noun
definition
The status or term of office of a pontiff or pontifex.
Examples of pontificates in a Sentence
Still less safe is it to ascribe the authorship of the forgery to any particular pope on the ground of its style; for papal letters were drawn up in the papal chancery and the style employed there was apt to persist through several pontificates.
The European state of mind no longer lent itself to such enterprises, and, moreover, under such brief pontificates, the attenuated Roman power could not expect to succeed where Innocent III.
The eleventh contains the lives of all the bishops in order, and includes the chief events during their pontificates; the twelfth deals in the same way with the archbishops, not forgetting the writer himself.
His numerous works include histories of Arianism, the iconoclastic controversy, the Greek schism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and of the pontificates of Leo I.
How Hildebrand paved the way for these reforms during the pontificates of Nicholas II.