The Next Pope

In honor of Pope Francis: Requiem aeternam et lux perpetua luceat ei

This piece will be posting on Where Peter Is, probably later this week. Mike Lewis thought it would be more appropriate for WPI to focus on tributes and recollections of Pope Francis, over these first days of mourning. For my part, I am just struck with the impact of having been called to write this, precisely when I was.

Note: I wrote almost all of this before Palm Sunday. By the time I put the finishing touches on it, Monday or Tuesday of Holy Week, it seemed more appropriate to hold it until after Triduum.

I am leaving the original headline intact, under the note. I do not know what else to say. I’m sorry.

Requiem aeternam et lux perpetua luceat ei. Godspeed, Holy Father. -PJC

The Next Pope, Part I – Where Peter Is and Where We’re At

Mike Lewis recently sent a link from Dennis Knapp at The Latin Right, which raised an interesting question: the issue of how we at Where Peter Is will react to the next pope – specifically, as to whether our loyalties might be shaken, should the next pope prove to be more “conservative,” more of the “culture warrior,” than Francis. I’m afraid some of Dennis’s presumptions are way off, one in particular, but I am grateful for the stimulus.

I can’t entirely speak for others. However, I would say we’ll… adjust. If that might sound a bit lukewarm, I would hasten to add: for many of us, that’s exactly what we did when Francis was elected. We adjusted. And that’s as it should be.

What Dennis seems not to know is that everyone at WPI without exception (at least among those I know) loved St. John Paul II, loved Pope Benedict XVI – indeed, we love them still, and hope that their prayers are with us in all we do. To my knowledge, few if any of us could have been characterized as progressives during those years (or, for that matter, even now); we certainly were not chafing against their teachings. While once more I cannot speak for others, the change from Pope Benedict to our current Holy Father in style, manner, and presentation took me some getting used to – and I know others who wholeheartedly support Pope Francis’s unique gift and mission and have done so for years, who found that period of transition more jarring than I did.

The American secular media were no help. While we knew full well that their presentation of Pope Benedict was absurd, we were unused to distorting reports on the papacy having actual recourse to the pope’s own words and gestures; of course, Pope Francis was not a gentle, introverted, and retiring scholar being represented as “God’s Rottweiler.” Even a marginally less silly mischaracterization (say, Pope Francis as a liberal American Latino) would have occasional moments of apparent substantiation, especially given someone whose great strength is free and fluent expression of natural and supernatural gifts and insights for human flourishing, rather than philosophically and theologically rigorous formulation of integral truth.

Yet a far worse issue was the American mindset. Let it be said: with however many exceptions, Americans tend in general to be individualists. We are formed in the Protestant tradition of private interpretation; we are the world champions at “doing our own research”; and, as a reporter whose name I do not recall presciently put it in March of 2020, the problem with telling Americans to do anything is that it will likely provoke them into doing the opposite. One of Mark Twain’s quips about the Garden of Eden comes to mind. This is no way to understand the papacy – or the Church.

Finally, there is the tendency to see everything through the lens of the political polarization that has spread throughout the globe in recent years. In such a view, a “conservative” is someone who will always fight for one set of objectives (e.g. lower taxes, less regulation, harsher criminal penalties for common crime); a “liberal,” in contrast, will always strive for another, opposed set of objectives (e.g. stricter environmental regulations, increased social services, a greater role for government in managing the economy). With vanishingly rare exceptions, one will never hear a “conservative” saying that taxes are too low, or a “liberal” advocating for limiting the size and scope of government social services. These positions never change with circumstance, for however much there is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens, neither sun nor moon nor anything else under the heavens can light the way for one blindly committed to a single path without regard to time or season. The wisdom of Qoholeth is lost on such persons.

The Barque of Peter, however, does not sail by consistently tacking left or right. In fair weather, that would only lead to running in circles. But there is no fair weather; fierce winds blow both left and right, and beneath the surface lurk treacherous rocks. Without compromising her unchanging commitment to loving and serving God, wisdom and prudence dictate continuous adjustment to prevailing circumstance on the part of the Church. Even so, we have no reason to fear: our Captain has gone before us, who knows all of the ways of wind and wave – and He has chosen His pilot to guide her through these particular storms.[1] This is why I can say without dissimulation: God forbid that our next pope be a conservative – or a liberal. Without casting aspersions on anyone who holds such ideologies, ideology itself qua ideology is not only tactically and strategically disastrous, but completely out of line with the Gospels, the spirit and mind of the Church, and – if I may make so bold – whatever this poor sinner can discern of the mind of Christ.

