John XXIII
When Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was elected Supreme Pontiff on the twelfth ballot of the papal conclave on October 28, 1958, he was less than a month shy of his seventy-seventh birthday. “Fat, kindly, and convivial, with an easy charm and a ready wit, he endeared himself to all those with whom he came in contact. No one had really loved Pope Pius; it was impossible not to love Pope John XXIII. Nonetheless, he was generally expected to be little more than a papa di passaggio –a caretaker pope. His pontificate did indeed last for less than five years, but there was little of the caretaker about it. On the contrary, it shook the world” (453).
The first big surprise was his selection of the name John –the most recent pope named John had dwelled in Avignon in the early fourteenth century, and many of the pope’s who had adopted the name John had been mediocre, with John XII being one of the most depraved pontiffs in all of history (there was also the anti-pope John XXIII who was deposed by the Council of Constance in 1415). At any rate, the legitimate Pope John XXIII had hoped to rescue this name from dishonor –perhaps partly because it was also the name of his father.
His career began as a scholar researching his hero, St. Charles Borromeo (sixteenth century Archbishop of Milan and towering figure of the Counter-Reformation). He later embarked upon a diplomatic career under the reign of Pope Pius XI.
Once elected pope, John hit the ground running –he announced three important projects: a Diocesan Synod in Rome, an Ecumenical Council, and a revision of the canon law. Naturally, the old guard in the Vatican was horrified. Under Pope Pius XII, the papacy had been run like an icy autocracy, with orders being issued from on high, but here was John XXIII hoping to bring together the faithful from around the world in joint dialogue. The new pope was determined to advance the papacy into the modern age. “It was time, said the pope, to throw open the windows of the Church and let in some fresh air” (455). He was a staunch advocate for peace, famously intervening in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and pushing for nuclear disarmament.
The Diocesan Synod, the first of its kind in history, was held at the Lateran in January 1960, and the Second Vatican Council was held at St. Peter’s in October 1962. In attendance were some 2,540, mostly bishops and other high-ranking clerics, making it the largest gathering of any council in Church history. Seventeen Orthodox and Protestant churches also sent observers.
The pope began the ceremonies on a note of optimism:
“We feel we must disagree with those prophets of gloom who are always foretelling disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand… The church should never depart from the sacred patrimony of truth received from the Fathers. But at the same time she must ever look to the present, to the new conditions and new forms of life introduced into the modern world, which have opened new avenues… For this reason, the Church has not watched inertly the marvelous progress of the discoveries of human genius… The Council now beginning rises in the Church like daybreak, a forerunner of most splendid light. It is now only dawn. And already at this first announcement of the rising day, how much sweetness fills our heart. Everything here breathes sanctity and arouses great joy. Let us contemplate the stars” (455).
Tragically, less than a year later, Pope John died of cancer ending the shortest pontificate in two centuries. His lively and vital vision of openness and reform for the Church was to be his lasting legacy. In five short years, he had opened up the Church to the twentieth century and welcomed interfaith dialogue among various Christian churches of all stripes, as well as with Jews for whom he maintained a special affection (John was the first pope to remove the odious antisemitic phrase pro perfidis Judaeis, or “faithless Jews,” from the Good Friday liturgy).
Paul VI
Prior to being appointed Archbishop of Milan in 1954, Giovanni Battista Montini spent nearly his whole life working in the papal Secretariat. He was the son of a prosperous lawyer and parliamentary deputy, and as a moderate liberal in the church, he was no doubt a thorn in the side of the reactionary old guard, including Pius himself, who subtly tried to push him out of the way. Initially prevented from joining the Sacred College by the dictatorial Pius XII –who distrusted his cardinals and gave seemingly no thought to his successorship—a beacon of hope emerged in the Church under John XXIII. Suddenly the geriatric College of Cardinals was opened up to new voices and it was expanded for the first time since Sixtus V.
