PhD candidate Glauco Schettini was awarded a Research and Writing Award from the American Catholic Historical Association (ACHA). The award, which is offered to graduate students and contingent faculty, will fund research and writing time for an article entitled “A Star Is Born: Pius VI and the Invention of Papal Celebrity,” which springs from Glauco’s dissertation, “The Catholic Counterrevolution: A Global Intellectual History, 1780s-1840s.” Drawing on recent scholarship that traces the birth of modern forms of celebrity and charisma back to the Age of Revolution, the article intends to show how popes, starting with Pius VI (1775-99), refashioned themselves as charismatic leaders and used their newfound popularity as a political tool in their fight against reforming sovereigns and revolutionary regimes that advanced a secularizing agenda. This eighteenth-century “reinvention” of the papacy, which paralleled the consolidation of papal power within the Catholic church, represents a crucial chapter in the emergence of charismatic forms of power at large—and perhaps helps explain why people by the millions interact with Pope Francis’s tweets today!
