Whew, those popes get up to all sorts of eye-opening, unpleasant things, don't they? I'm not religious but not militantly so I came to this with no axe to grind with the Roman Catholic Church, and came away from "Vicars of Christ" having raised my eyebrows in surprise at the antics of past popes so much that my eyebrow raising has turned into a full-on tic that probably needs medical assistance.

If you ever needed a resource to back up your argument for the eradication of religion, this book would be handy, as it lays out two thousand years of papal misdeeds, including the "Golden Age of Bastards" and "The Jousting of the Whores", where Medici and Borgia popes saw no problem siring children to various mistresses, then placing those children in prominent church positions. And the less said about the child molesters parading as popes the better.

De Rosa also writes well, with a streak of dark humour. Well worth a read. ( )

This is a sensationalist view of an old institution, that often seems to have no operating oversight. The pretensions of the Papacy add an element of spice to this protestant when he raced through reading the book. Not great prose, but certainly the type of book that could be written by someone with a hatchet and access to a moderate amount of research time and resources. ( )

INDEX; BIBLIOGRAPHY

Good ( )