How Many Popes Have There Been? 267, From Saint Peter to Leo XIV

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There have been 267 popes, and Leo XIV is the 267th. That is the Holy See’s own count: its list of the Supreme Pontiffs runs from Saint Peter, who died in 64 or 67, to Leo XIV, elected on 8 May 2025. One man appears on the list three times, so 265 different men have held the office.

It is a long line, and it begins with one man from Bethsaida in Galilee. In nearly two thousand years no pope has taken his name: there has never been a Peter II. Every record that follows belongs to the men who came after him.

You can count most of those records straight from the list on vatican.va, which gives each pope’s number, name, dates and birthplace. The main ones, as of October 2026:

The papacy in numbers	Figure	Source, date
Popes, counting Leo XIV	267	Holy See list, 2025
Different men	265	Benedict IX listed three times
Longest reign	Pius IX, 31 years 7 months	1846–1878
Shortest reign	Urban VII, 13 days	1590
Most used name	John, 21 popes	Holy See list
Birthplace given in present-day Italy	203 of 267	Holy See list, birthplaces
Honoured as saints	81 or 82	New Advent; Aleteia, 2026
Cardinals (voters)	240 (116)	GCatholic, 18 Oct 2026
Catholics worldwide	1.422 billion	Annuario Pontificio 2026, end of 2024

Leo XIV is the 267th pope. The Vatican’s biography calls him the 267th Successor of Saint Peter, the first pope from the United States and the first Augustinian pope. He was born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago on 14 September 1955 and began his ministry at his inauguration Mass on 18 May 2025.

Counting back on the same list, Francis was the 266th pope (2013–2025), Benedict XVI the 265th (2005–2013) and John Paul II the 264th (1978–2005). Who the Pope is, what he does and how he is chosen are explained in facts about the Pope.

The Vatican’s list has 267 entries, and other lists of popes can come out a little higher or lower. The differences come from four places.

• One man counted three times. Benedict IX held the office three times between 1032 and 1048, and the list numbers him 145th, 147th and 150th. Counted as men rather than reigns, 267 becomes 265.
• A pope-elect who died. A man named Stephen was chosen to follow Pope Zachary in 752 and died before he could be consecrated. Older lists counted him and modern lists omit him, which is why the next Stephen is called Stephen II in some books and Stephen III in others.
• Antipopes. A rival claimant set up against a lawful pope is called an antipope. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1907 printed a list of thirty, and it included Leo VIII and Sylvester III. The Vatican’s list today counts both of them as popes.
• Uncertain early dates. For the first centuries the list often gives two possible years, and for Peter it gives no starting date at all, only his death in 64 or 67.

The numbers popes take do not always match their place in the line either. There have been 21 popes named John, yet the last was John XXIII: no pope was ever numbered John XX, and a John XVI appears among the antipopes. Benedict X is also counted as an antipope, so Benedict XVI was the fifteenth man to take that name.

One. The Catholic Church has one Bishop of Rome at a time, and the office passes only when a pope dies or resigns. For nearly ten years a former pope lived beside a reigning one: Benedict XVI resigned at the end of February 2013 and was Pope Emeritus until his death in the Vatican on 31 December 2022, through most of Francis’s reign.

The great exception was the Western Schism at the end of the Middle Ages, when rival lines of claimants sat in Rome and Avignon. In 1409 a council at Pisa deposed both and elected a third man, Alexander V, but neither of the first two gave way. The Council of Constance ended the division, and in 1415 the Roman claimant, Gregory XII, resigned there. The Vatican’s list counts Gregory XII as the pope of those years.

Pius IX reigned longest of all the popes whose dates are known: from 16 June 1846 to 7 February 1878, 31 years and 7 months. Tradition gives Saint Peter a long time as head of the Church, but the Vatican’s list gives no date for its beginning, so his length cannot be measured the same way.

Pope	Reign	Length
Pius IX	1846–1878	31 years, 7 months
John Paul II	1978–2005	26 years, 5 months
Leo XIII	1878–1903	25 years, 5 months
Pius VI	1775–1799	24 years, 6 months
Adrian I	772–795	23 years, 10 months

Four of the five longest reigns began after 1770. Across the whole line the average is far shorter: from Peter’s death to Francis’s in 2025 is about 1,960 years, which spread over the 265 reigns from Linus to Francis comes to a little under seven and a half years each.

Urban VII, elected on 15 September 1590, died on 27 September, before he could be crowned: 13 days, counting the first and the last.

The next shortest, counted the same way from the dates in the Vatican’s list, are Boniface VI (16 days, in 896), Celestine IV (17 days, in 1241), Sisinnius (21 days, in 708), Marcellus II (23 days, in 1555) and Damasus II (24 days, in 1048). In living memory, John Paul I died on 28 September 1978, 33 days after his election.

