A Dictionary of the Popes from Peter to Pius XII

Preface: The object of this book is to provide in handy form a record of the principal events in the life of each of the popes: it does not aim at being a one-volume history of the papacy as an institution, much less such a history of the Universal Church, and therefore I have, in the main, confined myself to those matters in which the pope took an official or personal part, especially those of importance or interest to the general reader...In such a record as this much must be chronicled that is not to the credit of the popes or other Christians concerned: in the degree consonant with a “popular” work the principle laid down by Pope Leo XIII applies: “The historian of the Church has a duty not to dissimulate any of the trials that the Church has had to suffer from the faults of her children and even at times from those of her own ministers" (in a letter to Cardinal Pitra and others, September 8, 1889). “The dignity of Peter,” declared St Leo the Great, “is not diminished even by an unworthy successor.” From St. Peter, to St. Gregory I the Great (590 – 604), to St. Pius V (1566 – 1572), to Pius XII (1939 – 1958) St. Peter (Simon bar-Jona; Galilean Jew; martyred about the year A.D. 67). St Peter's original name was Simon, and he was the son of one Jona (John) at Bethsaida, a town on the shore of the inland Sea of Galilee whose site has not been certainly identified; the apostle St Andrew was his brother, and another apostle, St Philip, a fellow-townsman. By trade Peter was a fisherman, he was married, and at the time he was called by Jesus Christ he was living at Caphamaum at the northern end of the lake, his mother-in-law being one of the household. With Andrew he was a follower of St John the Baptist. Andrew was one of those who heard the Baptist acclaim Christ as the Lamb of God, whereupon he went to tell his brother that the Messias was come, and led him to our Lord; straightway Jesus changed Simon's name, saying that he should be called “Kephas,” meaning “rock” in Aramaic, a name whose Greek equivalent is “Petros.” St. Gregory The Great (Roman, of the gens Anicia, 590-604). Gregory I is the outstanding figure in the papacy between St.. Leo the Great (d. 461) and St Nicholas the Great (d. 867), nay, between St. Peter and his namesake St. Gregory VII in 1073, and he has been justly called the founder of the middle ages, and in particular of the medieval papacy. He belonged to an ancient senatorial family and himself became prefect of Rome, but when he was about thirty-four he gave up rank and riches and became a monk, turning his mansion on the Caelian hill into a monastery under (surely beyond doubt) the Rule of St Benedict. A few years later he was called out of his retirement, ordained deacon, and sent by Pope Pelagius II as his apocrisiarius to Constantinople; here he remained for six or seven years, writing his commentary on the book of Job called Magna Moralia, but, curiously enough, apparently never learning Greek. When he returned to Rome he became abbot of St Andrew's on the Caelian and it is at this time that is said to have taken place his meeting with certain Angles, his pun on their name, and his subsequent attempt to go as a missionary to Britain, which was foiled by the citizens of Rome, who would not lose him. He was the righthand man of Pelagius II, and when that pope died the clergy and people elected Gregory with acclamation: he tried in vain to get the emperor to refuse to ratify the choice. One of Gregory's earliest acts was to write a treatise, Regula pastoralis, on the duties of a bishop, which was not only a guide for himself but spread throughout Christendom (it was one of the books that Alfred the Great translated into English); he at once dismissed the archdeacon of Rome “on account of his pride and misbehavior.”