Saints and Sinners - Eamon Duffy

The papacy is among the most durable institutions in human history — older than the states that have alternately courted, attacked, and outlasted it. Duffy's account traces that continuity without sentimentality: popes who consolidated power through theological argument, political alliance, and occasional ruthlessness sit alongside those who genuinely reshaped the Church's moral imagination. What emerges is not a story of saints or sinners in any simple sense, but of an institution that has survived precisely because it has never been only one thing.