The Papacy and the Hinterlands
I sometimes muse about how our spiritual forebears in the Middle Ages experienced the advent of a new pontificate. News of the new pope would wend its way slowly to the hinterlands, taking months or perhaps years, and by the time the new pope’s name was added to the Canon of the Mass the Chair of Peter might have already passed to someone else. Though priests prayed daily for the pope, who the pope was must have been less significant than the sheer fact of there being a pope in the distant city of Rome. Doubtless those who had a hand in the choosing of popes—for a while prominent Roman families and later the College of Cardinals—paid attention to the personal qualities of the candidates, but this was of no concern for most Catholics, who would never lay eyes on a pope. This deficit of knowledge fit well with the teaching, dating from at least Leo the Great, that there was a kind of mystical identity between Peter and his successors, so what mattered was the office of Peter and not the person who held it. Most knew nothing about the pope apart from his name—if they even knew that—yet trusted that he was in some way fulfilling Jesus’ mandate to Peter to feed his sheep.
This might strike some as bizarre or naïve, but it strikes me as a pretty good way to relate to the papacy. Alas, it no longer seems to be an option. Today we are unavoidably aware of who the current pope is. This awareness brings with it the imperative that we take the measure of the man who will sit upon the Chair of Peter. This has been particularly clear as Leo XIV begins his pontificate and people focus their papal hopes and fears on him. Was the mozetta around his shoulders as he appeared on the balcony a sign of a return to Ratzinger? Were his warm words regarding his predecessor a harbinger of a Franciscan future? Was his failure to speak English in his first remarks to the world a slap in the face to the country of his birth? Was the fluency of his Latin a sign of hope for greater freedom regarding the celebration of the unreformed Mass? These hopes and fears have been intensified by the meme-ification of the papacy, complete with spurious quotations credited to Leo, ranging from an injunction to “be woke” to a warning that “communism has penetrated even Christian circles disguised as solidarity.” In our desire to have the right sort of person as pope, wishful thinking lapses into virtual reality, which seems increasingly the only sort of reality on offer.
There is no obvious way to undo the fact of how we relate to the modern papacy. It is a function of our digital culture, not of the particular men who hold the office. John Paul II certainly seemed to draw energy from the attention of crowds and to relish his role on the world stage (he did, after all, have a background as an actor), but Benedict XVI was a bookish academic who always looked slightly uncomfortable in public, and still we felt compelled to scrutinize his every word and gesture. If he appeared wearing the traditional red papal slippers, the news flashed across the internet, along with instant analysis of its significance and judgments of approbation or condemnation. Francis, with his propensity for off-the-cuff airplane interviews and his deft wielding of symbolic gesture—such as eschewing the papal apartments for a room in Casa di Santa Marta—provided much fodder for our fascination and fostered the deep conviction among pundits on left and right that he was out to revolutionize the Church. In a kind of grotesque ouroboros in which the office swallows the person who swallows the office, it matters little what a particular pope does to encourage or discourage attention to himself. In a culture of digital celebrity, the symbolic power of the papal office energizes our focus on the person of the pope with irresistible force.
So there is a certain inevitability to our fascination with who Pope Leo XIV is and what he will bring to the papacy. We can’t really ignore the fact that he is the first pope in history to have had a Twitter account prior to being pope, that he can probably actually operate his smartphone, that he surely knows what a meme is. We can’t help but wonder what it means that he’s a White Sox fan rather than a Cubs fan, or that he has a “MAGA-type” brother living in Florida, or that he had a gym membership. These things seem to matter to the papal office itself.
Of course, it has always been the case that the development of a papacy has involved a mix of a pope’s personality and predilections, the unfathomable depths of historical contingency, and the hidden workings of God’s providence. It mattered that Gregory the Great was an aristocrat-turned-ascetic before assuming the papal office and that Leo X was an aristocrat who was notably not ascetic. (He is reputed to have said, “Let us enjoy the papacy since God has given it to us.”) It mattered that John Paul II experienced both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism in his early years and that Francis underwent years of Jesuit formation. Even if we believe in a mystical identification of Peter with his successors, who the pope is has mattered.
Perhaps, however, what we can learn from our medieval forebears in the hinterlands, who knew the pope only as a name in a prayer, is that our increased access to papal personality does not give us increased insight into the papal future, for regarding that we are all dwellers in the hinterlands of the present. Which is to say, for us, at this moment, Leo is simply a name. Robert Prevost, the White Sox–loving, gym-going, smartphone-using man gives us only hints—and perhaps deceptive ones—of who Leo XIV will be. There are some indications of Leo’s concerns: along with evocations of synodality and a concern for an end to ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere, he has mentioned the impact of the digital revolution on several occasions, suggesting that in taking the name Leo he intends to address the “new things” of our time, just as Leo XIII addressed the new things of his own day. But no one knows if these will in fact be the things that define his papacy. Historical forces may be at work of which few if any of us are aware, forces that may confront Leo with circumstances, inside or outside the Church, that might send his time as Peter’s successor caroming in unexpected directions. And of course we are even less aware of God’s plans for Leo, except that we know that God’s ways are not our ways.
I freely admit my own desire to read the tea leaves, to gather the scraps of evidence so as to plot a trajectory for Leo. At the same time, I remind myself of the unpredictability of history and providence, and the danger of letting what we think we know lead us into thinking we know more than we do. Like Leo himself, we must wait for Christ and the Spirit to reveal to us the pope that he will be. And in the meantime, we pray for our Church as our hinterland forebears did: “Guard, unite and govern her throughout the whole world, together with your servant Leo our Pope.”
No comments:
Post a Comment