Montini was elected as Paul VI and he immediately began continuing his predecessor’s push for openness, outspokenness, and freedom of expression. It was the most revolutionary Christian phenomenon since the Reformation. During the continued council gatherings, all of the pronouncements of Pius XII were rejected –ecumenism, liturgical reform, anti-communism, freedom of religion, and above all Judaism. The key document was the Lumen Gentium, the decree of the Church which denied that the Roman Catholic Church was the sole church of Christ. In other words, it allowed for the equal coexistence of other religions –“Catholicism no longer claimed the monopoly on divine truth.” It also undermined the idea of papal autocracy, opened participation in Mass to the laity, introduced the common vernacular instead of Latin, and required the celebrant face to the congregation rather than the altar. The Sacred College now welcomed cardinals from Africa and South America, as well. For the American church, the freedom of religion was re-affirmed, and finally, a newfound tolerance and acceptance of Jews proliferated in the Christian Church (despite the presence of a still mostly antisemitic Curia).
“The Church had been transformed to the point of unrecognizability. For many Catholics, it had at last moved with the times. For many others, it had destroyed itself. Congregations, even in old strongholds such as Spain and Sicily, fell away. Priests tore off their collars; several orders of nuns put away their old habits in favor of uniforms inescapable reminiscent of those worn by airline hostesses. Particularly among the older generation, the disappearance of the familiar and beloved Latin proved hard to accept; to some it was even heartbreaking. Apart from its intrinsic beauty, Latin had served as a lingua franca; in every country of the world, the Mass had been identical and thus immediately familiar. Now, just at the moment when civil aviation was opening up and people were traveling more than ever before, the faithful were all too often obliged to hear it in languages of which they understood not a word… It was Paul’s task to hold all of these conflicting elements together. This he managed, on the whole, successfully –though he was unable to prevent the breakaway traditionalist Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre from founding the Society of St. Pius X, which firmly upheld the old order together with the full Tridentine Mass. He drove the Council forward and ensured that there was no backsliding when it was over; but in other respects, he remained staunchly conservative. On the question of priestly celibacy he refused to budge, while the stand he took on birth control did immeasurable damage to his reputation” (459).
Paul took advantage of the modern era and traveled widely –causing controversy such as when he fell to his knees inside the Hagia Sophia (fueling Islamic Jihadist propaganda)—he was the first pope to visit Africa, and in 1970 he escaped assassination in the Philippines.
“By this time, however, he was giving several of his closest associates cause for concern. His responsibilities were becoming too much for him; he was a deeply unhappy man. The loneliness of his position, his increasing unpopularity, especially after the Humanae Vitae [a document condemning artificial contraception], the increasing tensions within the Church as the full consequences of Vatican II slowly became apparent, the increase in international terrorism, and the Italian Red Brigades all took their toll and increased his depression” (460).
Rumors began to swirl of the pope’s resignation, and in 1978 the kidnapping and murder of his friend, Christian Democratic politician Aldo Moro, felt like the end of his time in the sun. The pope died later that same year of acute cystitis, culminating in a massive heart attack.
John Paul I
Cardinal Albino Luciani was elected pope on the fourth ballot on the final day of the conclave on August 26, 1978. He was of a working-class background, the son of a bricklayer and electrician, in Switzerland. And after rising within the papal ranks, he was still reluctant to accept his election as pope. But when it became clear that he would win, some members thought he might refuse, but slowly and sadly he nodded his head and assumed the name of John Paul I, the first double-barreled name in papal history. It was an homage to Pope John and Pope Paul, both his predecessors, whom he regarded as superior to himself.
“The informal, familiar tone set the seal on John Paul’s papacy. No pope had ever been more approachable; no pope had ever had such a warm and captivating smile –a smile that reached out to everyone he met. Pomposity he detested. Some was of course inseparable from his position, but he reduced it to a minimum. He was, for example, the first pope to refuse a coronation; there were no more triple crowns, no more gestational chairs in which he would be carried shoulder-high through the crowds, no more swaying ostrich feathers, no more of the royal “We.” He longed to take the Church back to its origins, to the humility and simplicity, the honesty and poverty of Jesus Christ himself” (461).
His humble decision not to be crowned horrified traditionalists, and they were further angered when he cut their salaries in half for electing a new pope. He also discovered that the Vatican had become a hotbed of petty jealousies, hatreds, and rivalries. Pope John Paul was known to be a critic of the Church’s staunchly unpopular opposition to birth control, and he refused to attend a conference on the Humanae Vitae while also meeting with U.S. Congressman James Scheuer, head of the House Select Committee on Population. It was a signal that the Church may have been ready to change its tune.
