What I Want in a Pope

The Catholic press and blogosphere is filled with writers pontificating on what they want in a new pontiff. Coupled with the musings of conclave observers and (pseudo) whisperers, one often hears about “a man of the Gospel,” “a man of God,” “a man of prayer,” “a man who serves the poor,” “a humble man,” and so on. Sorry, but I find such thoughts largely useless. It’s not that I don’t want a “man of the Gospel.” But wanting a “man of the Gospel” as pope is kind of like the “headlines” in some diocesan newspapers: “Bishop Urges Faithful to Pray!” No kidding. That’s not news. “Bishop Tells Faithful Not to Pray” would be news — and reason to investigate that bishop.

Similarly, pondering whether X is “a man of God” or “a man of prayer” is a vital but not particularly high bar for a pope. I’d liken the situation to the recruiter who goes through resumes. If you’re hiring an accountant and X never studied accounting and Y last worked as an accountant in 2010, you toss their resumes. They don’t make even the first cut.

Those criteria are minimum triage devices. A pope should be a “man of the Gospel” whether he’s elected in 2025, 1025, or 125. What does the Church need at this moment of her life? She needs a real governing reformer. She needs a pope that is going to take the throttle of the Curia and perhaps throttle some of its members. She needs a pope who will commit to clean out — root and branch — the sexual abuse scandal (and its coverup artists) that has been scandalous ballast for 20+ years. She needs a pope who will remove crooks big and small from decision-making and act as if ecclesiastical money and its use/misuse deserve serious attention. I’m not interested in a pope to build “a new heaven and a new earth,” as we heard during the Novemdiales. Cleaning house would be a more useful and practical construction and renovation project.

Doing this is not to muddle in the mundane. The Church’s teaching authority is compromised, especially when it comes to sex, by two-plus decades of priestly buggering. The Church’s ability to pay for what she has to do is compromised by dirty fingers in the till. These have been recurrent problems, solution for which in part Francesco was elected, and at which his record was, well, nothing to write home to Argentina about. Can one honestly say the Church of 2025 is better off than the Church of 2013? Only if you ignore the Uncle Teddy elephant that sits in the middle of the Francis papacy.

I’m also suspicious that all the talk about “a man of the Gospel” is not just naïve piety. I also think it is deliberate deflection, trying to make the obvious important in order to ignore what should be obvious; trying to talk about being a holy man in order to avoid talking about the sex and money scandals that mar the Church’s holiness. Let’s not fall for it!

[As a moral theologian, I also wrote about what the next pope needs to do in that discipline. I specified three things: recover the centrality of conversion, not “accompaniment”; restore the centrality of the objective moral order (especially against false ideas of “conscience”); and get away from the sacralization of “experience” which — without a hermeneutic to interpret it — is neither good nor bad, but just is. For those thoughts, see here.]

And What I Don’t Want

The summary for the cardinals’ General Congregation May 5 included this bilge: “The profile of the future Pope was discussed: a figure who must be present, close, capable of being a bridge and a guide, of favouring access to communion for a disoriented humanity marked by the crisis of the world order.” Read the last half of that text: it’s a cocktail of ambiguity and ignorance. On ambiguity: What is “access to communion?” Membership in the Church?  Eucharistic access? Both? Neither? On ignorance: Modern man is “disoriented” by sin, not “the crisis of the world order.” Man’s fundamental problem is sin; his fundamental need is metanoia, “conversion,” which etymologically means “changing one’s mind” — including about the Zeitgeist and the “world order.” We need a priest-pope who will say this. We don’t need an amateur politician-pope who will offer nostrums about salvation-through-global-reset.

Speaking of the Interregnum

One of the duties of the papal camerlengo (McCarrick housemate Kevin Farrell) is to destroy the fisherman’s ring and seal papal rooms. It’s not to prove his strength or ability to make pretty bows with wax seals. The institution emerged to ensure that fake documents were not produced post-mortem, claiming papal authority. When papal eyes close in death, that pontificate is over. That’s why I have to say: Although I am not a canonist, I am bothered by what I have seen these past two weeks. In the controversy over whether Cardinal Becciu could enter the conclave, Cardinal Parolin pulled a seemingly previously unpublished letter from “F” barring Becciu. That matches what has been said about Francis’s recent thought on the matter, but it still disturbs me that on so important a matter there was not a previously public declaration. Same thing over the course of the week: we suddenly found papal interviews and talks to young people. Anybody ask if there’s any equivalent to a papal auto-pen? Non-Vatican sources might release these sorts of things, but the purpose of the sede vacante is to negate the official value of such acts — the office being more important than the transient officeholder. It is not to make pretty ribbons with wax seals on doors.

