NB: I watch this stuff like people watch college football; the conclave is draft day for 1 guy. I have an advanced degree in medieval history, so this is my chance to scream about this for a short season, only for it to go underground like a cicada, then return in 7-15 years to scream again.
Let's talk about the last 25 years, because they are weird.
Popes have a shelf life. They're generally elected as old men in their own time: prior to the modern era, popes could be in their 40s and 50s. In the modern era, Catholic men in their 60s and 70s are picked because they aren't going to live THAT long. Governance is temporal power -- things that belong to this earth, not to God and the eternal. Nobody wants a pope ruling for decades. There are surprises, however.
In 1978, Paul VI died after a good-size reign of 15 years. Not too short, but getting a little long. The August conclave of 1978 elected Cardinal Albino Luciano, who took the regnal name John Paul. First of his name -- very cute!
He corked it 33 days later.
Just when everyone got home from the conclave, BACK to Rome they went to choose a new guy. Now, the problem is that the consensus candidate was dead -- John Paul had won it in 4 votes. The conclave still only took 3 days, but what ultimately happened was the two remaining heavyweights couldn’t muster enough votes to pull it on either side. Thus, we end up with a 58-year-old Polish Karol Wojtyla. Very young, not Italian – the first non-Italian since Adrian VI in the 1520s. He was considerate enough to take on John Paul as his name too so the monogram would only have to add an II rather than a whole new name.
John Paul’s tenure of 27 years is ridiculously long for a pope. It also proved to be a problem as he began to deteriorate due to Parkinsons’ very publicly. It also didn’t help that he had been a vibrant, young pope who went skiing and was very athletic. The contrast between young John Paul II and the hunched-over, suffering man he was at the end of his life could not be more stark.
And this is where Joseph Ratzinger comes in. To this day, Pope Benedict XVI is still more commonly referred to as Ratzinger, because his body of theology and management of the Vatican precedes his papacy. He was actually ceding power when he became pope; he was head of most of the major bodies of the Vatican under JPII from about 1982 onward. Ratzinger was not a pastoral leader; he did work in churches, but he was more firmly rooted in academia and then in administration. He was brilliant, but cold.
That, and he also preferred the company of cats to people. For me, that’s valid. But it does create a problem when you are the leader of a transnational church that needs a people person to bind them together. Ratzinger could often be clinical in his writing, being very detached from the sinners he wrote about. As a result, it felt as if he had a compassion gap: the person was could be kind to those he met, but the written word was harsh. In conversation, Ratzinger was soft-spoken with the charisma of a parked car.
In the 2005 conclave, the final two men in the ballots were Jorge Bergoglio (future Francis) and Ratzinger; Ratzinger always had a hefty lead, as he was viewed as someone consistent with JPII and would continue the administration. After such a long tenure, a new person was welcome, but perhaps not a theological change. That said, there was a Bergoglio lobby that did not cease to whip votes for him until Bergoglio said openly that he did not want the papacy. If hadn’t, we might have seen Francis start his tenure about 8 years earlier.
When Ratzinger became Benedict XVI, he anticipated he would be pope for a short time… no matter how long God planned to keep him on earth. Ratzinger had been up close and personal with JPII’s decline, and he did not want that to be him, on the world stage, decaying in public.
So Benedict XVI became the first post to resign since the Western Schism of 1378-1417(ish). The Western Schism had seen the election of a Roman pope but then the cardinals had buyers remorse, decamped to Avignon, and then voted in another. Then as it is now, there is no way to de-pope someone without killing them (which is the sin of murder, which is bad). The only way to end a papacy other than death is to willingly resign. In 1417, the competing popes were forced to resign, and nobody really went peacefully….
Benedict retired before he became frail and a spectacle. He willingly resigned. But now there was a theological problem: 2 popes.
Casual viewers of the Catholic Church may notice that Francis and Benedict come from two different ends of the theological spectrum. Despite harping and shrill cries of heterodoxy, neither one is a heretic – the Catholic theological interpretation spectrum is just that big. However, the two of them disagreed on how to approach key issues in the Church. This became a problem under the doctrine of papal infallibility.
Papal infallibility was established in 1870 under Pius IX, the only pope with a confirmed reign longer than John Paul II. He won the papacy at age 54 in 1846 and reigned until 1878, during which time the Papal States were merged into modern Italy. This left the Pope as the lord of a one-square mile country known as Vatican City. It was a huge change. Since the 500s, the Papacy and its curia lived off of and used lands throughout Italy to support itself. When one was elected pope, they were essentially the elected monarch of these lands as well as the international Catholic church.
