If They'd Made Me Pope: Preliminaries

Part I: "The End of the Celebrity Papacy"

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Several years ago, I visited a Dominican friend of mine who was being ordained to the transitional diaconate in Washington, D.C.. When I jokingly mentioned that either one of us could be elected pope, he laughed right in my face and said I would be a terrible pope. (He added that so would he.)

My friend was right, of course, but it still got me thinking harder: what makes a good pope? What should a pope actually do? How, in short, could I show up my friend?

Now we have a new pope, so, on the off chance Pope Leo XIV is browsing De Civ looking for ideas, here’s what I’d do if they’d made me pope!

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This post turned out to be my longest of the past twelve months—about eight times longer than a normal post, even for me—so I’ve decided to try an experiment: instead of posting the whole thing in one massive drop like usual, I’ve split it into eight parts, releasing weekly, probably on Tuesdays.

This is Part I: Preliminaries, the shortest of the series.

Coming up: Part II: Government 101, Part III: Ecclesial Constitutional Reform, Part IV: Restoring the Rule of Law, Part V: Particular Revisions to Canon Law, Part VI: Restoring the Old Disciplines (older than you think!), Part VII: Deepening Doctrine, and Part VIII: Miscellany.

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Preliminaries

Panic

I don’t think anyone would trust a newly-elected pope who didn’t panic.

At the very least, anyone who has vast power thrust upon them ought to feign panic. This is one reason why American elections are so messed up now: until 1900, presidential candidates were required by a rigid national etiquette to at least pretend they didn’t want the job and weren’t running for it. Many do not realize how much healthy national politics depends upon kayfabe. I don’t really believe anyone who appears humbled or nervous about taking great power, but I have enormous respect for the kayfabe.

However, I suspect my panic would be sincere. The papacy is a vast responsibility, involving the spiritual health of billions of people, and Jesus is unsparing about the weight of that responsibility:

If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to stumble! Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come!

I’m scared enough about the possibility of causing my own two children to stumble. To be the Holy Father of a billion children? Jesus Christ. No wonder they call the place where the newly-elected pope vests the Room of Tears. No sane man would envy Pope Leo, or any pope.

Name

First thing the Pope has to do is pick a name. As I’ve written elsewhere, I would pass up all the funny names² and instead choose the name Celestine VI.

Pope St. Celestine V was a gawdawful pope and everybody knew it. All he wanted to do was go pray in a cave on a mountain. Celestine’s successor, Pope Boniface VIII, was a legal genius and a highly effective administrator. However, Celestine was canonized a saint because he loved God and was a good person. Dante put Boniface in the eighth circle of Hell (the circle of simoniacs), and had ample reason for doing so. There’s a lesson there!

I am the sort of person who will always be tempted to place competent, orthodox Church governance over personal holiness. Celestine reminds me that, actually, you go to Heaven for doing the opposite.

Spiritual Disciplines

To that end: I would start praying the liturgy of the hours five times a day, as all priests do.³ Add to that a daily hour of adoration (as prescribed by Mother Teresa⁴) and daily confession and fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays.

Also, I think that, given the past couple decades, the head of the Catholic Church would probably do well to shed vestments and wear sackcloth and ashes every First Friday throughout his papacy. It’d be good for the Church and good for me.

Something With My Family!

I have a wife and two kids, all of whom are living and thriving in Minnesota, and I don’t want to uproot them. My wife, very wisely, fears power and hates fame. This creates many difficulties for a freshly-minted pope.

It is fun to try to solve those difficulties in my papal daydreaming, but they are boring and have no bearing on Church governance, so I’m not going to write about them. For the purposes of this series, I’ll pretend I have no attachments.

The End of the Celebrity Papacy

The rise of mass media turned the Holy Father from the bishop of Rome into a “spiritual leader” for the entire world.⁵ He is a celebrity, and much of his perceived power comes from that celebrity—especially his ability to win global approval (or disapproval) by saying things to reporters on airplanes.

This is all wrong. The role of Rome is not to be the Church’s P.R. firm. The role of the Pope is not to give electrifying homilies, say thrilling “event” Masses with millions of youth in attendance, or to perform ostentatious acts of charity with the cameras watching.⁶ Seriously, I checked the papal titles; “global spirituality celebrity” isn’t one of them. The Pope should know his approval rating, but should probably never do anything specifically to increase it.

