Absolute Power is not a work, however, of scriptural or theological analysis, but one of history. Collins traces two centuries of the papacy, from the death of Pius VI in a Napoleonic prison in 1799 to the current tenure of Francis, who became pope in 2013. His trajectory is of an institution that looked finished two centuries ago but today is more powerful than ever – or so his title claims. Collins reads this period as a dialectical movement, although not so much a surge and ebb of power as an assertion of one kind of authority for a pope, and a countervailing call for a less centralised, less monarchical reading of the role. This is openly polemical history, and the very best that Collins can claim for his liberal cause is one step forward and one step back.

At the centre of this so far unequal struggle is Catholics’ perception of what the pope’s role really is. The stumbling block for those who wish for a less autocratic role for the papacy is that the First Vatican Council in 1870 defined the pope as having ‘the absolute fullness of supreme power’. Grant such licence, Collins argues, to certain personalities among the papal incumbents, and it explains a lot. Pius XII, a conscientious, ascetic man, felt the care of the church was his heavy responsibility. Furthermore, almost his entire priestly life had been spent as a diplomat. Hence, Collins argues, his inability to denounce Nazism was a calculated move to protect his own institutional Catholicism. Even more boldly, Collins believes that John Paul II’s narcissistic personality led him to conflate the church, the Body of Christ, and himself in a unique way. As the saviour of Poland, as the victim of long drawn-out physical suffering and dying, he particularly identified himself as another Christ. His twenty-seven-year incumbency (1978–2005) encouraged him to see himself as vital to the salvation of Catholicism.

It is the coincidence of the character and longevity of certain papacies that makes them regrettable. John Paul II’s tenure was bettered only by the thirty-two years from 1846 to 1878 of the wholly reactionary Pius IX. Collins quotes a judgement of John Henry Newman’s in 1866 that this papacy was ‘a climax of tyranny ... It is not good for a pope to live 20 years. It is an anomaly and bears no good fruit.’

Pope John Paul II (Photo by Dennis Jarvis)For all its tendentiousness – and I’m largely in sympathy with its argument – Absolute Power is always stimulating and informative. My one major reservation is to do with its subtitle, ‘How the pope became the most influential man in the world’. Collins never quite explains, much less proves, this. He says the election of John Paul II ‘saw the beginning of the most influential papacy in history’ and ‘his high public profile enormously enhanced the power of the papacy’. Well yes, JP II was a celebrity, and, yes, he imposed on his church a revisionist turn away from the ideals of Vatican II. But hundreds of millions of Catholics had always been obedient to the diktats of the Vatican. And Collins himself repeats that the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae forbidding artificial contraception became a dead letter among most Catholics from the moment of its publication. On a wider world stage, John Paul II’s support for the overthrow of Polish communism, and then Francis’s brokerage of a rapprochement between the United States and Cuba, are hardly enough swallows to make a summer. As for people other than Catholics, it’s hard to see, or at least prove, any papal impingement on their lives. Anger at certain policies and at the turning of blind eyes, yes, but that’s hardly influence or power.

Collins himself does not underline the analogy, but papal protectiveness of the institutional church, as with Pius XII’s accommodation with Hitler, is uncannily evocative of the motivation behind the cover-up of sexual abuse. Of course, whether a more localised, a more participatory Catholicism – Paul Collins’s dream – would react differently is unprovable. His dream includes the usual suspects – married priests, the ordination of women, lay involvement at the highest levels – and Collins never allows that these might be merely pipe dreams. Yet the current ecclesial context he outlines gives little hope for any evolution. Paul Collins makes one sweeping judgement that would seem to undercut the realisation of any of his dream; the bishops appointed since 1978, and even during Francis’s papacy, have been mediocrities and yes men. Not much hope of a glorious resurrection if that’s really the case.