In this episode of Catholic Answers Live, Jimmy Akin joins Cy Kellett to explain why popes take new names after their election. Drawing from Church history and tradition, Jimmy explores how this practice developed, what these names signify, and why the choice often reflects a pope’s mission, inspiration, or theological emphasis.
Transcript:
Cy: The question is timely, so I wanted to throw it out to you. Where do popes get their names from?
Jimmy: Well, they pick them. This is actually the very first decision a pope makes after he becomes pope. The first decision is, do you accept your election? And if he says yes and he’s already a bishop, bam. That moment he’s the pope. So once he’s become pope, the very next thing that happens is they ask him, by what name do you wish to be called? So this is his first decision as pope. And then it gets announced, and then he comes out and so forth and greets the folks.
So that’s where the names come from, if you interpret the question in one sense. But there are a couple of other senses that you could ask it in. One of them is, well, what’s the source of the names? If the pope himself picks it, where is he getting it from? And the answer is, these days, popes get their name typically from previous popes. And so they look back on who were the previous popes, who’s someone that I would like to emulate, what message will be sent if I pick this pope’s name rather than that pope’s name. And they pick it from a previous pope, but not always.
Now, originally, popes didn’t have a papal name. You could argue Peter did, because Jesus changed his name. So he got his name from Jesus. His birth name was Simeon or Simon, but then Jesus called him Peter, and that’s what other people called him. But then after Peter, they just kept their birth name. So, like Pope Clement, he would have just been born Clement. And, you know, Pope Linus, he would have just been born Linus. And so they took their name from whatever their parents had given them.
Now, there were a few deviations from this in the first millennium. So that’s between, you know, that’s the first 10 centuries up to the year 1000, there were a few. The first guy to pick a different papal name was named Mercurius. That was his birth name. But he didn’t. It’s reported, at least. I haven’t seen a direct quote from him on this. But it’s reported that he didn’t feel it would be appropriate for the Christian world to be led by someone named Mercurius, because Mercury was the name of a Roman God. And so it’s like, why is your Christian leader named after a pagan God? So he thought there was a problem with that.
But not all popes have thought that, because there was a previous pope, Dionysius, and Dionysius was also a pagan god. So there have been popes with pagan god names, but Mercurius thought that was a bad idea. So he took the regnal name or papal name, John, and he was the second person to have the name John. So he became known as Pope John II. There were a handful of others in the first thousand years of church history that did the same thing.
But when the papal name custom really took hold was in the second millennium, just before the year 1000 in 996, we had a gentleman take a special name as pope. And thereafter, almost everybody did. I mean, basically, for a thousand years, you had people picking a new name when they became pope, with like three exceptions in the 1500s that kept their birth names.
And you might wonder, well, why would this happen at this point in time? You know, why would popes all of a sudden start this tradition of taking a different name? I have never seen a study done on that, a historical study done on that question. But my guess is it’s because of what royalty were doing. It’s been common with royalty throughout history to pick a different regnal name than their birth name.
And so by the Middle Ages, you know, when the year 1000 happened, kings and queens were a big deal in Europe. And the pope was also a monarch. He ruled the papal states. And so to make the. And it seemed more like a person was more authoritative if they had a new name in their new office as pope. And so it brought dignity to the office in that cultural context.
And so I suspect that the naming conventions among European monarchs had an influence on popes taking new names. If that hypothesis is true, then we might expect that sometime in the third millennium, that custom may fall away, because kings and queens are not a big deal now. The pope does not have the papal states anymore. And rather than trying to acquire more influence by imitating what secular rulers are doing, the popes are trying to come across as humble and as the servant of the servants of God.
So at some point in the third millennium, maybe 100 years from now, we may have popes just sticking with their baptismal names, unless their baptismal name is Peter or Jesus, because we’re not going to have a Pope Peter II. No one wants to. Someone who had a birth name of Peter, they would definitely pick something else, because otherwise it would be like, who are you to compare yourself to St. Peter, you know, so I don’t expect a Peter II.
Also, if someone’s named Jesus, what Pope Jesus? Really, that would be a bit of a shock to some people. And so I suspect anyone named Jesus or Peter will keep up the custom of changing names. But the custom may fade away.
And we even see signs that we’re living in an age right now where popes are reconsidering the pool of names they want to draw from. Because in 1978, we had John Paul I elected, and he had the first double papal name in history. He said he wanted to honor Pope John and Pope Paul, so he called himself John Paul.
Then we had Pope Francis, which was another unprecedented papal name after Saint Francis of Assisi. And even if we look at other popes like Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, they had reached back hundreds of years to find a papal name. And so that suggests that popes these days are feeling like maybe the current route, bunch of names is a little stale and they’re rethinking some things.
But I did a whole study of the subject of papal names back in 2013 when Pope Benedict XVI retired. I turned it into an ebook just called *Pope Names*. It’s not currently on Amazon, but I’m hoping I can get it up again real quickly.
And I also talk about this in the upcoming Monday episode of the *Jimmy Akin Podcast*, where I look at how four popes, the four most recent popes, so that’s John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis, and Leo XIV, how they met the world. And I cover their choice of papal names because that’s their first decision about how they’re going to interact with the world.
And then we watch footage of them coming out on the balcony, the loggia at St. Peter’s, and we analyze their body language and see what that tells us about how they’re going to reign. So there are some very interesting lessons you can learn about them from just their opening interaction before they say anything in public. Just studying. Okay. What’s their name and what are they doing with their body? That tells us a bunch about their reigns, and I’m going to be covering that on the *Jimmy Akin Podcast* on Monday.
Cy: Very cool. David, I’m sorry you weren’t able to stay on the line, but I hope you were listening and that answer was helpful to you.