As a theologian, priest and author, Hans Küng has served the Catholic Church throughout his life. In this time he has known very different papacies. Now he looks back and writes about "his" seven popes: "very individual experiences that I personally, in a direct and indirect way, have lived with the last seven popes". But Küng is not limited to elaborate with mastery and fluency the portrait of each one of these seven personalities, as it makes at the same time a critical appraisal of their respective pontificates. The experience is necessarily illuminated by "often unconventional but justifiable knowledge, of which I have been aware in the course of my studies, prolonged for years, of the history of popes and papal ideology". Thus, experiences and knowledge acquire in this witness of his time, observer and privileged actor, the rank of a balance of the epoch leading to a final reflec...read more