Holy See-Saw

Thoughts on the papacy, power, succession, and the death of Pope Francis

It is a fearful thing to be
The Pope.
That cross will not be laid on me,
I hope.
A righteous God would not permit
It.
The Pope himself must often say,
After the labours of the day,
‘It is a fearful thing to be
Me.’

—A.E. Housman

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The history of the papacy is a history of power.

Each of the 276 popes, from the obscure to the prominent, from St. Peter to Francis, has had to grapple with the dynamics of power: spiritual power, temporal power, institutional power, geopolitical power, economic power, land power, personal power. How much should be invested in the Church? How much in the pope himself? Should the papacy be also a political entity—a state? Should it own territory? If so, how should that territory be governed? Should questions of religious doctrine be decided by high-minded theological debates or by realpolitik? Does the power of the pope trump the power of a king, an emperor, a president or prime minister?

Scoff if you will. True, the next pope is not likely to channel Gregory VII, who forced the German king Henry VI to “go to Canossa” to beg forgiveness. Nor will he command armies, like Pius V, whose Holy League annihilated the Turkish naval forces at Lepanto. But even today, in the Year of Our Lord 2025, the power of the papacy is not inconsiderable.

There are some 1,410,000,000 baptized Catholics in the world—roughly 16 percent of the total population. One in five Americans are Catholic. Whether that number includes lapsed Catholics like me I cannot say, but the point is that the spiritual leader of north of a billion humans—and the ultimate overseer of countless pieces of prime real estate and more money than God—is a powerful man indeed.

There is a reason JD Vance sought an audience with Francis, who, you may recall, bitchslapped the VP after his cynical and intellectually puerile attempt to use the principles of ordo amoris as cover for the Trump Administration to deport people willy-nilly. Not so fast, sayeth the pope:

The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.

Vance, I submit, sought the pope’s divine sanction for his administration’s vile Nazi tactics. He wanted the pontiff to bless the American Dachau in El Salvador. Why else come to the Vatican? And rather than grant the VP’s request, Francis played the ultimate trump card.

About that: Francis was 88 years old. His health was failing. JD Vance did not actively kill the pope, any more than Liz Truss actively killed the queen. But it’s hard to imagine a more compelling call to “come to the light” than looking into the well-kohled but empty eyes of that soulless Nazi ghoul.

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The history of the papacy is also a history of Europe—and, in more recent centuries, the wider world. It was a pope who, parleying with Attila the Hun, persuaded the great conqueror not to invade Italy; a pope who, in what remains the greatest psy-op of all time, riled up disgruntled Normans and sent them to Jerusalem to repulse the Seljuk Turks; a pope whose legate, after indiscriminately slaughtering the entire population of Béziers because a gnostic sect was based there, replied, when asked how to tell the heretics from the faithful, “Kill them all and let God sort them out”; a pope who divvied up lands in the New World between Portugal and Spain; a pope whose Papal Bull was used to justify slavery in the Americas; a pope who excommunicated Henry VIII, indirectly establishing the Church of England; a pope whose corrupt and venal policies prompted Martin Luther to nail his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg church, jumpstarting the Reformation; and so on. How would the map of Europe look today, had not a pope actuated these momentous events?

Some popes perfectly complement the age in which they live. A few were reformers—agents of positive change. Others railed against modernity and the diminishing power of the Roman Catholic Church. Some accomplished great things, some horrific.

And whatever assertion a Papal Bull might make to the contrary, no pope is infallible. We can always nitpick, as we can with any influential leader, and find flaws. Even so, Pope Francis is unimpeachably one of the good popes. The first paragraph in the New York Times story about his passing makes this clear:

Pope Francis, who rose from modest means in Argentina to become the first Jesuit and Latin American pontiff, who clashed bitterly with traditionalists in his push for a more inclusive Roman Catholic Church, and who spoke out tirelessly for migrants, the marginalized and the health of the planet, died on Monday at the Vatican’s Casa Santa Marta. He was 88.

