ARTICLES
JUNE 2005 ARTICLES
Contents © 2005
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
An Inhuman Job
Book Outlines Failures and Triumphs of the Papacy
BY CHRISTOPHER ZEHNDER
The pope is not a demi-god, nor is he sinless, nor is he (necessarily) a saint. Though under some circumstances infallible, his judgment can fail, and he can even utter errors. The pope can be the most just of rulers, but he can also be the worst of tyrants. He stands in the place of Christ, but he can play the devil. He holds the keys of heaven, but he struggles against the gates of hell, and sometimes falls. Yet he is never overthrown, for he is the rock on which Christ has built His Church.
The pope is a man, like any other man. "The lives of the popes are in a sense our own lives writ large," said Los Angeles writer Charles Coulombe, author of the book, Vicars of Christ: A History of the Popes. Vicars of Christ, published in 2003 by Citadel Press, is a treasure trove for those who want to know not only about the popes, but about various Church customs and sometimes arcane Catholic lore. Offering short biographies of each of the 265 pontiffs from Saint Peter to John Paul II (a new paperback edition will cover the beginning of Benedict XVI's pontificate), the book also provides an appendix containing the papal coronation oath, St. Pius X's Syllabus of Errors and "Oath Against Modernism," Boniface VIII's bull Unam Sanctam, the "Tridentine Creed," and Pius IX's ever-controversial Syllabus of Modern Errors.
These the book offers in its several parts, but its overall thrust is perhaps its most important offering. What is this? The demonstration that the Church is like a ship breaking up at sea that yet never sinks — and this despite the very human and sometimes incompetent steersmen who have held her tiller.
This message was intended, Coulombe told me in a May 10 telephone interview. The papacy, said Coulombe, is "an inhuman job. More is demanded out of a pope than a human being can possibly give; it just is not possible."
And yet, Coulombe said, "this is the way Christ chose His Church to be run. God has willed that we should be saved through men and through physical things, the sacraments and so on. Why He did this, I don't know. But He willed that men should be saved through weak and fallible other men. I suppose part of the reason is humility; we submit ourselves to someone very often whose imperfections are entirely glaring, and whom, sometimes, we are even required to resist."
What is true of the pope, said Coulombe, is finally true of any father. "Your father may be a lush, you may need to physically restrain him to keep him from harming himself or others, but he's still your father, and he has rights and, occasionally, insights that you won't have. So, it's a mystery; the Church as a whole is a mystery, but the papacy is as mysterious in reality as the Trinity or transubstantiation. Some popes were great men, a lot of them were saints, a few were evil men — just awful — and the majority, probably, were mediocrities — kind of like us. But each of them brought something different to the papacy."
Several of the popes' lives found in the book illustrate this. The popes' embrace of temporal authority, though necessary to maintain the Church's freedom, nevertheless in the middle ages so involved them in temporal politics that many pontiffs seemed more like rulers of this world than spiritual fathers. And several of them were mere politicians, or worse. Some popes had to enlist the Holy Roman emperor as a buffer against dangerous power brokers in Rome, but then Pope Saint Gregory VII ended up having to defend the Church's freedom against imperial pretensions. This forced the pontiff into an alliance with Norman kings in southern Italy — who not only took the pope captive (for his protection) but sacked Rome. Innocent III, perhaps the most powerful pope in history, used his office for the doctrinal and moral reform of Europe; but his use of the temporal power for this end set the stage for a reaction from the rising nationalist consciousness in several European nations. Medieval popes came to use excommunication and interdict freely to keep European leaders in line, and often for very just reasons (though certainly not always); but this only served to cheapen these spiritual instruments in the eyes of the faithful. But what else was a pope to do? Though exercising temporal authority, his power remained spiritual; his armies could not contend with those of the secular powers.
"Just as in normal life, very often the choices you are given are a set of more or less unpalatable ones, so it is for popes. It's just the matter of things," said Coulombe. "And that too points out the divine nature of the institution, because despite everything the popes somehow manage to pop back up like the Energizer Bunny. Unfortunately, the solutions to one crisis very often contain the seeds for the next one. But again, that's human life all over. That's the nature of existence on this fallen world. If you don't like it, next time choose an unfallen one."
And what is true of every pope, including Peter, was true of Pope John Paul II. "One thing should be apparent from all the papal lives reviewed in this book," says Vicars of Christ: "In some ways the pontificate of John Paul II is completely unprecedented; in others, for good or ill, it is typical."
How so? "On the one hand, John Paul's pontificate was certainly unprecedented in the sense that he raised the visibility of the papacy to unheard of heights," Coulombe said. "And, of course, part of this is technology; part of it is knowledge of how to use it. No pope ever traveled as much as he did. The ultimate achievement of his pontificate, in a way, was really his funeral — five million pilgrims came to see it, two billion people watched it on television. He turned the papacy into an absolute bully pulpit."
But, on the other hand, "you have the same stresses and strains and odd sorts of issues under John Paul II that you always have had," Coulombe continued. "The thing about Church history is, while the names change, the roles don't. You've always got the problem of power-hungry, independence-seeking bishops. You always have the problems of different heresies, albeit in differing proportions. These things are not always as upsetting or awful in one pontificate as they are in another, but they are always present. You always have the problems with the state; the issues change, but there is always tension — particularly when the non-Catholic state demands the right to say what is right and wrong and arrogates to itself the definition of morality. By its nature, this is something the Church can never surrender to the state. So there will always be tensions there — and, sure enough, there was in John Paul's pontificate."
