Word.ws English Dictionary

papalist

papalist adjective: supporting papal authority; supporting papalism or hierocracy.

Adjective

papalist (comparative more papalist, superlative most papalist)

  1. (historical) Supporting papal authority; supporting papalism or hierocracy.
    • The Summa de potestate ecclesiastica of Augustinus was reprinted in 1582 and again during each of the next three years, and it became a standard repository of papalist arguments. The pope, Augustinus had argued, has immediate power of jurisdiction over temporal as well as spiritual things […]1968, William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of Counter Reformation, page 312

Noun

papalist (plural papalists)

  1. (historical) A supporter of papal authority; (Middle Ages) a hierocrat.
  2. (derogatory, rare) A papist (Roman Catholic).

Forms of papalist

Adjective
comparativemore papalist
superlativemost papalist
Noun
pluralpapalists

Origin of papalist

From papal + -ist.

Questions about papalist

What does papalist mean?
Papalist means supporting papal authority; supporting papalism or hierocracy.
What part of speech is papalist?
Papalist can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near papalist in the dictionary

  1. papalise
  2. papalised
  3. papalises
  4. papalising
  5. papalism
  6. papalist
  7. papalistic
  8. papalists
  9. papalities
  10. papality
  11. papalization

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: papalist (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “papalist.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/papalist. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.