If the abuse crisis darkens much of this book, it is because the crisis has darkened the church, causing millions to leave. Disputes over homosexuality, priestly celibacy and birth control also appear so often that the reader might think that sex (the word or derivatives appear some 400 times in 514 pages of text) is the main preoccupation of the modern church. Weary Catholics may agree.

Pope John wanted the Vatican council to recognize Roman Catholicism as a “church of the poor,” but John Paul II and Benedict did everything in their power to crush the post-council spiritual movement called liberation theology, with its centerpiece “option for the poor” and millions of followers; they connected it to Marxism and communism. Shenon highlights models for those who embraced the theology’s work, however, like Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, assassinated by a right-wing death squad as he said Mass.

He also recognizes the weight of papal teaching documents meant to guide Catholics — but goes too far by categorically proclaiming “Humanae Vitae” (1968), Paul VI’s prohibition of birth control, “the most consequential encyclical of modern times.” What of “Populorum Progressio” (1967), which declared that the economy of the world should serve all people and became a touchstone for government authorities, seminarians and political dissidents aiming for structural change in impoverished Africa and Latin America? Or John XXIII’s “Pacem in Terris” (1963), which definitively positioned the church in the modern debate on human rights that helped end the Cold War? Or Francis’ “Laudato Si’” (2015), which made climate change a central issue of church social teaching and helped bring forth the Paris Accords?

Shenon repeats a story about Jorge Mario Bergoglio (later Francis), that during the Argentine junta’s repression against presumed leftists in the 1970s, he denounced two slum worker priests who were captured and held in a torture center. He fails to add that one of the priests, Franz Jalics, issued a statement in 2013 saying that they “were not denounced by Father Bergoglio” and the suspicion was ”unfounded.” (The other priest, Orlando Yorio, died in 2000.)

Pope Francis is 88. Whether the next conclave will elect a candidate committed to Vatican II or swing back to traditionalism is unknowable. Francis, for one, appears sanguine, occasionally referring to an aspirational successor, Shenon notes, who would take the name John XXIV, honoring the pope who let the fresh air in 60 years ago.

JESUS WEPT: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church | By Philip Shenon | Knopf | 590 pp. | $35