For the Church and the world face many and various hazards. No mortal human, however graced with the Holy Spirit, has within himself the multitudes of gift and formation – and, far more, of vocation and mission – to address them all with equal focus. I have noted before that, as Pope Benedict had an extraordinary gift and mission for addressing relativism, Pope Francis has a gift and mission for addressing utilitarianism. This gift of our current Holy Father is likely to sting the most fervent among us at times; where Benedict’s critique of relativism cut at the marginal vices of accommodationism and a divided spirit, Francis strikes at the heart of the utilitarianism that is such a trap for those who believe most strongly in the rightness and justice of their position… which, at times, is all of us.

To be sure, this kind of utilitarianism does not involve claiming that the end justifies the means. No, its seduction exploits the moral and psychological power of an urgent, just, and righteous cause to engender a glorification and absolutization of that cause. In the grip of such a fixation, any finite good will become corrupted. The natural result is that the means we employ to our ends, and the havoc these means wreak in our characters and our souls, become invisible to us. They are, however, quite visible to other people, leading us to become, as my old doctoral director once put it, “a bad advertisement for the truth” – or, to put it more bluntly, a scandal.

If that were all, it would be bad enough. However, obstinacy and disobedience take on a life of their own, especially where faith and the sacraments are concerned; I find it hard to believe that the spirit animating such statements as these is the same spirit that led their authors to seek ordination and pledge obedience to their ordinaries and their successors. And even more: as we transmute our chosen end into a false god in itself – or, worse still, redefine the true God to conform to our ends – we reduce our loving Father to a thing, a purity algorithm for our personal moral or liturgical preoccupation, not merely falsified but inert – a God without freedom, subjugated to our personal interpretation of him and of his will. Materially, this is idolatry, blasphemy, or both. God is merciful, and I hope (for my own sake) to meet everyone – liberal Catholic or conservative Catholic; culture-war Catholic or cultural Catholic; Sunday Mass Catholic, daily Mass Catholic, ashes-and-palms Catholic, Christmas-and-Easter Catholic, fallen-away Catholic, non-Catholic and anti-Catholic – in Heaven. Still, inasmuch as Heaven and Hell begin here on Earth, it matters which dynamic we are following, every moment. Besides, it seems a shame to damage our relationship with God, hurt our souls, and degrade our character out of a fervor for the Church or for its teachings (whatever our vision of them may be) that has become so misplaced as to lose God, to lose Christ, to lose the joy of the Gospel and the precious gift of each moment spent in love with God.

So what does this say to WPI and the next pope? First of all, we as much as anyone must remain attentive to the Holy Spirit. God is outside of time, and we are in time; God is eternally at work in his Church, and it is part of our mission as Christians to discern the signs of the times, and through them what God’s work means in our time. Despite all the human elements involved, the election of a pope is a key moment of discernment which we must all recognize as Catholics. To do so will require grace and may well involve suffering.

This task, however, will be more formidable (and more perilous) for those who have not even sought to adjust to our current Holy Father – and by this I do not mean only those who heap contempt upon him or question the validity of his papacy. These are numerous enough, and some degree of repentance would be in order. Yet anyone who has looked on the current papacy (or any other in our lifetime) as an anomaly to be endured or even as a qualified good, to be celebrated only insofar as it confirms pre-existing trends and points of focus, has missed a unique papal message, and lost thereby a golden opportunity[2] for growth.

I recall the successful mainstream YouTube apologist of our acquaintance who brushed away the suggestion to read Laudato si’, saying dismissively: “I’m not interested in that stuff,” and I am saddened. I see the conspiracy theories, contentious behavior, and mental gymnastics to which professedly orthodox and obedient Catholics have resorted in the face of papal decisions they did not like or understand, and I am even more saddened. Saddest of all is knowing that our Holy Father may well die without reaching so many among us to whom he was called in mission, though I know it will not be held against him and that his prayers will still be with us. Let it not be held against us.

Indeed, though he could have brought more, had we been more open, Pope Francis has brought the Church many graces. But the next Successor of Peter will bring new graces and new challenges to the faithful. Whomever he may be and whatever he may bring, we at WPI will, by the grace of God, be there to offer our two cents – our widow’s mite – into the treasury of grace. We will pledge to him due honor and due obedience. And we will love him – indeed, we love him already.

Where Peter is, there is the Church.

[1] This is the point where some would darkly invoke Alexander VI (no saint by any means, but not the worst pope – and the great-grandfather of St. Francis Borgia, no less!), or, among the more learned, Benedict IX or John XII. I cannot pretend to know the ways of God in permitting such papacies, but the troubles of the Church in those days were far different from what we experience in our time; while the faith has long since ceased to be a universal presumption in the world the Church inhabits, the papacy has become more focal, century by century. A neutral observer would be hard-pressed to name such a “bad” pope since the Enlightenment, or even the Reformation.

[2] It is, however, not too late – read the writings with an open mind. Start with Dilexit nos and work backward – there is much to be gained and nothing to be lost!

Image: Generated by Imagen 3, Google AI