Popes in a Year Email Service: A Recommendation

For a week now, I've been subscribed to the "Popes in a Year" email from Flocknote, and I recommend it to you.

You can sign up here.

I've been greatly enjoying these emails, and hopefully benefitting from them. There's a capsule description of one Pope every day. It's just the right length, if it was any longer I might not read them. (I find the jokey tone a bit annoying, but that seems to be the fashion these days.)

Yes, you can just look the Popes up on Wikipedia, or anywhere else, but it's nice to have these pen portraits delivered to your inbox every day.

I'm frequently amazed at how little I know about papal history. I learned only this week that there was an Anti-Pope Christopher who reigned from 903-904 and who was considered a legitimate Pope all the way up to the twentieth century.

It's also quite astonishing that the Vatican itself concedes that, at certain periods in history, it's impossible to tell who was the legitimate Pope when there are various claimants.

There's a great deal of discussion on the nature and limits of the papacy these days. Learning more about papal history can only help us in navigating such debates, whether as participants or as audience.