With the formation of the state of Italy, those lands were now gone. One can interpret the doctrine of papal infallibility as a last grasp at power… or, if one is a believer, a codification of what was already known by Catholics. While the pope is pope, he is theologically infallible. He doesn’t have to be perfect at math or grammar, but if he says something related to theology, it is doctrine. He is infallible in that capacity.
So what happens when you have Benedict XVI as pope emeritus and Francis as the active pope? They come from different ends of the theological interpretation spectrum.
And neither of them are wrong. Both are infallible, somehow.
In short, it got messy fast. Francis would signal support for clerical marriages and making celibacy optional, and Benedict would write an entire book on why that was wrong. Benedict wrote a letter on how the sex scandal within the Church was due to deteriorating Western and traditional values, while Francis blamed the Church institution and the conspiracy of silence: we did it, we need to fix it. LGBTQ issues had the same conflict: Benedict stated these people were constantly in sin and needed to be celibate to participate in church life, and Francis argued it wasn’t his job to judge them, but God’s; they should be included.
This subtweeting and indirect bickering continued almost to the last, with Benedict XVI dying in December 2022, just after Christmas. As emeritus, he didn’t get the big papal funeral, which was fine and understandable. But now Francis himself was starting to decline, and his peak years had been spent with a constant theological debate undermining him among more conservative parts of the Church. This magnified an already dramatic shift from the theology of JPII (which was mostly Ratzinger anyway).
I think – and I think most popewatchers also thought – that Francis might resign when the time came. When he took office in 2013, he said he might make it a tradition, jokingly. Francis was always in favor of a church for the poor and without ego. Resignation is sacrificing your ego as a pope. Francis could live with that…
…but I think he realized that his successor would have the same problems he did if he was alive. There can only be one pope. This is not the Easter Orthodox Church, where the Patriarch of Constantinople is “First Among Equals” in a council. As a result, I think Francis decided to die in the saddle to spare his success the theological problems, especially if they were miles apart.
Now that Robert Prevost of the US has become Leo XIV, that may not be the case. Leo XIII was a pope at the turn of the 20th century that wrote doctrine on the dignity of work, the importance of social justice, using capitalism responsibly, and legitimized unions in order to help these goals along. The name Leo XIV suggests Prevost will be consistent with that mission – and that of Francis, without being Francis II.
Leo XIV is a big surprise, for sure. He is from the Americas, like Francis. He is not Italian, which I thought for sure was going to happen – we haven’t had an Italian since John Paul I in 1978. Prevost does have some questions about two sex scandals around him, though this seems to be heavily disputed; Prevost has engaged the problem and addressed the issue, rather than some of the egregious cases that JPII and B16 just ignored or swept under the table. It’s still unsatisfying, since it doesn’t seem like resolutions have been reached yet, but it’s better than the conspiracy of silence.
That said, he seems to be concerned about the environment (like Francis). He may be onboard for priests marrying, but he’s not overtly in favor of adding women to the diaconate. He seems more reserved about LGBTQ; he decried “more genders than do exist” but he also didn’t support a blanket policy that forbade anyone from blessing same-sex couples; it should be a bishop’s choice in his diocese. He’s ok with giving communion to divorced and remarried Catholics; he won’t stigmatize them or weaponize the sacrament, as some conservatives threaten to do.
Overall, I think he will park the bus on some issues like LGBTQ outreach, but he’ll be more dogged about workers’ rights, protection of migrants, and the environment. I wasn’t joking when I said Prevost might have been elected for the purpose of bitching out American president Donald Trump in English.
Prevost in his style seems to be more traditional, as he let them put the mozzetta on him, while Francis noped right out of that. That said, he picked the name Leo XIV, which conveys the idea of social justice for workers and common people. Leo XIII was the first pope to be recorded in sound or in film – that, combined with the long-ass speech Leo XIV delivered (particularly compared to Francis), suggests to me that the @ pontifex social media may be very active, even if we don’t get as many sit-down interviews or random question sessions like Francis had.
A gorgeous gilt Senior Officer’s Backsword wit the motto “Viva L’Italia/Viva Pio IX”, roughly translating to “Long Live Italy/Long Live Pius IX” in reference to Pope Pius IX who was pope from the 16th of June 1846 to his death on February 7th, 1878, Italy, Papal States, ca. mid 19th century, from Czerny’s International Auction House.
And, since where religion has been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost,
Pope BI. Pius IX
