtic penitential...