“Had he lived his full term, this quiet, gentle, smiling man might well have a achieved a revolution in the Church –a revolution even more dramatic and profound than that created by Pope John’s Second Vatican Council. But he did not live. Shortly before 5:30 A.M. on Friday, September 29, 1978, he was found dead in his bed. He had been pope for just thirty-three days, the shortest reign since that of Leo XI in 1605” (462).
Was Pope John Paul I murdered? There were many reasons to speculate –he was a man of sixty-five and in excellent health, there was no post-mortem or autopsy conducted, the Vatican didn’t have a police force of its own to prevent such a murder, the Curia had been caught in any number of lies regarding the unexpected manner of his death, and the pope was widely believed to be on the precipice of revealing a major financial scandal which would implicate the Vatican Bank and three international criminals (one of whom was later found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London). For many years, John Julius Norwich was convinced the pope was murdered, but after reviewing all the evidence, he changed his mind.
John Paul II
Following the death of the previous pope came the first non-Italian pope to be elected since Hadrian VI in 1522. Karol Wojtyla was a most remarkable fifty-eight-year-old man. He was a published poet and playwright, an accomplished skier and mountaineer, and he was fluent in some 6-10 languages. He studied at the University of Krakow prior to Germany’s invasion of Poland (before the Nazis closed the university). He then worked several different laborer’s jobs, and apparently had a relationship with a woman, before joining the priesthood and rising in the ranks to become Archbishop of Krakow.
Upon being elected Pope John Paul II, he emphasized the modern role of the Church as an “international organization,” even though his own personal spiritual center was always back in Poland where he had lived most of his life through major global events like the Warsaw Rising and the Holocaust. He remembered Black Friday on August 6, 1944 when the Gestapo rounded up 8,000 young men in Krakow (he hid in a basement while the Germans searched the house upstairs). After the war, he endured nearly a half century under the horrors of communism while also giving his strong support to the Polish Solidarity movement under Lech Walesa throughout the 1980s (some say he secretly channeled funds through the Vatican Bank to support the cause). Mikhail Gorbachev once remarked, “The collapse of the iron curtain would have been impossible without John Paul II.”
In late afternoon on May 13, 1981, an assassination attempt was made on the pope while he was being driven around St. Peter’s Square. The culprit was a Turkish gunman named Ali Agca, a self-proclaimed “nationalist atheist” who hated the Catholic Church, as well as both Russian and American imperialism (many implicated the Bulgarian government in his efforts). He fired three shots at point blank range and the pope was rushed to the hospital where he slowly recovered. He then immediately forgave Agca. John Paul periodically visited Agca in prison and the two struck up a friendship in years to come. The pope also faced assassination attempts by Al-Qaeda radicals and by traditionalist Catholic priests who were part of the Society of St. Pius X.
After recovering from his wounds, the pope could be found jetting around the world like a colossus visiting some 129 countries (including a six-day stint in Britain, the first reigning pope to do so, where he preached inside Canterbury Cathedral). He prayed in an Islamic mosque, and visited Israel (bucking the antisemitic cultural currents that still lingered in the Catholic Church at the time). He was a celebrity pope in many respects, the papal figure I myself grew up hearing the most about, much of it fond admiration from ordinary people for a praiseworthy pope. “In other respects, however John Paul II can now be seen to have been closer in thought to Pius XII than he was to John XXIII… his fourteen encyclicals reveal him if anything as a reactionary, doggedly reasserting the old Catholic teachings on euthanasia, abortion, the ordination of women, homosexuality, and same-sex marriage” (465).
Tragically, John Paul refused to change the church’s policy on birth control and condoms, which would have saved innumerable lives from the scourge of HIV. He did, however, surprise everyone with his “berserk canonizations of everyone in sight” –he beatified some 1,340 men and women (the first step to sainthood) and he canonized no fewer than 483 new saints, more than had been made in the previous five centuries combined.
