A word from the editor in chief: Sometimes, when I have experienced something particularly absurd in the functioning of the church—the scrum last Friday around the Vatican press office is one of the most recent occurrences—I utter a brief prayer of frustration, saying to God “This? This is how you save your people?” It is my own, and much less holy, version of St. Teresa of Ávila’s (quite possibly apocryphal) “If this is how you treat your friends, Lord, it’s no wonder you have so few of them.”
In many conversations among journalists around Rome these days, likely votes are being totaled up, although the conclusion is almost always, as our colleague Father James Martin, S.J. wrote, “Nobody knows anything.” Can all this politicking and vote-counting and interviewing and speculation really be how God wants the church to be governed?
At some level, certainly not. But on other levels, the church has always been, and will always be, run by people, and God has definitively chosen a church full of real people, even at the expense of all this mess. To put it better: There is not some ideal church full of only holy people, moving smoothly in closely orchestrated harmony, that God actually wants, except that he has sadly had to settle for this one.
This church, as messy and absurd as it can be, is the “universal sacrament of salvation,” as Vatican II taught in Lumen Gentium. Which means that it does not point to itself, much less to the pope, but to Jesus. And as Ashley McKinless says below, that’s certainly what we should be praying for. – Sam Sawyer, S.J.
The pope is not the point
By Ashley McKinless
Unlike some of my colleagues, I did not make it to Rome in time to attend the funeral Mass for Pope Francis. And despite being in Rome for a week now, I have not had a chance to visit the pope’s tomb at the Basilica of St. Mary Major on the other side of the Tiber. (If you take a look at America Media’s podcast feeds and website, you know: We’ve been busy!) So, on a personal level, the loss of our beloved Pope Francis has not really hit me.
But on a professional level, I certainly feel like I’m now in uncharted waters.
I began working at America, six months after the election of Francis—and three days before America would publish the groundbreaking interview that the pope gave to several Jesuit journals. Since that time, scarcely a day has passed when I have not had some reason to think about Pope Francis—whether that meant publishing his latest homily or a news story about a foreign trip or talking about the latest papal document on “Jesuitical.”
It also meant looking at a lot of pictures. I have probably seen more pictures of Pope Francis than I have of all my closest friends and family combined.
So when in St. Peter’s Square for the first time last Monday, what struck me most was not being able to picture who the next pope will be. Sede vacante—empty seat—really is an appropriate term for this time of uncertainty.
Which is not to say there aren’t a lot of people telling you exactly who you should picture.
As my colleagues Colleen Dulle and Father James Martin have written in this space, “papabile,” lists of possible popes, are inescapable in the days before the conclave. The first question on everyone’s lips in interviews and casual conversations is: Who do you think will be pope? Who do you want to be pope? The images of Francis that once populated my news feeds have been replaced with shots of various cardinals entering and exiting their pre-conclave meetings who are considered likely frontrunners for the papacy.
On the one hand, this is completely understandable: We are all anxious to know who our Holy Father will be and how he might shape the church. And to some extent, it is helpful. Cardinal Gregorio Rosa Chávez of El Salvador said in a recent interview that the cardinals themselves rely on the media’s papabile obsession. “The names are in the press,” he told Ines San Martin of OSV News. “We depend on the press to know who the candidates are, because names are not something we really talk about in there—perhaps only in small groups. This is not a parliament.”
At the same time, it can all begin to feel like a bit much. The College of Cardinals is not a parliament, and the conclave is not a presidential election.
Ultimately, the pope is not the point. Jesus Christ is. It’s a case that Cardinal Gerhard Müller made powerfully in an interview with my colleague Gerard O’Connell. Describing a “certain populism” that has come to shape the place on the pope in the universal church, he said:
Rome is important, but it is not the center of the church. The center of the church is Jesus Christ. Even in the Amazon, when the Eucharist is celebrated, it’s the same Eucharist as at St. Peter’s. The pope is the visible principle of unity, but not the center. Some have spoken of “the church of Francis”—a theologian cannot accept that. There is no “church of Benedict” or “church of Francis.” It is always the church of Christ, whose visible representative is the current pope.
Like all Catholics, I want to know the name and face that will become as familiar to me as family. But whoever it is, one thing is certain: The church will not belong to him. And the best thing we can pray for is that he, like all of us, belongs to Christ.
Catch up on our top stories from this week in Rome:
