The pope? How many divisions has he got?” Joseph Stalin is said to have shouted at Winston Churchill when the Brit talked about protecting the Catholics in Europe from the Nazis. Now, Donald Trump has hurled a worse insult at the pope. After Francis died, he said he would “like to be pope”, and then posted on the White House X account a doctored image of himself wearing a white cassock and papal headdress. The civilised world treated the boorish act with the contempt it deserved.
The pope has no divisions to command, nor large lands to lord over. Though papacy claims a hoary tradition of 20 centuries, the modern state of the pope is not even a century old. Vatican, the world’s smallest sovereign state, was created in 1929 through the Lateran treaties.
Papacy may look an anachronism today—a theocratic monarchy in an increasingly godless world of technology. Not a member of the UN, but with diplomatic ties with most countries, not on behalf of the Vatican state, but on behalf of the Holy See. This Holy See, which many think was always seated in Rome, had often moved its habitat—to Avignon, to Pisa and elsewhere. It was without territory from 1870 till 1929.
Illustration: Deni Lal
Yet it wields power. Not just spiritual power over the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, but a moral power in a world that seeks to be guided by ethics. Many think the moral power is waning in a world where fewer are going to church, and churches are being sold to pubs. Blessed Mary, quite the contrary! The moral power of the pope is only increasing in recent times, his political power declining.
Time was when popes could marshal not just divisions, but corps and kings. Calls by Popes Urban II, Eugene II and Innocent III sent Europe’s crowned kings, feuding barons and knighted warriors charging into the Holy Land to clash with Saladins and perish at their hands in the sands. Pope Gregory VI made the mighty Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV freeze for three days in a snow storm outside his mountain retreat in Canossa in 1077.
Mediaeval popes—not all but many—made not only war, but peace and even love. Many enriched themselves, their kin, and the English language. ‘Nepotism’, literally meaning promoting nephews, has its origins in the practice of popes and cardinals appointing close kin to positions of power. This abuse of power by successive popes and cardinals led to Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses on the Wittenberg church door, kicking off the Reformation and the modern age of reason.
Yet, papacy survived, displaying a remarkable adaptability in a changing world. Even as it initially resorted to institutions of ill-repute like the Inquisition, progressive elements were also at work. The last hurrahs of its political power were heard in 1493 when Pope Alexander VI divided the soon-to-be-colonised world between Spain (in the western hemisphere) and Portugal (the east), and in 1583, when Gregory XIII decreed the calendar that the world follows to this day.
Since then the political power of the pope has been waning, but his moral power waxing. Most of the post-Lateran popes have been saintly souls unlike their mediaeval predecessors, and have been spreading the message of true love, peace, brotherhood and harmony.
Papacy attained its highest glory in the late 20th century. Its power of virtue may not have moved mountains, but has torn political iron curtains and social segregations. The first Polish pope was instrumental in punching the first hole in the Iron Curtain, the first Latino pope reached out to the sexually ostracised.
The next pope?