Monday, May 12, 2025

Frequency of papal names

Computer scienceFrequency of papal names




The new pope chose the name Leo XIV. That made me curious about the distribution of names of popes and so I made the graph below. (I’m Protestant, so wasn’t familiar to me.)

Looks like Leo is tied with Clement for fourth place, the top three names being John, Benedict, and Gregory.

There are a few oddities in counting the names due to the time in the Middle Ages when there was disagreement over who was pope. For this reason some popes are listed twice, sorta like how Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump each appear twice in the list of US presidents. And although the last pope named John was John XXIII, 21 popes have been named John: there was no John XX due to a clerical error, and John XVI was declared an antipope.

I also made a higher resolution PDF.





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