The Pope Who Quit

January 1, 2012
Ruminations on the career of a most inept and unlikely pope. In 1294, a deadlocked College of Cardinals suddenly selected an 84-year-old hermit monk, Peter of Morrone, to be pope. Upon taking office as Celestine V, he spent 15 miserable weeks in the custody of the King of Naples before resigning, allegedly the only pope ever to do so. He was imprisoned by his successor, Boniface VIII, who promptly annulled the few actions Celestine had taken. After ten months of confinement Peter died of unknown causes. He was declared a saint in 1313. Unfortunately, the extant well-established facts about Celestine's tenure appear insufficient to sustain a work of book length. Paraclete Press associate publisher Sweeney (Verily, Verily: The KJV--400 Years of Influence and Beauty, 2011, etc.) provides extensive background information about topics ranging from contemporary poisons to the Sicilian Vespers. He demonstrates his enthusiasm for medieval history, but the information often only has tangential relevance to the life of his subject. Where facts are urgently needed but lacking, the author attempts to compensate with unsatisfying conjecture about such central issues as the true motivation for Celestine's resignation (he gave a number of reasons) and the cause of his death. Internal contradictions, overstatements and mysteries abound, but the central one concerns Peter's character. Sweeney declares that Peter proved utterly incompetent as a pope because he did not have "a political bone in his body" and "did not understand how to live and succeed among powerful men on earth," even though he had traveled extensively, lobbied popes and cardinals and built and administered an array of dozens of monasteries. Was his resignation an act of cowardice, holy wisdom or just weariness? No one really knows. Ultimately, does his story have any ongoing significance? The author labors to argue that Celestine's resignation and death were a hinge point in the culture of the late Middle Ages, but his contentions are clearly a stretch, and this issue too is left unresolved. A confused and disappointing ramble through 13th-century papacy.

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January 1, 2012

Born of humble birth in an Italian village, Peter Morrone spent much of his life as a hermit monk who inspired many followers. He was improbably elected pope, as Celestine V, in 1294 and reigned for five tumultuous months before becoming the first and only pope to abdicate. His reign was spent outside of Rome, and his poorly judged actions alienated many cardinals. After his resignation, he was imprisoned by his papal successor, Boniface VIII. Sweeney posits that Celestine may have been murdered on Boniface's order, but the author's prose style lacks a dramatic power equal to the events being narrated. Nonetheless, he draws a relatively well-rounded portrait of the pope, including contextual details of medieval cultural, political, and religious life likely to be unknown to the lay reader to whom this book is aimed. VERDICT Readers with more than a cursory knowledge of the Middle Ages will be frustrated by the number of overgeneralizations and suppositions, although they may admire Sweeney's efforts to make sense of such a complicated time. There is no recent comparable biography of Celestine V in English, although readers may wish to consult reference materials related to Catholicism and the Catholic Church. Some fans of fiction like Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code might want to consider this.--Sharon E. Reidt, Marlboro Coll. Lib., VT

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 15, 2011
st1\: *behavior: url(#ieooui) On April 8, 2009, Italian firefighters charged into a basilica that was threatening to disintegrate amid earthquake aftershocks. Their mission: to retrieve the relics of a pope remembered chiefly as a quitter. But in the unprecedented decision of Celestine V to surrender the Seat of Peter, Sweeney uncovers a tangle of mysteries that will matter more to most readers than will the pope's relics.To pierce those mysteries, Sweeney must probe the devious psyches of an ambitious monarch (Charles II of Anjou) and a lawyerly cardinal (Benedict Gaetani), shrewd men who advanced their own interests by promoting a holy mountain hermit to the pinnacle of medieval Catholicism. But the deepest mysteries lie in the heart of that hermitPeter Morronewho, as Celestine V, would wield the pope's pastoral staff for 15 disastrous weeks before shocking all Christendom with his unexpected abdication. Sweeney weighs competing and irreconcilable responses to that abdicationranging from indictments of Celestine as a coward who quailed at the difficulties of the papacy, to panegyrics lauding him as a saint too pure for ecclesiastical politics. Just as untidy is the account Sweeney unfolds of Celestine's suspicious death as a prisoner of his relentless successor. Real sanctity enveloped in baffling ambiguities.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)