To his credit, Pope John Paul II was also a vocal opponent of the Iraq War, declaring “No to war!” in his 2003 State of the World Address. But by now, his struggle with Parkinson’s Disease could no longer be kept a secret by the Vatican. His speech was slurred and he was confined to a wheelchair. He died on April 2, 2005, forty-six days shy of his eighty-fifth birthday. The Requiem Mass in his honor was attended by over four million people, the largest single Christian pilgrimage in history.
Despite the popularity of the pope, by this point, Catholicism and the Christian Church more broadly, was often perceived to be in a state of rampant decay and decline in the West. In the United States, Catholics fell to somewhere around 20% of the population, and Protestants fell from over 50% to less than 40%. In the U.K. that number fell to about 8% for Catholics, 15% for Anglicans, and less than 10% overall for church-goers. The narrative of the established Christian Church was simply no longer meaningful to a great many people. Perhaps this was spurred-on by a bevy of ongoing scandals which were given significant media attention, none more prevalent and disturbing than the widespread sexual abuse of children by church clerics all over the world, with utterly astounding numbers of priests having committing heinous acts in secret for decades all while being protected and shielded from scrutiny and legal oversight –the Church was found to have stridently fought all efforts at transparency and justice. After decades of silence and facing countless lawsuits, these stories finally rose to prominence in the 1980s, and numerous court cases resulted in the ensuing decades and cases continue to be settled by the Church to this very day. With each passing year, new abuses seem to be unveiled to the world. Indeed, it is a sad commentary on the times that many hundreds of millions of collections taken up by local parishes around the world have been used to settle court cases involving pedophilic priests (for example, at least five dioceses in separate U.S. states went bankrupt over settling the claims in the 2010s). And these scandals have since brought down clerics at every level of the church, from priests to bishops to cardinals. Likewise, the same could be said of the Church of England which also covered up hundreds of cases of child sexual abuse, and currently hundreds of new cases seem to be coming to light each year. The damage these scandals have inflicted upon the church cannot be overstated.
To his credit, Pope John Paul II was the first pontiff to seriously address these controversies by pushing to curb sexual abuses in the Church, but by this point, the damage to the Church’s reputation had already been done, and every succeeding pope after him would be forced to issue apologies and address the dilemma in his own way. On a final note about Pope John Paul II, he also issued a variety of mea culpas for past transgressions committed by the Church, such as the Church’s persecution of 17th century scientist Galileo Galilei, its involvement in the African slave trade, the countless burnings at the stake conducted by the Church during the Protestant Reformation, the institutional denigration of women throughout the Church’s history, the inactivity and deafening silence of the Church during the Holocaust, the perpetuation of centuries of antisemitic conspiracy theories, the thousands upon thousands of sexual misconduct and abuse that was permitted and sometimes concealed by Church officials, the Church-backed “Stolen Generation” of Aboriginal children in Australia, and the atrocious behavior of Catholic missionaries in places like China and elsewhere throughout its history. These were extraordinary admissions of wrongdoing from the supreme pontiff. But was it enough to bolster the Church’s reputation into a new century?
Pope Benedict XVI
The funeral service for John Paul II was conducted by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, at the time the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Holy Faith (formerly known as the “Holy Office” and “Holy Inquisition” office). His role was to strictly enforce global Catholic doctrine as laid down by Rome. He was known as “God’s rottweiler,” despite being a mostly gentle and amiable person. It came as no surprise that he was elected pope on the fifth ballot in 2005 –the seventh German pope (the first since the 11th century). He took the papal name of Benedict XVI.
Despite being a highly intelligent theologian, he quickly managed to anger three key religious groups needlessly during a time of extraordinarily heightened tensions. First, he claimed in a lecture that Mohammad had only accomplished things “evil and inhuman” which elicited widespread anger and public demonstrations by Muslims across the world (violence ensued when two churches were firebombed in the occupied West Bank). The pope was forced to issue an apology, and it was later revealed that he was quoting the words of Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus in 1391, but this was never made entirely clear in his speech. As part of his apology, he flew to Turkey to pray at the Blue Mosque (amidst understandably tightened security concerns over threats of violence). Next, he antagonized Protestants by claiming it was not possible to talk about a “church” with respect to Protestantism because they had no notion of the one true Church in the Catholic sense. In response, an avalanche of criticism was directed at the Vatican, including sinister warnings from France about “external repercussions.” And lastly, he offended Jews –many of whom were already justifiably irate at the Church’s decision to canonize Pope Pius XII, the pope who seemingly turned a blind eye to the Holocaust– when Pope Benedict recited the Tridentine Mass on July 7, 2007, including the prayer asking that Jews “may be delivered from their darkness” it was widely condemned. He also lifted the excommunication sentences on four breakaway bishops who were part of Archbishop Lefebvre’s Society of St. Pius X, among whom was the English Bishop Richard Williamson, notorious for his continued denial of the Holocaust. These were all careless scandals of the pope’s own making and they could have easily been avoided.
