A word from the editor in chief: Yesterday evening, I went to the evening prayer held nightly at Santa Maria in Trastevere, organized by the community of Sant’Egidio, with whom I have become friends in New York City over the past few years. The prayer itself was beautiful and consoling, a chance to step out of the intensity of these couple of weeks and be grounded in something more basic and more lasting. It was also the first time I had been inside that church, which is stunningly beautiful, especially in its mosaics. A friend with whom I got dinner later that night, who had, years earlier, lived for a while in Trastevere, pointed out to me that the very pillars of the church were taken from Roman ruins.
The church’s beauty and pageantry, as Zac Davis points out below, are neither unchanged nor unchanging. They have a history—much of which is the history of Rome itself, like the pillars of the baths of Caracalla becoming the pillars of a Christian church—and a future. What all of it is doing is using the materials at hand, whether in stone or in word and song and image, to point us to the one who is the cornerstone, to the Word himself. Because what makes, for example, a church in Trastevere so beautiful is not only the artistry and history that have formed it, but the fact that day after day and night after night, a community gathers there to pray and seek God together. – Sam Sawyer, S.J.
From king to the world’s pastor: How will the next pope change the style of the papacy?
By Zac Davis
The scarlet robes. The hulking white marble pillars. The black smoke, again and again, and then finally white billowing from the Sistine Chapel. The secrecy. The gossip. The gold and the frescoes and the Raphael tapestries.
You are embarrassed by it, in quiet moments, aren’t you? Or at the very least, it makes you a bit uncomfortable when you ask yourself what the poor carpenter from Nazareth might think about the opulence involved in choosing his vicar.
And yet, if you are honest, part of you loves it, too.
There is something that compels the world (along with the thousands of journalists who arrive by the hundreds every day) to focus on Rome. And I think that it is more than a latent longing for monarchy or an attraction to glamour and gold. It is because there is something mesmerizing, even beautiful, about a long line of scarlet processing into Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.
C.B.S.’s Norah O’Donnell asked Cardinal Michael Czerny whether the church would choose continuity or change in the conclave. Cardinal Czerny, as good Jesuits often do, rejected the premise of the question. “The choice is not between continuity and change,” he said. “The choice is to go forward—and that includes both continuity and change. And that has always been our way forward. We never make a total break, and we never stay in the past. It’s both; it has to be both. That’s the life of the church.”
The papacy itself embodies this contradiction of change and continuity. In the first 1,000 years of the church, hardly anyone knew the pope existed. “Popes did not ‘run the church,’ nor did they claim to,” the late Jesuit historian John O’Malley said of the church in the first millennium. “They defined no doctrines, they wrote no encyclicals, they called no bishops ad limina. They did not convoke ecumenical councils, and they did not preside at them.”
The next thousand years looked quite different. Coronations, papal states, the Reformation and the teaching of infallibility. A lot of papal bulls and encyclicals. And with the dawn of modern media, there was little doubt in the world—Catholic and not—about who “runs the church.”
But the role of the pope is in a process of conversion from worldly monarch to world’s priest. Recent memory calls to mind the example of Pope Francis, who shunned many of the papacy’s opulent traditions, but he did not start this process. Pope John Paul I got rid of the papal tiara. St. John Paul II nixed the sedia gestatoria, the ceremonial throne that the pope was carried around on. Even Pope Pius X, stalwart opponent of modernism, broke with the longstanding tradition of popes dining alone.
I cannot help but look at the pageantry of these days of interregnum, drawn as I am to them, and wonder what could and needs to change about this process. (One possibility: Conclave excluded, should lay people be involved in the general congregation discussions about the state of the church now happening in Rome?)
And what will the next pope change about the style of the papacy? He will be judged almost immediately based on whether he chooses to live in the Apostolic Palace, which Francis stepped away from for the simple rooms of Casa Santa Marta. (For what it’s worth, I think that will be an unfair judgment. Francis’ choice of housing was driven as much by a desire for community as for simplicity and poverty. An introvert pope may want some alone time once in a while after a day filled with meetings.)
Whether and how the style of the papacy ought to change should be based on only one criterion: Does the innovation help the church bring the Gospel to the world?
That decision will mostly fall upon the shoulders of the man the cardinals elect. The decision facing the rest of us? How do I need to change to bring the love of Jesus Christ to the world?
Here are the other stories you need to read today:
- In an interview with America’s Gerard O’Connell, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, discusses whether he believes Pope Francis was heretical and what he wants in the next pope.
- Senior editor J.D. Long García asks: Is it time for the second Latin American pope?
- Far from the Sistine Chapel where cloistered cardinals will cast votes, people are placing bets on who will be chosen as the next pope.
- Casa Santa Marta is abuzz with workers, engineers, and Vatican officials transforming the guesthouse that was the residence of Pope Francis into a secure, secluded place of lodging that would put Fort Knox to shame.
- Conclave Podcast: Will the next pope undo synodality?