Contrast that with what the same paper wrote about Benedict XVI when he passed away:

Benedict XVI, the pope emeritus, a quiet scholar of diamond-hard intellect who spent much of his life enforcing church doctrine and defending tradition before shocking the Roman Catholic world by becoming the first pope in six centuries to resign, died on Saturday. He was 95.

Even the now-sainted John Paul II was “polarizing,” providing “a television-ready voice for peace and life, from the womb to the wheelchair.” The former Karol Wojtyła absolutely accelerated the fall of Communism, especially in his native Poland. He also helped facilitate the spread of HIV with his idiotic bromides against condoms. Too, his positions on homosexuality and abortion were stubbornly antiscientific and unnecessarily cruel, and certainly contributed to making life worse for women and the LGB community. That he faded almost immediately into semi-obscurity after the ascension of “the pope of the people” speaks volumes.

Yes, Francis was also a staunch opponent of abortion, the science of which he clearly misunderstood. This is an indelible black mark on his record. And we can’t ever assess the career of a modern pope without mentioning his role in the Church’s disgraceful, inexcusable, and unforgivable cover-up of rampant child sex abuse. With that said, Francis held the same venerable position in the same ancient organization that burned people at the stake for having different takes on arcane theological doctrines, made Galileo recant, condemned scientific inquiry generally, and spent a good part of the nineteenth century relentlessly arguing that the Immaculate Conception was real.

With regard to the Church, change comes slowly. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

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The question now becomes: will the new pope, whoever he might be, come from the Francis school of relative modernity and genuine kindness of spirit, or will he be the sort of retrograde, doctrinaire, hardliner asshole—“enforcing church doctrine and defending tradition”—that Leonard Leo and his self-flagellatory ilk would prefer?

The odds are not in our favor. There have been, as mentioned, 276 popes. The lion’s share were short-lived mediocrities who came and went with little fanfare. A few, like my namesake Gregory the Great—who, during times of famine, hawked church lands to pay for food for the poor and hungry, an act so unthinkable to most of his priestly contemporaries that they canonized him as soon as he died (and subsequently and steadfastly ignored his saintly example)—have been legitimate holy men. Some have been extraordinarily powerful: the imperial-minded Nicholas II; the aforementioned Gregory VII; Paul III, who led the Counterrevolution; and the badass Innocent III, who was anything but what his name suggests.

A significant number of popes have been downright bad: greedy, corrupt, bloodthirsty, merciless, venal, tyrannical—more Donald Trump than John XXIII. The notorious Borgia family installed a few popes. So did the Medicis. Bonifice VIII was so ungodly that in the Divine Comedy, Dante ranked him higher—or, rather, lower—than Lucifer. Imagine if, say, Newt Gingrich were chosen at the conclave, or the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts, and he immediately went buck wild, and you get some idea. Corruptio optimi pessima.

The worst-ever pontiff, perhaps, was one Octavian: son of a pope and grandson of the powerful Roman Senatrix Marozia. He the first pontiff to assume a papal name at his coronation, in A.D. 965: John XII. This was genius, in that it distanced him from his lousy reputation. The average Roman peasant had no idea that John XII was the same nepo baby, rapist, and compulsive gambler who lustily plundered the city’s treasury. As E.R. Chamberlain recounts in The Bad Popes (1969):

In his relationship with the Church, John seems to have been urged toward a course of deliberate sacrilege that went far beyond the casual enjoyment of sensual pleasures. It was as thought the dark element in his nature goaded him on to test the utmost extents of his power, a Christian Caligula whose crimes were rendered particularly horrific by the office he held. Later, the charge was specifically made against him that he turned the Lateran into a brothel; that he and his gang violated female pilgrims in the very basilica of St. Peter; that the offerings of the humble laid upon the altar were snatched up as casual booty.

This bad behavior was countenanced by the Church lackeys, much as modern-day cardinals looked the other way at the child sex abuse. Only when Octavian, who had kids with many different women in a way that would make Elon Musk proud, began paying off his baby mommas with papal real estate did the Romans finally draw a line.