Then came a firestorm –in Ireland new stories emerged about widespread child abuse and physical and sexual violence that was rife throughout Catholic schools and orphanages. Almost as utterly repugnant as the charges was the Church’s extraordinary effort to cover-up the scandal. And instead of immediately taking action against Cardinal Sean Brady for his admitted role in these nefarious activities in shielding offending priests from accountability, Pope Benedict simply allowed Cardinal Brady to remain in his position without punishment. Brady remained in his role for many years despite overwhelming calls for his resignation. Brady was seen as especially hypocritical for his vocal condemnation of same-sex marriage, while still protecting child predators under his watch. He later served in the papal conclave that elected Pope Francis, but he finally tendered his resignation in 2014 on his seventy-fifth birthday. On his eightieth birthday in 2019 he finally lost the right to vote in future papal conclaves. At any rate, the explosive scandal in Ireland was but a drop in the bucket for the church, and when Pope Benedict issued a formal apology to Ireland, many Catholics in Austria, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany felt slighted –as if the scandals affecting their nations were somehow of lesser concern to the pope.
Pope Benedict stumbled yet again when doubling down on the potential ordination of women, calling it a grave crime in canon law, and then again when he offered to welcome into the Catholic priesthood those married Protestant bishops and priests who were leaving their own church in protest of the ordination of women. Once again, it drew the ire of many Protestants. In his writings, Pope Benedict often came across as curmudgeonly, embittered, and out of touch –and on top of everything else, it came to light in the press that as a young 14-year-old growing up in Germany he had joined the Hitler Youth. Never mind the fact that he came from a family of anti-Nazis. Could Catholics possibly continue to support a former Hitler Youth as their Supreme Pontiff? The shadow of his past continued to haunt him throughout his pontificate.
On February 11, 2013, Pope Benedict at last resigned his pontificate ostensibly due to his poor health and advanced age (he was nearly eighty-six years old at the time) but it caused widespread shockwaves since the pope was traditionally expected to serve for life. The exact reasons for his resignation have never officially been made clear, but we might rightly surmise that he had come to represent everything people despised about the church. Benedict was the first pope to resign since Gregory XII in 1415, taking the title “Pope Emeritus” for the remainder of his life until he passed away in 2022.
Francis
The next pope was to be Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a former bouncer, janitor, and chemist who was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He joined the Jesuits in 1958 after suffering a severe bout of pneumonia and cysts. Following the resignation of Benedict, Bergoglio was elected pope on the fifth ballot of the conclave and took the name Francis (in honor of St. Francis of Assisi) making him the first pope to be a member of the Jesuits, the first pope from the Americas and the Southern Hemisphere, and the first pope to be born or raised outside Europe since the 8th-century papacy of the Syrian Pope Gregory III. By taking the name “Francis” (and not “Francis I”) he became the first pope since Lando in 913–914 to hold a name not already used by a predecessor.
All of this unprecedentedness was intended to signal a new era, but in truth it was shaping up to be a continuation of reform, building on the foundation laid by John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, and John Paul II. Upon assuming the papacy, Francis abolished the bonuses paid to Vatican employees upon the election of a new pope, and he ended payments to cardinals who served on the board of the Vatican Bank. His reign also highlighted stronger regions of opportunity for the Church, primarily in Africa, Asia, and South America. To date, Pope Francis made it possible for women to be involved in the Roman Curia, he garnered headlines for striking a stridently more sympathetic tone toward LGBT people (he called for the decriminalization of homosexuality), he permitted the blessings of same-sex couples (just recently as of this writing in December 2023), and he has been a critic unbridled capitalism, rampant consumerism, and the imperialist legacy of the past. He has also won popular praise for his efforts to raise awareness about climate change, and for denouncing the death penalty as intrinsically evil, making the latter a key mission of the Church to advocate for its abolition. Additionally, he has been largely critical of the sinister rise of right-wing populism across the world after the lingering pains inflicted during the 2008 financial crisis, and he has occasionally served as a rare bulwark in the public discourse against heated political attacks on large numbers of migrants and refugees fleeing desperate situations and escaping to places like Europe and the United States. Like John Paul II before him, Francis issued an apology on behalf of the Church, this time for the Church’s role in the “cultural genocide” of native people in Canada.
