Problem Popes

By Crispin Sartwell

 

 

John Paul II's will bequeathed nothing to anyone, because he didn't own anything. This is a remarkable expression of the humility ≠ and indeed the overall spiritual fitness - for which the last pope was so noted. But it is even more remarkable because he was speaking from the Vatican, a place that bristles with the wealth of nations, continents, centuries, a museum and treasury of the world, a city encrusted with gold, jewels and priceless art.

     To live both as the person who controls such resources and as a humble monk ≠ to live enthroned, in golden robes, while living also in poverty - is admirable, though (not to put to fine a point on it) impossible. 

    Indeed, the papacy's astounding history has been a mass of contradictions: representing the Prince of Peace while fielding armies, proclaiming infallibility in the midst of debauchery, committing itself to charity and humility while draining half the world of its wealth.

    Perhaps this is beginning to sound to you like an anti-Catholic diatribe ≠ and perhaps it is. But not without this disclaimer: if I recount the excesses, corruptions, and sins of the papacy, I am aware too of its moments and figures of transcendent holiness.

    A couple of weeks ago, I was teaching Machiavelli's The Prince to my political philosophy classes. That book, as you may recall, sets up Cesare Borgia as a model for rulers to emulate, because he put into operation such Machiavellian axioms as this: if you are going to commit murders, commit them all at once as quickly as possible.

     Pausing to give a biographical sketch of Borgia, I said he was the son of Pope Alexander VI, who ascended to the papacy in 1492. This suddenly registered on a student named Julia, and she said "Wait a second. How does the Pope have a son?"

    But the children were the least of it. Alexander bribed his way to the papacy; he held an infamous orgy in the Vatican called the Banquet of Chestnuts, featuring a hundred prostitutes; he threw parties and hunts and dances of unbelievable lavishness, even as the financial position of the church teetered on the edge of unsustainable. And his schemes to dominate Europe politically and militarily were prosecuted by his murderous children Cesare and Lucrezia.

    Machiavelli said of Alexander VI (approvingly): "Alexander VI did nothing else but deceive men, nor ever thought of doing otherwise, and he always found victims; for there never was a man who had greater power in promising, or who with greater oaths would affirm a thing, yet would observe it less."

     Alexander was no doubt among the very worst of the men who have held the papacy, but he was neither unprecedented nor unsucceeded. His immediate predecessor Innocent VIII was in many ways even more reprehensible, fathering children and repressing philosophers as he conducted witch hunts.

   Alexander's immediate follower Leo X was by all accounts a less morally repugnant person. But he stripped the wealth of Europe to fill Vatican coffers and restore St. Peter's Basilica ≠ the center of the recent funeral spectacle ≠ among other things by selling indulgences, documents that purported to reduce the time in purgatory of the family of the purchaser.

    So outraged did this make the monk and theologian Martin Luther (among many others) that he broke with the Catholic Church, eventually going so far as to call the pope "anti-Christ." Christendom has never again been united, though for the first time at a papal funeral, John Paul II's featured leaders of protestant denominations.

    Indulgences were, for Luther, merely a symptom of the true problem of the papacy: that it claimed to be poised between God and man, that it proclaimed that people could only reach and experience God under the auspices of its bureaucracy.

    In contrast, Luther taught "the priesthood of all believers": that each person could forge a true and primary relation to God. And he pointed out ≠ what seemed undeniable in his time ≠ that the claim to speak for God to man was an invitation to greed, arrogance, and corruption, a claim to which no merely human being was equal. And it was to obscure their mere humanity, according to Luther, that (putting it directly) popes indulged in vast quantities of quasi-mystical mumbo-jumbo and fabulous displays of wealth, even as peasants starved.

     It has been a long time since the papacy was occupied by an Alexander, or even a Leo, in part because the Catholic Church, confronted by the Protestant Reformation, undertook to reform itself.

    But still the papacy is a unique institution. You will not find the Dalai Lama or a Grand Ayatollah enthroned in a Vatican of infinite wealth, and you will not find them claiming the sort of religious authority - the status of intercessor between God and man ≠ that the Catholic church claims for the papacy.

     As the Cardinals meet to choose a new Pope ≠ perhaps, as they claim, with the help of the Holy Spirit ≠ we can only hope for a man of John Paul's simplicity and humility. But it must be said that it's not a position that's designed to encourage such qualities of character.

 

Crispin Sartwell teaches political philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA and blogs at eyeofthestorm.blogs.com.