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Reviewed by:
  • Ten Popes Who Shook the World, and: Christian Churches of the Eastern Mediterranean, and: Jerusalem on the Hill: Rome and the Vision of St. Peter’s in the Renaissance
  • Christopher M. Bellitto, Ronald G. Roberson C. S. P. , and Thomas M. Izbicki

Duffy, Eamon. Ten Popes Who Shook the World. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2011. Pp. 151. $25.00. ISBN 978-0-300-17688-9)

This short, illustrated volume of captivating essays began as a series of BBC radio programs in 2007. Eamon Duffy starts by declaring, “The papacy is an institution that matters, whether or not one is a religious believer” (p. 9), and moves easily from Walter Ullmann’s determinism—even as Duffy tells a more decentralized, messy tale—to Thomas Hobbes’s dismissal of the papacy as “not other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned on the grave thereof” (p. 17). There follows quite a pleasant read with all sorts of jewels—very few church historians could get away with calling Roman polytheism’s acceptance of other faiths “a sort of symbolic scalp-collecting” (p. 35) or the Holy Roman Emperor “God’s policeman” (p. 62) without losing perspective and gravitas. Why these ten and not others? Duffy states that he did not try to choose the “ten ‘best’ nor even the ten most influential. . . . [E]ach of the men discussed here encapsulates one important aspect of the world’s most ancient and durable religious institution” (p. 24). Much of his accessibility and appeal lies in the ability to take what can be an insider’s history and place each pope on a broader canvas, rendering compelling even familiar stories. The first six essays (on Peter, Leo I, Gregory I, Gregory VII, Innocent III, and Paul III) function in this way as episodes in a Western civilization survey course. Some might then find it abrupt to jump between Paul III, the surprising sixteenth-century reformer, to four popes of the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries: Pio Nono, Pius XII, John XXIII, and John Paul II. Duffy captures well John Paul II’s essential paradoxes, which in a sense define the church’s intramural struggles and efforts to remain a witness to the world today.

Christopher M. Bellitto
(Kean University)

Frazee, Charles. Christian Churches of the Eastern Mediterranean. (Placentia, CA: The Author. 2010. Pp. xi, 371. $18.99 paperback. ISBN 978-1-456-32954-9.)

Over the years there have been many attempts to group and classify the many and varied Eastern churches to facilitate a grasp of the wider picture. In the past the most common method was to classify these churches according to their liturgical rites. More recently, it has become common to group them according to the four communions to which these churches belong.

Charles Frazee, professor emeritus of history at California State University, Fullerton, has opted for a geographical approach and produced a book about the churches of the eastern Mediterranean. The bulk of the book covers the history of the four ancient eastern patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem and the various divisions that grew up [End Page 623] within them. But he also includes chapters on the Assyrian Church of the East and the Armenian Apostolic Church.

Frazee has published extensively on the churches in this region, especially on Orthodoxy in Greece, and writes with confidence and accuracy. In view of this background, it is surprising, however, that he provides so little information on contemporary developments in the Orthodox Church of Greece. He also has a tendency to apply the term autocephalous in an undifferentiated way to Eastern churches throughout their history when in fact the term has had a variety of meanings over the centuries. And he does not seem to have a clear understanding of the nature and authority of the so-called “Balamand Document” produced by the Catholic-Orthodox international dialogue on the question of uniatism in 1993.

Nevertheless, Frazee has produced a very useful overview of the churches in this region, bringing together an enormous amount of research into a coherent and highly readable narrative. It will serve as a valuable introduction to the churches of the lands...

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