Why are so many books on the papacy so long? There is something about the subject of the papacy, and more especially its modern transformation into an institution of global influence, which seems to provoke historians to write on a grand scale. This collective volume, the product of a conference held in Rome in 2003, is no exception. Composed of twenty articles, written in French and English, it provides a comprehensive account of the papacy during the pontificate of Leo xiii. Few would deny the inherent importance of the subject. Especially compared with his immediate predecessors and successors, Leo has been hitherto largely absent, his encyclical Rerum novarum excepted, from the historiographical reassessment of the papacy that has proceeded apace over the last twenty years. But, even so, there is something perhaps slightly too monumental about this volume. Some of the articles are frankly somewhat slight. Inevitably, some contributors, notably and unsurprisingly certain of the French participants, content themselves with summarising work that they have already published elsewhere, while others concern themselves with relatively minor aspects of the pontificate. More interestingly, and importantly, however, as Vincent Viaene readily admits in his well-stated introduction, a tension is apparent throughout the volume between those contributors such as Laurent Koelliker who perceive Leo's ambitions primarily in terms of his determination to reverse the loss of the papacy's temporal authority in 1870, and those, notably Jean-Dominique Durand and Viaene himself, who argue that Leo sensed the need for the papacy to break away from the interminable Church–State disputes provoked by the establishment of a unified Italy, and instead, in the words of Wladimir Czacki, the secretary of the Congregation for Ecclesiastical Affairs in 1877, sought to establish the papacy as ‘an immense moral power’ (p. 9).

In the light of its transformation over the subsequent century from a Liechtensteinian irrelevance to a global institution, it is difficult to avoid seeing Czacki's words as a premonition of what was to come. And the principal value of this volume undoubtedly lies in the way in which it lays out, in illuminating detail, the determination with which Leo and his influential Secretary of State during the latter years of his reign, Mariano Rampolla, set about building up the resources of the Vatican as a modern and autonomous institution. The Curia was transformed into an effective transnational bureaucracy (Jankowiak); the financial resources of the papacy were reinforced by the expansion of the system of Peter's Pence, thereby enabling it to avoid financial dependence on the Italian state (Klieber); the regular papal jubilees, notably that held in 1888 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Leo's ordination as a priest, were exploited to inculcate a Roman-oriented Catholicism among the faithful (Ticchi and Zambarbieri); the Catholic Congresses were transformed into a more reliable agent for the dissemination of Leo's view of Catholicism, not as anti-modern but as the means of salvation for the modern world (Lamberts); and the predominantly intransigent Catholic press was brought round, at least partially, to Leo's more flexible priorities (Viaene). And yet, as these well-researched articles demonstrate, there was something less than remorseless about this march of the papacy towards modernity. The efforts of the modernisers were rarely entirely successful, and had to contend with the multiple resistances of hostile governments, national ecclesiastical hierarchies and indeed ecclesiastical dignitaries within the Vatican, who remarked scornfully on the ‘turbolenta attività festaiola’ (p. 272) provoked by the arrival of the crowds of pilgrims. There were as many failures as successes during Leo's pontificate, most notably in the diplomatic sphere, where the articles by Koelliker and Trincia well show Leo's inability to break the Triple Alliance and win over either Austria or France as his allies in the enduring conflict with Italy. In that respect it is a shame that the one emphatically weak link in the volume is the essay by Andrea Ciampani, which fails to convey why a solution to ‘the Roman Question’ proved to be so elusive in the complex relations between the Italian state and the papacy.

If, therefore, the papacy was by the time of Leo's death in 1903 an emphatically more visible and influential presence in European life than it had been at the beginning of his pontificate in 1878, then that change owed at least as much to external forces as to the efforts of the Vatican. And this is where, however unfair it might be to suggest it, the limitations of this volume are most apparent. This is papal history, albeit of the new sort, which rightly pays more attention to the broad presence and image of the papacy than to Vatican court politics or issues of doctrine. It is also, ultimately, sympathetic to its subject. Leo xiii, one senses, is for many of the contributors something of a model of a modern pope: forthright in his criticism of the social injustices of the modern world (not merely within Europe, but also, through his emphatic condemnation of slavery, beyond); intransigent in his defence of the Catholic faith as a self-contained doctrine; but also sufficiently flexible to seek, as is well demonstrated in a sparkling essay by Karina Urbach on Leo's dealings with Gladstone over Ireland, pragmatic compromises with the temporal powers. The dead end represented by Pius ix's root-and-branch condemnation of the modern world had been rejected in favour of what Viaene describes as ‘the papacy's adaptive confrontation with the modern world’ (p. 325). But what any volume of this kind cannot really do is to turn the focus of attention away from Rome to the reception of the papacy and its teachings among the Catholic faithful. As a number of the articles demonstrate, notably a highly suggestive one by Jan De Maeyer on the iconography of Leo xiii, what Durand aptly terms the popular ‘papolâtrie’ (p. 58) of the late nineteenth century ran far ahead of the more cautious priorities of the Vatican. Mass participation in events such as the papal jubilees, as well as the readiness with which many of the faithful picked up on forms of devotion encouraged by the papacy, demonstrate the way in which, as Annibale Zambarbieri comments in his contribution, a ‘sentimental and ideal devotion to the bishop of Rome’ (p. 251) appeared to respond in an almost Durkheimian way to the need for new forms of solidarity in the modern world. And yet the true depth and nature of the enthusiasm for Leo and his successors still remains in many respects a somewhat unexplored subject, which reflects the national priorities of much of the ‘new religious history’ of recent decades. Now that historians have done so much, as this volume well demonstrates, to study the modern papacy, so to speak, from the inside out, it is perhaps time for them to turn their attention to studies which approach the papacy from the outside in, by examining the ways in which the episcopus universalis became an emotional and institutional focus of the lives of ‘ordinary’ Catholics in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such studies are, however, unlikely to be any shorter.