John is the most common, with 21 popes. A new pope chooses his own name: at the end of the conclave he is asked, “By what name do you wish to be called?” The custom began in 533, when Mercurius, unwilling to carry the name of the Roman god Mercury, took the name John II. The last pope to keep his own baptismal name was Marcellus II in 1555.

Name	Popes	Most recent
John	21	John XXIII, 1958–1963
Gregory	16	Gregory XVI, 1831–1846
Benedict	15 (17 reigns)	Benedict XVI, 2005–2013
Clement	14	Clement XIV, 1769–1774
Leo	14	Leo XIV, since 2025
Innocent	13	Innocent XIII, 1721–1724
Pius	12	Pius XII, 1939–1958

At the other end, 47 names have been used only once, among them Peter and Francis. No pope has taken the name Peter II. In 1978 Albino Luciani became the first pope with a double name, John Paul I.

Leo XIV explained his choice to the cardinals two days after his election. He took the name “mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution.”

Mostly from Italy. Of the 267 entries in the Vatican’s list, 203 give a birthplace in what is now Italy, and 95 of those are Rome itself. France comes next with 15 and Greece with 11, counted by the same birthplaces on today’s map; twelve entries give no birthplace.

The first popes came from all over the Roman world. Peter was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and the early lists include popes from Syria, Greece, Jerusalem and Africa. After Gregory III, a Syrian who reigned from 731 to 741, no pope was born outside Europe for almost 1,300 years.

For more than four centuries every pope was Italian. Adrian VI, from Utrecht in the Netherlands, died in 1523, and as the Pew Research Center put it, “Prior to the election of Pope John Paul II in 1978, all the popes since the early 16th century had come from Italy.” Since then the line has run from Poland (John Paul II, born in Wadowice) to Germany (Benedict XVI, born in Marktl am Inn) to Argentina (Francis, born in Buenos Aires, the first pope from the Americas) to the United States (Leo XIV, born in Chicago, who also took Peruvian citizenship in 2015 after many years there as a missionary).

The youngest known was John XII, chosen on 16 December 955 when he was, in the Catholic Encyclopedia’s words, “then eighteen years of age.” Benedict IX is often said to have been twelve; the same encyclopedia puts him at “about twenty” in 1032. The oldest known was Celestine III, elected in 1191 “in his eighty-fifth year,” and Clement X was 79 when elected in 1670.

Pope	Elected	Age
John Paul II	16 Oct 1978	58
Benedict XVI	19 Apr 2005	78
Francis	13 Mar 2013	76
Leo XIV	8 May 2025	69

Only a handful, over nearly two thousand years. One of the earliest was Pontian, who was banished to Sardinia in a persecution and stepped down on 28 September 235 so that a new pope could be elected. Benedict IX gave up the office and later came back. Celestine V resigned in December 1294 after five months, and Gregory XII resigned in 1415 to end the Western Schism. No pope then resigned for 598 years, until Benedict XVI in 2013. Canon law allows a pope to resign, provided he does so freely.

About 81. New Advent’s edition of the list of popes, kept up to Leo XIV, marks 81 of them as saints. Most are early: the first 35 popes, from Peter to Julius I, are all saints, and 73 of the 81 reigned before the year 1000. The three most recent were canonized by Francis: John XXIII and John Paul II together on 27 April 2014, and Paul VI on 14 October 2018. Counts differ by one or two between lists, partly because, as Aleteia points out, in the Church’s first 1,000 years “there was very little formal process in place for the canonization of a saint.” Aleteia’s own count, updated in May 2026, makes Paul VI the 82nd canonized pope. Pius IX, the longest-reigning pope, is honoured as Blessed, and John Paul I was beatified in 2022.

As of 18 October 2026 there are 240 cardinals, of whom 116 are under 80 and so could vote in a conclave, according to GCatholic’s count. Cardinals who turn 80 before the see falls vacant do not vote, and the rules John Paul II laid down in 1996 limit the electors to 120.

That limit was exceeded at the conclave of May 2025, when 133 cardinal electors took part. A new pope needs two thirds of the votes of the electors present, so 89 were needed. The conclave opened on 7 May, and Leo XIV was elected on the fourth ballot, on the afternoon of 8 May.

The Catholic Church counted just over 1.422 billion baptized members at the end of 2024, about 17.8 per cent of the world’s people, according to the Annuario Pontificio 2026 and the Church’s statistical yearbook. Nearly half live in the Americas (47.7 per cent), with Africa (20.3) and Europe (20.1) next, then Asia (11.0) and Oceania (0.9). They are served by 5,525 bishops and 407,421 priests. The country-by-country picture is in how many Catholics there are in the world.

The numbers have grown very large. Yet the list that holds them still begins with a fisherman who left his nets when Jesus said to him and his brother, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” (Matthew 4:19, KJV).

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• Facts about the Pope: who he is, what he does and how he is chosen
• How many Catholics are there in the world?
• Is the Catholic Church growing?
• Peter in the Bible: his journey with Jesus
• Orthodox vs Catholic: how the two churches differ

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