UNITED STATES
Slate
Paul Baumann
What are popes good for? In the quarter-century I’ve been writing about Catholicism, I’ve learned that popes are good for the pope-arazzi and for a bit of exotica on the nightly news. On occasion, of course, they are good for producing reams of copy. Time’s Man of the Year! The cover of Rolling Stone! Ten thousand words of aggrieved vindication—“A Radical Pope’s First Year,” insists the recent tendentious headline—in The New Yorker! Apparently there is something about popes that a mass media otherwise skeptical of religious authority finds almost irresistible—which is why, from time to time, popes have even been good for getting me on television, called upon to comment on this or that papal action or utterance. Modern popes also function as job creators for church historians and for biographers. Wait a week, and we’ll get yet another instant life of Jorge Mario Bergoglio or collection of his table talk. How else would we know that Pope Francis was once a bouncer? Essential training, one presumes, for a guardian of orthodoxy.
On this first anniversary of Bergoglio’s elevation to the throne of Peter, kudos and lamentations keep piling up. To some extent it’s not difficult to understand the allure—after all, there aren’t many celibates or absolute monarchs left, let alone one who can claim the allegiance of a billion people. Still, there is something mismatched about this dalliance between the vicar of Christ and the celebrity-obsessed mass media, and one can’t help but wonder at the secular fascination with the papacy that it signals. In a world of limitless choices and seemingly unresolvable conflicts, here is a man and a creed that preaches the renunciation of worldly things and a promise of otherworldly justice. Is the pope offering merely an escape from the burdens of modern freedom or a real alternative? For many Catholics the question still matters. Churches are not quite as empty as rumor has it.
Whatever people think Pope Francis is offering, he is no magician; he can’t alter the course of secular history or bridge the church’s deepening ideological divisions simply by asserting what in truth are the papacy’s rather anemic powers. In this light, the inordinate attention paid to the papacy, while perhaps good for business, is not good for the church. Why not? Because it encourages the illusion that what ails the church can be cured by one man, especially by a new man. In truth no pope possesses that kind of power, thank God. The very first pope, let us recall, was a man of legendary weakness, denying his Lord three times before the cock crowed. And the most recent pope, Benedict XVI—a man of towering intellect and inspiring, if fusty, piety—retired from the ring, overmastered by palace intrigue within the Vatican. John Paul II, to be sure, was a media superstar and arguably played a historic role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet even he could not effectively confront the most critical challenge facing his church, the clergy sexual-abuse scandals.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.