Like other pontificates, John Paul's was a mixture of success and failure. "On the one hand," said Coulombe, "he played a big part in the defeat of communism, which is nice; but on the other, the bishops have never been so independent from Rome since the French Revolution. Basically, any given bishop is only subservient to Rome to the degree he chooses to be; and if you have someone like Archbishop Burke of St. Louis, fine. He chooses to be subservient to the pope. But if you got somebody like — oh, I don't know — Cardinal Mahony, he'll reject papal dicta out of hand and make no bones about it."
It is very hard to judge one's own time, to sort out responsibility for success and failure. To compound the difficulty, popes do not make their reality; they to a great degree inherit it — like John Paul II did from Paul VI. "What he inherited from Paul VI was the general downgrading of the papal office, the quasi-independent bishops conferences that did their best to turn the Church into a kind of federation of national churches (which didn't succeed)," said Coulombe. "The liturgical confusion, the catechetical confusion — he inherited all that stuff. He did not really address it in his pontificate. He began to; in 1980, with Inestimabile Donum and Dominicæ Coenæ, he began to take the liturgical questions in hand and actually went so far as to apologize to the Catholic people for the liturgical abuse that the clergy have foisted on them. But then there was the assassination attempt on him, and all that kind of thing went by the board. A lot of the things he stood for early in his pontificate he just sort of let slip. While John Paul was busy building the bully pulpit, I can only say he neglected the administration of the Church to a great degree. And I'm not being mean; he says as much in his last autobiographical volume, in which he wonders, 'perhaps I let the bishops get away with too much.' Well, yeah, and that basically in terms of the Church's internal affairs, he had the choice of taking the Church in a new direction or continuing down the path of what Paul VI called the auto-demolition of the Church. And he chose the latter. I don't think because he enjoyed it, but because he had other ends in sight."
But with one of the ironies with which history is full, the "bully pulpit" John Paul erected, "is possibly the thing Benedict XVI will use in some degree not only to deal with the great and powerful of this world, but also to deal with overcoming the problems his predecessor didn't address," said Coulombe. "So, in a certain sense, while John Paul II didn't really do that much to arrest the process unleashed under Paul VI, it's quite possible that history will show that he made it possible for his successor to do so. Ironically."
Vicars of Christ, though, doesn't just deal with papal successes and failures. A sub-theme is that of the Christian and Roman empire — Coulombe, in fact, dedicates his book not only to Pope John Paul but to "His Imperial and Royal Highness Otto von Habsburg" and "His Royal Highness Louis de Bourbon ... de jure King Louis XX of France and Navarre" — the two "successors of Charlemagne," the founder of the Holy Roman Empire. "The institution of the empire was sort of a temporal twin to the papacy, as Viscount Bryce, probably the best known historian of the Holy Roman Empire, put it," Coulombe said. "Seen in its proper light, the Holy Roman Empire was simply the Holy Roman Church in the temporal sphere. The fact that the popes themselves saw it as ultra-important I would say should militate for our feelings that it is important. Remember, Christendom is not merely a spiritual thing but also a physical, temporal thing; the social and temporal kingship of Christ, which Pius XI in Quas Primas called upon us to uphold. To my way of thinking, the recent beatification of the Emperor Karl, last emperor of Austria-Hungary and, thus, in a sense, inheritor of the Holy Roman Empire, both brings the story of the empire to a close and, as John Paul II said when he beatified him, gives an example to all people in public life."
Coulombe said he thought it "necessary to point out what had been the ideal in the ages of faith and therefore what really ought to be our ideal today." Most people, he said, accept the separation of Church and state, "the state determining for itself what's right and wrong." But without a Christian political arm, "the Church has lost first and foremost a voice in political affairs. It's lost a strong right arm. It's lost a protector. And yet, because Catholics live in the world as well as in the Church, ideally there should be someone to defend the Church's interests. Basically, what we've lost with the empire, above all, is the notion of the Church existing actively in the world." To separate the Church from the world is a kind of heresy, "a sort of Manichaenism, a sort of dualism, wherein the Church is held to be restricted to matters of faith and the spirit and so forth, and the temporal world is given over to the temporal rulers to do with as they see fit. That divorce of body and soul, matter and spirit, Church and state is very un-Catholic and very pernicious."
Coulombe's other intentions in writing Vicars of Christ were more, perhaps, ecumenical. One target audience was the Orthodox. "I wanted to show, via whatever Eastern connections a given pope had, what the real traditional view of the papacy on the part of the East was, as to be separated from the view that they've cooked up in subsequent years," Coulombe said. "So you will notice that there is a lot of contemporary commentary about a given pope's dealings with the East." Another target was the "sedevacantists," those who think the papal throne has been vacant since at least John XXIII. "I also wanted to show them," said Coulombe, "that if what they were saying was true, going by their standards, the papacy came to an end a lot longer ago than 1963 or '58. If I were to be a proper sedevacantist, I would have to say the papacy came to an end when Peter denied Our Lord three times.
"And, then of course, there were the non-Catholic and Protestant population in general. I wanted to show what the papacy really was as opposed to the characature they had of it."
Nor did Coulombe forget the non-Christians, to whom he wished to show "that the papacy, as well as the Church herself, is part and parcel of everything they enjoy. That everything decent we as members of Western Civilization have actually comes to us from the Church, and so from the papacy. My Jewish editor, when he finished the book, said he came away with a completely different view of the papacy, and his respect for it as an institution had gone way up. Let's face it, 265 popes in 2000 years — what other institution has existed for that period of time? What other dynasty has lasted that long in power? None. And the sheer fact of the papacy's continued existence despite some of the worst rascals on the throne, despite the most incredible enemies, all that sort of thing, that is a powerful argument for its divine nature."