Pope of Rome

The designation Pope of Rome refers to the Bishop of Rome, occupant of the episcopal see that the Roman Catholic Church regards as founded by the Apostle Peter and as holding a unique primacy among Christian bishops. It is an office, not a single biographical subject, and therefore no one birth year, death year, native city, spouse, or personal feast day can be assigned to it. Christian tradition, already voiced by Irenaeus of Lyons in the late second century, listed a succession of Roman bishops beginning with Peter. The New Testament presents Peter as a fisherman from Galilee and a leading apostle; it also implies that he was married, since it mentions his mother-in-law. Later Roman tradition held that he preached in the city and was executed there during the Neronian persecution in the mid-first century. Archaeology and the surviving literary sources do not yield a precise year of birth or death for Peter, nor a fully reliable contemporary biography of every first- and second-century bishop. What can be said with confidence is that a Christian community existed in Rome by the time of Paul's Letter to the Romans in the first century, and that by the late second century that community claimed an apostolic foundation and a public succession of bishops.

From late antiquity the Roman bishop's authority grew in the Latin West. Figures such as Leo I in the fifth century and Gregory I in the late sixth and early seventh centuries combined pastoral care of the city, doctrinal intervention in distant churches, and, in Gregory's case, missionary initiative toward the English. The title pope, from the Greek pappas (father), was not originally exclusive to Rome; it became the ordinary Western designation for the Roman pontiff. Medieval popes ruled the Papal States, convened councils, and contended with emperors and kings. The rupture with the Eastern patriarchates, conventionally associated with the eleventh century, and the sixteenth-century Reformation confined the pope's accepted jurisdiction mainly to the Catholic Church, within which the First Vatican Council in the nineteenth century defined papal primacy and, under strictly limited conditions, infallibility. Occupants of the see have been predominantly Italian for many centuries, but the historical list also includes Greeks, Syrians, Germans, Frenchmen, Spaniards, and, in the modern era, men from Poland, Germany, Argentina, and other countries.

Because the subject is the office rather than one man, personal details necessarily vary from pontiff to pontiff. Some early bishops of Rome appear to have been married, consistent with practice in the first Christian generations; later Latin canon law required celibacy of bishops, and most medieval and modern popes were ordained clergy who had never married, including a number who belonged to religious orders such as the Benedictines, Franciscans, Dominicans, or Jesuits. Burial has most often been at the Vatican, in or beneath the basilica associated with the shrine of Peter, but numerous popes lie at the Lateran, Santa Maria Maggiore, or other churches, and a few were buried outside Rome. Patronages, religious orders, and canonization status belong to individual popes. Many early pontiffs are venerated as martyr-saints, and a smaller number of medieval and modern popes have been beatified or canonized; many others were never raised to the altars. The present residence of the pope is Vatican City, whose sovereignty was recognized in the Lateran Treaty of 1929. Election remains the work of the College of Cardinals meeting in conclave.

Historians conventionally number more than two hundred sixty bishops of Rome from Peter to the present. The earliest names after Peter—Linus, Anacletus (or Cletus), Clement, and their immediate successors—are known chiefly from succession lists rather than from contemporary biographies; modern scholarship treats several of those names and dates as traditional rather than demonstrably exact. Later centuries are richly documented. Catholic theology has always distinguished the spiritual claim of the office from the personal holiness of any given occupant, holding that the see continues even when an individual pope is weak or morally failing, a contrast illustrated by universally venerated figures on the one hand and by the so-called pornocracy of the tenth century or the Avignon and Western Schism periods on the other. Any biographical field that requires a particular human life—year of birth, native city, spouse, children, religious order, or patronage—must be left blank for Pope of Rome as such and supplied only when a named pontiff is the subject.