So John Paul II is now the fourth-longest reigning pope. Let's take a look at the top three.
St. Peter is on the list despite not having exact dates for his tenure. It is generally taken to be from 30 or 32 AD or whenever the death of Christ is, until 67 AD, give or take a year, the traditional date for when Peter was beheaded in Rome. Most of the stories of his life are Biblical. Little is written of his time in Rome. Circumstantial evidence suggests he was martyred during the reign of Nero, on an upside-down cross, according to legend, because he considered himself unworthy to die in the same manner as Jesus. St. Peter's in Rome was erected on the site where he was believed to be either martyred or buried or both.
Pius IX, born Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, was pope from 1846 until 1878. He is known for the Syllabus of Errors, which accompanied the encyclical Quanta cura, and for convening the First Vatican Council. He opposed the tide of liberalism that swept through Europe in the 19th century, in part because the unification of Italy ended papal suzerainity. On September 3, 2000, he was beatified alongside John XXIII (perhaps to provide ideological bias), despite charges of anti-Semitism that include the kidnapping and baptism of the Jewish boy Edgardo Levi Mortara and the forcing the Jews, who he once called "dogs of which there are too many present in Rome, howling and disturbing us everywhere," back into the ghettos in 1848, the last time before Hitler that Jews were forced into segregation.
The third pope is Leo XIII, the successor of Pius IX. His main legacy is the 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum, a document so important and influential that John Paul II wrote Laboren exercens on the occasion of its 90th anniversary and Centesimus annus on its centennial, while Pius XI wrote Quadragesimo anno to mark its 40th anniversary and Paul VI celebrated its 80th anniversary with Octagesima adveniens. The encyclical opposed the excesses of both capitalism and communism. A hallmark of social justice, it supported the rights of workers--including the right to human dignity and the right to form labor unions--while denying Marxist confict theory. He is also known as the pope who negotiated an end to the Kulturkampf, for the encyclical Humanum genus, an attack on Freemasonry, and for generally removing the Vatican from conservatism, opening it up to the rest of the world. (1:53 PM)
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