As the Conclave to elect the new Pope opens in Rome I would commend to the reflection of my readers this quotation - a favourite of mine - from the preface to Walter Ullmann’s A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages, which was first published in 1971.
“ the papacy is the only institution within the European or Western orbit of civilisation which links the post-apostolic with the atomic age:”
When I first read it, many years ago, I was struck by not just its truthfulness but by the implications of the truth it expressed. That sense has stayed with me, and maybe it was a factor in clarifying my path to reception some years later.
Ullmann continues
“ as an institution it has witnessed the birth, growth, prosperity, decay and disappearance of powerful empires, nations and even of whole civilisations; it has witnessed radical transformations in the cosmological field evidenced by bloody revolutions, intercontinental wars and popular upheavals of such magnitudes and dimensions that wholly novel political and social structures appeared in their train.”
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