UNITED STATES
The Atlantic
ROSS DOUTHAT
APR 18 2015
In 1979, almost a year into the papacy of John Paul II, a novel called The Vicar of Christ spent 13 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. The work of a Princeton legal scholar, Walter F. Murphy, it featured an unlikely papal candidate named Declan Walsh—first a war hero, then a United States Supreme Court justice, and then (after an affair and his wife’s untimely death) a monk—who is summoned to the throne of Saint Peter by a deadlocked, desperate conclave.
Once elevated, Walsh takes the name Francesco—that is, Francis—and sets about using the office in extraordinary ways. He launches a global crusade against hunger, staffed by Catholic youth and funded by the sale of Vatican treasures. He intervenes repeatedly in world conflicts, at one point flying into Tel Aviv during an Arab bombing campaign. He lays plans to gradually reverse the Church’s teachings on contraception and clerical celibacy, and banishes conservative cardinals to monastic life when they plot against him. He flirts with the Arian heresy, which doubted Jesus’s full divinity, and he embraces Quaker-style religious pacifism, arguing that just-war theory is out of date in an age of nuclear arms and total war. (This last move eventually gets him assassinated, probably by one of the governments threatened by his quest for peace.)
Murphy’s book is mostly forgotten, but his hook, the idea of a progressive pope who sets out to bring sweeping change to Catholicism, has endured in the cultural imagination. The priest-novelist Andrew M. Greeley’s 1996 potboiler White Smoke, for instance, culminates in the election of a modernizing Spanish cardinal, whose conservative opponents are undone by the wily politicking of two Irish American prelates. Two years ago, Showtime shot a pilot for a series called The Vatican, in which Kyle Chandler (a k a Coach Taylor from Friday Night Lights) played a rising-star New York cardinal with progressive views—only to spike the show, perhaps feeling overtaken by events, 10 months after Pope Benedict XVI unexpectedly resigned.
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.