Papal authority in a democratic world

I've lived through six popes in my lifetime, including the 33-day pontificate of John Paul I in 1978. Next month we'll witness another papal election, in a process virtually unchanged in almost a millennium except for the attention riveted on it, at least in the Western world. Only the Academy Awards can rival a papal election as a publicity vehicle, and the prize— the keys to the church of St. Peter— is even more valuable than Oscar, at least in the eyes of the faithful.

The papacy is both a venerable anachronism and a modern creation. When the first College of Cardinals chose a pope in 1059, the idea that Mary conceived Jesus as a virgo intacta or that the wine and wafer of the mass were the transmuted blood and body of the Christ were not yet articles of faith in the Church. Not until 1870— right around the time that Friedrich Nietzsche was proclaiming that God was dead— was it asserted that the Pope was infallible when pronouncing on matters of faith and morals.

Catholicism was once the faith of about half of Europe. With the Protestant Reformation, that share fell, at least geographically, to about a quarter. Thanks to the conquest of the New World and the subsequent adventures of European imperial powers, Catholicism became a world religion that now commands the allegiance, although not necessarily the obedience, of a billion souls. They comprise the prime (though not the sole) audience for the forthcoming conclave.

Autocrat of a billion souls

As a non-Christian, I've always been bemused by the idea that, as a poet once put it, a wandering Hebrew prophet was the lord of the universe. The demands on credulity placed by the Christian narrative far exceed those of any other world religion. As the Second Century theologian Tertullian put it, Credo quia absurdum: "I believe because it is absurd."

This isn't just an issue for Catholicism, of course, but for Protestants, Mormons and other outliers of the faith, although most of them have dropped much of the baggage that Catholics still carry.

What's most striking about institutional Catholicism today, however, is not its ancient dogma but the figure of the pope himself (it's always of course a him, the legend of Pope Joan aside). In a time when, at least ideologically, the notion of democracy has won out almost entirely in the secular realm, the pope is what no figure in history has ever been before: the autocrat of a billion souls.

Debating with Jesus

You can find secular rulers of populations at least as large in China and India, but in neither case is such absolute power devolved upon a single individual for life. Pope Benedict XVI may have resigned, but there is no mechanism for replacing a pope for any reason, be he dotard or tyrant or even infidel. The faithful are required to believe that the reigning pope is the sole person on earth vouchsafed the capacity to judge inerrantly of faith and morals, and thus in an important though not final sense to possess the keys of salvation.

Of no other religious leader has this authority ever been predicated. Even Jesus's disciples debated with him. The pope hears advice and opinion, but he debates with no one.

We live in an age of democracy and also (perhaps not by accident) an age of tyrants, but no secular potentate ever exerted a claim over conscience or the most intimate of private activities such as the pope does. As more and more of our lives— including the lives of many Catholics— are ruled for better or worse by secular values, papal authority seems ever more of an anomaly.

Whiff of reform

Yet the consensus in the church hierarchy maintains that this authority must not be diluted or qualified in any way. The church thus remains the purest example of autocracy in the modern world, and perhaps the purest example in recorded history.

Roman emperors were accorded divine honors, and Chinese rulers were believed to possess the mandate of heaven. But none was given the status of oracle.

Could the Catholic Church democratize itself? Attempts have been made in previous centuries to elevate the authority of church councils over that of the pope. Pope John XXIII let in a whiff of reform in the 1960s with Vatican II, a move that subsequent pontiffs have sternly repudiated.

Luther's lesson

Opponents of democratic reform have argued that the absence of a final seat of judgment in the church is an invitation to heresy and schism. The popes of the Reformation predicted— correctly— that the Protestant church founded by Martin Luther would splinter. Consequently, for the past four and a half centuries, the unity of Catholicism has been tied firmly to the pope's authority.

Decoupling that authority is a risk the princes of the church seem very disinclined to take. Their authority, after all, is inseparable from the hierarchy that culminates in the Holy Father.

The historian and Catholic intellectual Garry Wills recently suggested in The New York Times that the papacy has become an unsustainable drain on the faith and values of the modern church. (Click here.) But I think the hard-liners are right. God may be dead, as Nietzsche suggests, but the church is only slowly dying. The papacy, meanwhile, is the glue that holds it together.

Liberals may despair at papal absolutism, but what appears as a gaudy and well-nigh incredible spectacle to some of us may be the last tentpole of a 2,000-year structure. Given the even more parlous state of contemporary Protestantism, much of Western Christianity itself may be at stake in the papacy's survival.

So, watch for the Oscar envelope if you will. But the puff of white smoke that will shortly rise above the Vatican still holds the biggest prize of all.♦


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To read a response commentary by Dan Rottenberg, click here.