Chris Trotter says there is very little that is either logical or rational in the doctrines of the Catholic Church – or in its manner of choosing a pope

By Chris Trotter*

The Young Pope, a 2016 television series, written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino, picks apart the Papacy’s many contradictions. An ancient institution, navigating a post-modern world. Patriarchal to a fault, but besotted with the maternal. A ruler offering spiritual guidance, from the belly of a vast and conspiratorial bureaucracy. Good news preached to the poor, from atop a mountain of accumulated wealth.

Sorrentino gives us a 40-something pope – played by Jude Law – wickedly subverting the near universal perception of the Vatican as an exceptionally good country for old men. But, what could the Catholic Church possibly hope to gain by electing a young pope blessed with film star good looks? Forty or more years of quietude and continuity? A tumult of doctrinal and institutional change? These are the questions Sorrentino’s series poses. His answers make for spectacular television.

Though the rules of the Catholic Church require only that the Pope be a man and a Catholic, it has been nearly half-a-century since the job was given to anyone under 70. In 1978, Poland’s Cardinal Karol Józef Wojtyła was elected pope at the age of 58 – making him one of the youngest pontiffs in church history. As Pope John-Paul II, he would lead the world’s one billion Catholics for the next 27 years.

That is, of course, the reason why the College of Cardinals hardly ever seats a young man on the papal throne. For those ambitious prelates who dream of rising to the top job, a venerable pope is a good pope, for the very simple reason that he will not be pope for very long. Electing a young man like Wojtyła makes sense only if there are challenges facing the church that are unlikely to be met easily or quickly. Making radical changes, or rolling them back, requires time – and youthful energy.

Even so, not all of Catholicism’s change agents have been young men. Pope John XXIII and Pope Francis were both aged 76 when they were elected.

John XXIII was the pontiff responsible for driving through the radical structural and liturgical reforms of the Catholic Church known collectively as “Vatican II”. The son of peasant farmers, this humble Italian, christened  Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, was much beloved by the faithful, who dubbed him “The Good Pope”.

Nearly half a century after John’s death in 1965, Francis shouldered another reform mission: to undo and repair the worst effects of John-Paul II’s doctrinally and politically conservative pontificate. It was a tall order. Especially since John-Paul II’s successor, Pope Benedict XVI, was eager to protect the Polish pope’s legacy.

Benedict’s resignation in 2013, and the election of the Argentinian Jesuit, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, offered powerful evidence of the traditionalists’ discomfiture. John-Paul II may have played a major role in the downfall of the Soviet Union’s godless communism, and all but extirpated “Liberation Theology” – the “preferential option for the poor” which Catholic conservatives condemned as a Marxist fifth column inside the Church – but poverty and injustice remained undefeated, challenging the conscience of Christians everywhere.

Bergoglio’s choice of the name Francis, after St Francis of Assisi, proclaimed his intention to meet this challenge head-on. The new pope’s passionate commitment to those on the “periphery” of respectability, society, and planet’s economic power-structures, immediately threw the entrenched factional divisions of the universal church into sharp focus.

At the heart of these divisions lies the Church’s dual mandate – present from the moment the Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. The Church has always been, at one and the same time, the body of those committed to the teachings of Jesus Christ; and a powerful instrument for preserving the political and social cohesion of the state.

Jesus’s enigmatic exhortation to “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” has, over the ensuing twenty centuries, almost always been resolved in Caesar’s favour. The Church’s enormous power and wealth could hardly have been accumulated except by it becoming the chief apologist for, and protector of, secular authority. Indeed, if the question is: “What became of the Western Roman Empire?” The correct answer might well be: “It dissolved itself into the Catholic Church.”

In the eyes of conservative Catholics, nothing is more important than that the Church confronts the pessimism and fracture of a godless world with a faith that brooks no compromise. Nothing about the pontificate of Francis disturbed curia traditionalists more than the vast expansion of the Vatican’s communications division. “Have you not noticed,” they would ask their fellow Catholics, “that whenever Pope Francis washes the feet of the poor, there is always a camera present to record this act of private piety?”

To which the liberals and radicals would respond: “You hint at hypocrisy, brothers, and yet throw up your hands in horror when Pope Francis asked who was he to judge the sincerity of gays and lesbians. Forgetting in your outrage the words of Jesus himself: ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’ No one is suggesting that the Christian message should be compromised, brothers, merely that Christ’s words should be echoed in men’s deeds.”

It has always been thus. Ever since Francis of Assisi, threw off his rich attire in the Bishop’s sight, and vowed to marry Lady Poverty.

The Catholic Church is always hard to read. Should the conclave deliver a Black African pope it would be most unwise to read its choice as a victory for the Curia’s ‘progressive’ faction. Few cardinals are more militant in their defence of traditional Catholic teachings, or more strongly opposed to homosexuality, than the prelates of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Nor is it a given that the sudden upsurge in church attendance among young Europeans is a reflection of their enthusiasm for Pope Francis’s Christianity of Deeds. It is just as likely that their hunger for spiritual sustenance has been prompted by a surfeit of TikTok and Tinder and more than is good for them of the Gospel of Me, Money, and More.

And if, against all the odds, the College of Cardinals slips the shoes of the fisherman onto the feet of a 40-something Jude Law lookalike, would the world be delighted – or appalled?

If a prophet is without honour in his own land, then is it not likely that a young pope would be rejected by his own generation as inauthentic? Were such a figure to kneel to wash the feet of prisoners and prostitutes, the temptation would be strong to dismiss his actions as purely performative.

And yet, the image of a man in his 80s ministering to the marginalised moved millions. It makes no sense. Then again, there is very little that is either logical or rational in the doctrines of the Catholic Church – or in its manner of choosing a pope.

Maybe that’s the point. A god that moved in completely predictable ways; a god that allowed for nothing mysterious; would be indistinguishable from a computer.

And, surely, we’ve got enough of those? 

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.