Michael Walsh is an English Roman Catholic author, historian, and an archivist at London University. He was formerly a Jesuit. Some years ago, I picked up his book The Conclave: A Sometimes Secret and Occasionally Bloody History of Papal Elections. He starts with some straightforward historical facts. He writes, “ ‘Pope’ simply means ‘father’ . . . it comes from the Greek ‘papas’. In the Western . . . Church it was used of bishops from the third century onward . . . from the eighth century onward the Bishop of Rome began to use it of themselves in official documents, and in the eleventh century Pope Gregory VII demanded that in the West the term should be applied only to Bishops of Rome, and to no one else.[1]
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