The Conclave: A Sometimes Secret And Occasionally Bloody History Of Papal Elections - Plot & Excerpts
The publisher will invariably answer that there is a good reason why they haven’t. Luckily, Canterbury Press in England and Sheed & Ward in the United States did not respond in that manner to my suggestion of a book on the history of papal elections. So here it is. It rapidly became clear, however, that there is a good reason why no such book had hitherto existed: it proved to be practicallyimpossible to write.The idea I presented to the publisher was to produce a fairly straightforward book, one which kept the story simple. That was not at all as easy as it sounds. The factors deciding who was chosen for Bishop of Rome – as pope, in other words, for the two terms are interchangeable – were often distinctly complex. Not infrequently, for instance, they entailed attitudes to heresies which, had I attempted to explain them (even were I able), would have made what was intended to be a fairly short book a mammoth tome. I may have said in the course of the text a tiny bit about Arianism, but there is next to nothing about Monophysitism or Monothelit- ism, and I have never dared engage in the Three Chapters contro- versy (I am not alone in this).
What do You think about The Conclave: A Sometimes Secret And Occasionally Bloody History Of Papal Elections?
