✚ Pope Reviews · About
Yelp, but for popes.
A hallway two thousand years long with a podium for every pope, 267 of them so far. Walk it, read what each one did and didn't do, and, once reviews open, rate him in Keys of Heaven, one to five.
This is a joke about the format, not about anyone's faith. The reviews are of the job. Both sincere and satirical reviews are welcome and will be labeled so you can tell which you're reading.
Where the facts come from
Every podium carries a short summary from Wikipedia, used under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, with a link to the article. Reign dates come from Wikidata. For popes before 1582, day-level dates are shown only where we've checked them; otherwise you get the year, because the Julian and Gregorian calendars disagree and so do the databases.
The portraits are pixel art made from paintings, mosaics, and photographs on Wikimedia Commons; the credits page lists every source and license.
Where a podium has "One thing to know" and "Did / Didn't", those were written by hand, kept short, and kept to things you can verify from the linked article. If one is wrong, tell us.
The two calculations
Nearest pope. There is exactly one pope, and he is in Vatican City, so "nearest" has a real answer. The distance is a great-circle calculation from the center of your state to the Vatican. We resolve your ZIP code to a state, not a house, which at five thousand miles is wrong by well under a percent.
Next pope. The expected wait is the historical mean tenure (267 popes across about 1,993 years, roughly 7.5 years each) minus how long the current pope has served. Tenure isn't memoryless and the honest version would need an actuarial table for popes. This is the simple version and the screen says so.
Rules for reviews
Reviews haven't opened yet. When they do:
- Review the job, not the faith.
- No slurs, no harassment of living people.
- Documented abuse by clergy is history and the doors state it plainly. Reviews may discuss it. This is not a place for survivor testimony, and we say so gently; the resources page lists organizations that are.
- Cite a source if you can. Helpful votes, not volume, are what count.
Who
Made by RBW Labs in Seattle. The domain was bought in a fit of pique when a pope quit.