In this day and age, it would be hard for a pope to be a greedy, corrupt, opportunistic plunderer. His charges simply wouldn’t tolerate it. But then, not long ago, I would have said the same thing about the president. The Leonard Leo faction, remember, counts Clarence Thomas—one of the most brazenly corrupt public figures in recent U.S. history—as one of its exemplars. We could for sure get a Sam Alito type in Rome.

The second half of the nineteenth century—you know, the “great” America of Trump’s red-hatted fantasies—gave us two popes, of radically different mentalities. Pius IX (1846-78) is best known for his Syllabus errorum, or Syllabus of Errors, published in 1864. This was a litany of 80 grievances—a collection of assertions from his previous promulgations that most of us would agree with, but that he insists are ungodly and wrong. Among the things Pius IX finds offensive are nationalism, democracy, socialism, the separation of church and state, non-Christian philosophy, and scientific inquiry. It’s basically Project 1864—masturbatory material for today’s weirdo self-flagellants. As Donald Sullivan explains at EBSCO:

The Syllabus of Errors created a sensation across Europe. Previously scattered among diverse, sometimes obscure sources, the provocative papal opinions it expressed had a far greater impact when concentrated in a single publication. Despite ambitious attempts to place the Syllabus of Errors in its contemporary context and in a less baleful light, the curious document inevitably became ready fodder for critics of the Church. In general, the Syllabus of Errors can be seen as a last defiant declaration of a venerable papal monarchy come to grief in a secular world it no longer understood. While Pius IX could not prevent the triumph of nationalism, liberalism, and science across Europe, he would not cease trying.

Contrast this with his successor, Leo XIII (1878-1903), friend to the workingman, who in his 1891 Rerum Novarum on Capital and Labor, wrote this defense of unions and scathing rebuke of oligarchs:

In any case we clearly see, and on this there is general agreement, that some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient workingmen’s guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself. . .

And this send-up of democratic ideals:

As regards the State, the interests of all, whether high or low, are equal. The members of the working classes are citizens by nature and by the same right as the rich; they are real parts, living the life which makes up, through the family, the body of the commonwealth; and it need hardly be said that they are in every city very largely in the majority. It would be irrational to neglect one portion of the citizens and favor another, and therefore the public administration must duly and solicitously provide for the welfare and the comfort of the working classes; otherwise, that law of justice will be violated which ordains that each man shall have his due…

And, in what must be anathema to the Leonard Leo cabal, this almost libertarian screed against a federally deputized morality police:

The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error. True, if a family finds itself in exceeding distress, utterly deprived of the counsel of friends, and without any prospect of extricating itself, it is right that extreme necessity be met by public aid, since each family is a part of the commonwealth. In like manner, if within the precincts of the household there occur grave disturbance of mutual rights, public authority should intervene to force each party to yield to the other its proper due; for this is not to deprive citizens of their rights, but justly and properly to safeguard and strengthen them. But the rulers of the commonwealth must go no further; here, nature bids them stop.

These two diametrically-opposed popes, Pius IX and Leo XIII, came one right after the other. In the Holy See-Saw of Vatican succession, odds are that Francis will be succeeded by someone whose sympathies hold more with the former. This lapsed Catholic prays for the opposite outcome—that the smoke rising from the conclave comes from copies of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership being tossed into the fireplace.

There have been 47 presidencies in the 249-year annals of the United States, with two officeholders—Grover Cleveland and our criminal incumbent—serving non-consecutive terms. By the time the 47th pope, St. Simplicius, was elected, in A.D. 468, the papacy had existed for 436 years. It was during his 15-year papacy that the Western Roman Empire collapsed once and for all; that the city of Rome fell to the barbarians—an ominous foreshadowing, perhaps, of what is in store for the American Empire, led as we are by a Simplicius of our own.

May God help us—and may we help ourselves.

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Photo credit: Pope Silvester II. and the Devil. Miniature from Martinus Oppaviensis' Chronicon pontificum et imperatorum, Cod. Pal. germ. 137, Folio 216v, ~1460.