A See That Outlasted an Empire, and Who Has Held It

Papal primacy was not asserted all at once. Early bishops of Rome exercised real but limited influence beyond their own see, and the claims that later hardened into full jurisdictional authority developed over centuries through crises, the fall of the western empire, disputes with Constantinople that ended in the mutual excommunications of 1054, the Avignon papacy of the fourteenth century when popes lived in France under French influence, and the Western Schism that produced three rival claimants at once before the Council of Constance resolved it in 1417.

The loss of the Papal States to a unified Italy in 1870, in the same year Vatican I defined papal infallibility, stripped the papacy of the temporal kingdom it had held for a thousand years and left it, after decades of self-imposed confinement to the Vatican, as a purely spiritual and moral authority projected through travel and media rather than armies. That shift shapes the modern office: twentieth and twenty-first century popes have travelled further and spoken to more people than any predecessor, and the see has increasingly been held by men from outside Italy, a Pole in 1978, a German in 2005, and an Argentine in 2013, the first pope from the Americas, reflecting a Catholic population now concentrated well outside Europe.