Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Priests gathers thirty figures who held formal priestly office, and the group is overwhelmingly the papacy, twenty seven bishops of Rome from the seventh century to the twenty first, alongside three office holders from outside it whose presence shows the label is not a papal one by design.

Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest before whom the Gospels place the interrogation of Jesus, was appointed about 18 CE and held office an unusually long eighteen years, and an ossuary inscribed with his name, recovered in 1990, is widely though not universally identified with him. Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1533, wrote the Book of Common Prayer under Edward VI and was burned at Oxford in 1556 after recanting and then repudiating his recantations. Michael Cerularius, Patriarch of Constantinople from 1043, was one of the two principals in the mutual excommunications of 1054 conventionally dated as the start of the schism between the Greek and Latin churches.

Among the popes the span runs from Sergius I, who defied Emperor Justinian II's Quinisext canons in 692 and was saved from arrest by the militia of Rome, to John Paul II, the first Polish pope, who survived an assassination attempt in 1981 and later forgave his own shooter in person, to Francis, the first Jesuit and first American pope, whose 2015 encyclical Laudato Si tied ecological crisis to poverty in a single moral argument before his death in 2025. Between them the group covers reforming popes, persecuted popes and popes who reshaped the office itself.