It is certainly the job of the Church to strive for Christ, to thrust herself upward to meet His embrace in an ecstatic cry of, “Yes, God, yes!” The face of every Catholic priest and layman should shine with the euphoric rapture of communion with Jesus. We should all, always, seek new ways to deepen our intimacy with him.⁷

However, in the Church’s constitution as laid out by Jesus and the Apostles, the job of Rome (with respect to the rest of the Church) is mostly to say “no”:

“No, that particular way of understanding Christ is not quite correct, and will lead you to dark places.”

“No, this practice you have devised to draw closer to Jesus is actually quite morally and/or spiritually perilous.”

In this way, Rome nudges the Church in her ecstasy to ensure that she meets her Bridegroom and does not, in confusion, accidentally embrace her Enemy instead.

Instead, the pope’s first and foremost job is to be bishop of Rome, tending to the spiritual needs and sacraments of Romans.

Strictly as a secondary matter, the pope is ultimately responsible to the rest of the world for:

• legislating canon law (including feasts, fasts, disciplines, etc.)

• serving as a final venue for appeals in ecclesiastical matters (doctrinal or not)

• supervising bishops and holding them accountable

• rarely, defining doctrine, usually to resolve a dispute or canonize a saint

That’s it. The pope has full, immediate, universal jurisdiction over every Christian alive,⁸ but it is almost always a bad idea for him to actually exercise it. His energy should be focused first on the Archdiocese of Rome. As for the rest of the world’s flock…

Christ is at the head of the Church, leading us into Paradise. We are scrambling and stumbling after him as best we can, with His guidance. Rome’s special function is to be the caboose of the Church. Rome is the hired hand following after all the sheep, the “servant of the servants of God.” Rome occasionally has to reach out from behind with a shepherd's crook to pull an overeager sheep away from a cliff… but, most of the time, Rome’s function is to let Christ do His thing.

Since none of my four global responsibilities as pope benefit from publicity, I would therefore immediately cancel all public appearances, tours, speeches, exhortations, written letters to the world, et cetera.

Besides, as previously established, I have a face for radio.

I would be a pope of no encyclicals.⁹ There are smarter people than I writing better theology than I could ever hope to write, plus I’ll be busy.

I would also be a pope of very few Apostolic Blessings, which currently run like a mill through Rome because every parish on Earth wants a papal blessing to hang on the wall of its sacristy.

Of course, many people from around the world would come to see me at Mass, which I would of course say daily, and which, by its nature, is, in some sense, open to all. However, I would openly favor the citizens of Rome in all kinds of ways: privileged seating, special Masses, showing up for Mass by surprise in their parishes, giving special blessings to their children and marriages, and so forth. This is not because I think Romans are special, but because Romans would be my special responsibility. The pope is the bishop of Rome! That’s the very good reason so many popes were Italians!

So if I’m pope, and you want to hear my theological reflections for the day, try San Vigilio, or one of the other local parishes, and you might just hear my homily.¹⁰

(Contrary to every shred of evidence this blog has ever produced, I think I’d be a short homilist.)

However, don’t think that my low papal public profile would mean I’m not busy dealing with the world, too! There’s plenty the pope can—and should—get done through canon law and supervision of bishops alone… and I have a whole lot to say about it.

Next week: Papal Government 101: Succession, Legitimacy, Security.

Also: since most of this article is pre-written, I’ll be pursuing other, non-Catholic topics during these weeks. I’m working on a short review of a good play with a dumb name, a new entry in Some Constitutional Amendments, a retrospective on Net Neutrality, and I’m about to get started pursuing an interview. Those of you who don’t care about Catholicism will still have plenty to read, and soon!

1. Meanwhile, for you real old-timers, the old Wordpress blog archive now resides at ropersanchor.jamesjheaney.com. I spent like a week configuring the .htaccess files to make sure all the old links still work and properly redirect. (I’m still working on getting Google to crawl both domains correctly.)

2. Here are the funny names I considered taking:

1. SIXTUS VI: Because it’s been four hundred years and, eventually, somebody’s gotta fall on that sword.

2. JOHN XXV: For many years, Baldassare Cossa (1410-1415) was considered to have been Pope John the 23rd. However, there were always questions about his legitimacy. In 1958, Angelo Cardinal Roncalli was elected pope, and he took the name John the 23rd. This finally led the Vatican’s Papal Yearbook to reclassify Cossa as Antipope John XXIII. Taking the name John the 25th would really mess with their heads!