As of the time I am writing this, Francis has convened the beginnings of the Synod on Synodality (October 2023) which promises to be the culmination of his papacy, perhaps the most significant convening since Vatican II. The pope opened this gathering with an urgent plea for the world to address the dire environmental outlook with rising global temperatures and increasingly hazardous climactic shifts across the world. However, only time will tell what this convening will yield (it is expected to conclude in October 2024). At the very least Pope Francis serves as a ray of hope for the future of the church.
***
Thus concludes my extensive survey of the papacy. After completing a deep-dive into the kings and queens of England using several different sources (including Winston Churchill’s History of English Speaking Peoples) I decided to turn my gaze toward that other enduring monarchical tradition spanning over two millennia. At the outset I asked myself how is it that a religion which venerates the “meek” and the “poor in spirit” has managed to elevate a supreme pontiff to govern the faithful like a global king? What are the traits and characteristics of a good pope? How are we to understand civic virtue under the vision of a global theocracy? Now at the conclusion, I believe I have come to see the papal regime with greater clarity, especially its numerous pitfalls and missteps, however the question of how this theocratic monarchy, which rules over all peoples across the globe –and yet formally none– has either endured (or at least survived) as long as it has is a historical fact that continues to befuddle me. The papacy is a political regime that still attempts to avoid portraying itself as an earthly political regime, while still depending entirely on its earthly support; it portrays itself as a philanthropic organization while it has nevertheless amassed staggering riches; it is ostensibly a moral authority on important matters of human concern despite having served as one of the most corrupt, debauched, and morally abhorrent institutions in human history. The Catholic Church is indeed a strange mix of contradictions. At the very least, what seems most striking about my survey of the papacy, is that the greatest of all the popes have tended to be leaders who were keen diplomats, courageous overseers, and wily negotiators. That is to say, the best pontiffs were primarily earthly and human, rather than heavenly and divine. To its critics, the Church has often been a stale, archaic, backward institution which has been lamentably granted undue authority over worldly affairs –a reactionary relic from a bygone medieval era that is sorely in need of reform; a painfully antiquated anchor for bigotry and superstition; a decadent example of theocratic authoritarianism; and an extravagant edifice which has henceforth failed to atone for its many crimes against humanity. But to its proponents, the Church has served as a steadying force, a unique refuge from the modern world, an international body whose history echoes back across two millennia; the standard-bearer of a humble tradition extending back to Peter, Paul, and Jesus; a rarefied space wherein people are invited to partake in sacred rituals that give purpose to life; a quiet temple of solemnity and solitude amidst the cacophonous experience of modern life; and a symbol of hope, restitution, healing, and forgiveness for all of humanity.
In closing, I will leave the last word to John Julius Norwich since he has served as my primary guiding light on this journey. Writing in 2011 (prior to the election of Pope Francis), Norwich wrote the following:
“It is now well over half a century since progressive Catholics have longed to see their Church bring itself into the modern age. With the accession of every succeeding pontiff they have raised their hopes that some progress might be made on the leading issues of the day –on homosexuality, on contraception, on the ordination of women priests. And each time they have been disappointed… and that after nearly two thousand years, and despite the atmosphere of agnosticism that prevails in much of the world today, the Roman Catholic Church –with its two billion members, representing as it does half of all Christians and about one-sixth of the global population—is, despite everything, flourishing as perhaps it has never flourished before. If he could see it now, St. Peter would –I think—be proud indeed” (468).
For this reading I used John Julius Norwich’s 2011 single volume history of the papacy Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy.