Pollard shows him to be neither a radical nor a reactionary but a deeply pious, liturgically conservative pontiff.
Today an angel announced the death of the pontiff to his disciples and the demented executioners were declaring to the populace that they had done those things unwillingly.
Chadwick depicts the four pontiffs vividly.
But because the most scandalous charges were suppressed, those charges obviously being of a conscientious nature, the most severe penalties were not to be dreaded by that pontiff.
He shares with the wartime pontiff an authoritarian centralist world-view and a deep distrust of liberalism, modernity, and the ravages of moral relativism.
According to the abbot, he was penitent and turned away from his sins as pontiff.
These few words have been interpreted by some partisans of a conspiracy theory as evidence that the late pontiff had indeed been poisoned.
His successor will be a pontiff that nobody expects.
