Stefan Bauer,
The Invention of Papal History. Oxford University Press, 2020. $90.00 (hardback)
The papacy has survived heresy, schism, the Protestant Reformation, and internal challenges to papal authority to say nothing of scandals both financial and sexual. And, like most institutions of such longevity, it has evolved and adapted itself along the way. The ups and downs of the “bishops of Rome” (as protestant reformers insisted on referring to popes in the sixteenth century) are legion, and they run through history, like a basso profundo against which both the high politics and religion of the past two millennia unfolded. The institution has done good at different times, but also supported great evil: the Inquisition and the Index of Prohibited books and the moral failure of the Papacy to condemn Jewish deportations prior to and during World War II.