3. JOHN XX: Due to an error in medieval papal record-keeping, there was never a Pope John the 20th. We went straight from John the 19th to John the 21st, then John the 22nd, and then the multiple Johns the 23rd. It would be doing the Church a solid to “fill in the blank” on this papacy, and, more importantly, mess with the heads of the guys at Papal Yearbook!

4. JOHN XXIII: heh heh heh heh heh you can see the implication yourself but okay I promise no more Johns.

5. MICHAEL III: some misguided Christians self-identify as Catholic, but believe that the papacy has been vacant since the 1950s due to (more or less) alleged heresy in the Second Vatican Council. In 1990, one such man, an American real estate agent named David Allen Bawden of Kansas, held a conclave with six like-minded lay Catholics (including his parents) and was “elected” “pope.” Upon “Pope Michael’s” death in 2022, Rogelio Martinez, Jr. of the Philippines was selected as his successor… Pope Michael II. The actual pope taking the name Michael III would be an insane flirtation with a bunch of, frankly, crazy people. But it would be hilarious.

6. MICHAEL II: This is my favorite, because it implies that David Bawden was pope but Rogelio Martinez is an antipope. This position is held by, I believe, literally zero people, living or dead, at any time, ever.

7. POLYCARP I: Saint Polycarp is a genuinely badass saint whom I love dearly, but his name is, alas, tops goofy. (No offense to Cardinal Polycarp Pengo, who seems like a great dude.)

Full disclosure: I stole some of these from my book club group chat, The Read Men.

3. The fact that I’m not already doing this is why every priest and bishop would start out with a big leg up on me if they were elected pope. I’m so bad at prayer.

4. I once visited the house of the Missionaries of Charity in Rome, where my group was generously given a tour, and the sister who led the tour told us this story, which I am uncertain of because I have never seen it repeated elsewhere:

At some point during Mother Teresa’s ministry, some of the sisters chafed under her requirement that everyone in the order complete one full hour of Eucharistic Adoration every single day. The Missionaries of Charity are kind of extreme in their devotion to serving the poor, and their schedules were full. Some of the sisters humbly asked Mother Teresa to reduce the Adoration requirement to half an hour, at least for some sisters, at least on some days.

Mother Teresa listened very quietly to their request, and agreed that there were indeed too many demands on the sisters’ time, and that they did indeed need help meeting their obligations. She promised to consider their request prayerfully and sent them on their way.

The next day, it was announced that all sisters were now required to complete two hours of Adoration each day. The help they sought would come from Jesus.

The sister who told us this story relayed that the help did indeed come. More good things and help came their way. Things got easier for the order after they started spending more time with the Lord.

5. …okay, the rise of mass media and Charlemange. The papal cult of celebrity did not come entirely during the twentieth century.

6. The Pope had better damn well perform acts of charity. For the record, I think it was a great idea for Pope Francis to wash the feet of prisoners in Rome’s prisons. However, Matt 6 reminds us:

Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

7. If you think this sounds weirdly sexual, you’ve got it backwards. There is an analogy between sex and the Eucharistic communion of the Church. After all, Jesus and Paul constantly compare the Church to a bride and Christ to the bridegroom. However, the analogy runs in the other direction. Eucharistic intimacy is not weirdly sexual; rather, sexual intimacy is weirdly Eucharistic.

8. This was infallibly defined at the First Council of the Vatican in Pastor Aeternus Chapter III, Paragraph 9:

So, then, if anyone says that the Roman Pontiff has merely an office of supervision and guidance, and not the full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church, and this not only in matters of faith and morals, but also in those which concern the discipline and government of the Church dispersed throughout the whole world; or that he has only the principal part, but not the absolute fullness, of this supreme power; or that this power of his is not ordinary and immediate both over all and each of the Churches and over all and each of the pastors and faithful: let him be anathema.

I suspect that this passage, more than anything else, is the leading cause of the continuing separation between the Catholic and Orthodox churches. (The preceding paragraphs give some more sense as to what is meant by “jurisdiction” and “power” and “immediate.”) However, since this passage is irreformable (and true), something will simply have to be worked out, eventually.

9. Might bring back papal bulls, though.

10. I picked San Vigilio almost at random, largely because of my recent work on Pope Vigilius (who was very much not canonized).

However, looking at the website, it may be the ugliest, worst-designed sanctuary I have ever seen. Good. If the good parishioners of Rome must live in architectural squalor, then so should the pope.

…until such time as it can be remedied. What do parish renovations cost these days?