Pope

The papacy is the oldest continuously functioning office in Western Christianity. Catholic tradition holds that Jesus Christ commissioned the apostle Peter as the rock on which the Church would be built, and that Peter served as first Bishop of Rome before his martyrdom under Nero in the first century. Historians trace the office's development more cautiously: the bishops of Rome held no unchallenged primacy in the earliest centuries, and papal authority grew alongside Rome's prestige as the empire's former capital, the presence of Peter and Paul's traditional tombs, and the city's role as a court of appeal in doctrinal disputes.

Papal authority today rests on the doctrine of Petrine primacy, formalized most explicitly at the First Vatican Council in 1870, which defined papal infallibility for solemn pronouncements on faith and morals made ex cathedra, a power exercised only rarely. As Bishop of Rome, the Pope governs the worldwide Roman Catholic Church through the Roman Curia, appoints bishops, calls and confirms the decrees of ecumenical councils, and serves as a visible symbol of the Church's unity. The office also carries civil sovereignty over Vatican City State, an arrangement dating to the 1929 Lateran Treaty that resolved the Roman Question left by the loss of the Papal States in 1870.

The papacy's authority has never gone unchallenged. Eastern Orthodoxy rejects universal papal jurisdiction while honoring Rome's historic place of honor; the Reformation rejected papal authority outright; and within Catholicism itself, councils and popes have at times disputed where final authority lies, most sharply during the fourteenth-century Western Schism, when rival claimants divided the Church.

A pope is chosen by the College of Cardinals meeting in a papal conclave, a process refined over nine centuries. Early bishops of Rome were elected by the clergy and people of the city, a pattern vulnerable to interference by Roman factions and, later, by emperors and kings. The Second Lateran Council of 1139 and especially the 1179 decree of the Third Lateran Council placed election firmly in the hands of the cardinals, requiring a two-thirds majority. The word conclave, from the Latin for with a key, dates to 1268 to 1271, when the citizens of Viterbo locked the cardinals in and reduced their rations to force a decision after nearly three years of deadlock, a crisis that produced the sealed, sequestered election procedure still used today.

Only cardinal-electors under the age of eighty may vote, gathering in the Sistine Chapel until a candidate secures two-thirds support; ballots are burned after each round, with chemical additives producing black smoke for an inconclusive vote and white smoke to announce a new pope. Any baptized Catholic man is technically eligible, but every pope since 1378 has been chosen from among the cardinals themselves.

Notable holders include Gregory the Great, who reorganized the Church's finances and mission to England around 600; Leo the Great, who met with Attila the Hun in 452; Urban II, who launched the First Crusade in 1095; and John Paul II, whose twenty-seven-year papacy was the third-longest recorded and included a central role in the collapse of European communism. Benedict XVI's 2013 resignation was the first in six centuries and set a modern precedent for a living pope emeritus.