And for Future Reforms

On X there is a Cardinal Matteo Zuppi “fan” account (here). I am not attributing it to the Archbishop of Bologna, but I do want to note an analogue in the American political process. There are political action committees (PACs) that spend money independently of candidate control or endorsement (as long as they have some kind of disclaimer). They’re “independent” and usually focused on a particular issue (e.g., abortion) or demographic (e.g., union members). Their “independence” gives them deniability — real or plausible — that such “fan accounts” are not the candidate’s effort to influence voting. That said, in reviewing conclave legislation, the next pope may have to consider the impact social media — controlled and uncontrolled — may have on the papal electoral process. Universi Dominici gregis does not envision our current realities.

Synodal “Novelty”

Synod.va admitted (here) that the “synodal path” is a “novelty,” while trying to glom onto Cardinal Baldo Reina’s homily during the Novemdiales about not yielding to supposed “mental and spiritual laziness” that excludes “necessary changes.” Glad the synodal lads admit the “novelty,” because: (i) a synod is not a Council (and, therefore, should not be hijacked as the “implementation” of Vatican II); (ii) Francis’s synods have increasingly borne ever less resemblance to what Catholics West and especially East knew a “synod” to be, particularly when non-bishops get (lots of) votes; and (iii) Francis’s deathbed saddling of the Church with an “ecclesial assembly” imposed a wholly new creature, springing ex nihilo from his mind.

I’ll admit my bias. I worked in the State Department for 26 years. The Carter Administration stood up the “Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor” (DRL) as part of its quest to create a “rights-based U.S. foreign policy.” In practice, DRL had a dual purpose. In Democratic administrations, it drove a lot of U.S. foreign policy; in Republican administrations, it became a sinecure where the Left ensconced itself to undermine bilateral relations in the name of the “rights vision” its staff espoused. In other words, it was a permanent bureaucratic home for liberal policymaking, no matter who Americans elected — the institutionalization of the “revolution.” I fear a similar role for the perpetual synod.

How so? Through continued misrepresentation of the idea of “sensus fidelium,” the idea that the faithful as a whole do not err in matters of the faith. The Church has always insisted the sensus fidelium is NOT an opinion poll or survey, but that has not deterred its advocates. The Church has always also noted that sensus fidelium first presupposes a sensus fidei, a sense of lived and practiced faith that is not coextensive with “somebody splashed my head with water when I was two weeks old.” The problem with sensus fidelium is how do you establish where it’s found, because (a) there are nominal Catholics and (b) history knows there are instances where fidelity to the faith was a minority position. Sensus fidelium was in vogue when I studied theology in the 1980s; it’s another (like Kasper’s “Communion for the divorced”) moldy oldie back on a rethread.

The U.S. bishops were shocked in 2019 when the Pew Survey showed them three-quarters of Catholics did not understand Jesus’ Real Presence in the Eucharist — so shocked, they did the thing they are best at: spend a couple million dollars (rather than investigate poor catechesis). My question: Are those 75% of “American Catholics” the sensus fidelium? The answer seems obvious: no. But if not, how do you know? What are your criteria for establishing (not just “discerning”) a true versus false sensus? We’re never told (just like “what is synodality”) but we’re to institutionalize it in some hybrid “synodal structure” and have the Church live by constant “dialogue” perpetuated in its name.

While We’re on the Conclave…

-In defense of “synodality,” spokeswoman Paloma Garcia Ovejero likened the late Pope’s reforms (which she thinks will take a couple of pontificates to instantiate) to “emergency room doors which, once opened, cannot be closed from the outside” (see here). I was wondering whether those were the ER doors that the Francis “field hospital” ran out through when it abandoned the battlefield for a year-plus in the middle of COVID.

-Is Unity Still a Mark of the Church? — The New York Times suggests (here) that calls by some cardinals for Church “unity” post-Francis are really dog whistles for rejecting reform and turning back the clock. Jesuit Cardinal Michael Czerny sees it as “reversion” and rejection of the benefits of “inclusive[ness]” and ecclesial DEI. Seems like some future cardinals weren’t asked by their bishops prior to Confirmation what are the four marks of the Church (or have subsequently forgotten them). They are unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity, in that order. Not diversity, humanness, universality, and spiritual-but-not-too-religious (and definitely not “proselytizing”).

-Fr. Raymond De Souza has an excellent article at The Catholic Thing (here) on how Francis eschewed until the end most papal titles (including leaving “P.P.” off his tombstone), sticking with “Bishop of Rome.” As De Souza notes, Peter was pope because he was Peter and held the Petrine Office, not because he was “bishop of Rome.” That was an historical accident. Peter would have been Peter even if he never sailed to the imperial capital. Such minimalism might perhaps excite some professional ecclesiology and ecumenical circles, but it does the Petrine Office injustice.

-Given the proto-canonizations of Francis heard from some cardinals during the Novemdiales, I have to say the American Catholic writer J.F. Powers was prescient. Half a century ago, in his short story “Prince of Darkness,” he has an archbishop commenting on the times: “Today there are few saints, fewer sinners, and everybody is already saved.”

-May 3 marked the 25^th anniversary of the death of John Cardinal O’Connor, former archbishop of New York. He was a lion of a man who, in his charity, did not waver from proclaiming Catholic truth without dilution. They don’t make too many cardinals like him anymore.