When the movie Conclave came to the area, I had to go see it because it was all about the popes. For a Protestant kid, I’ve been oddly obsessed with the Catholic tradition.
As a kid, I was probably trying to understand the difference between my traditions and Roman Catholic ones at some level. At my African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, we recited the Apostles Creed. There’s a line about the “holy catholic church,” and I was confused by that because we were Protestants. They were talking about the universal church, small c catholic, not big C Catholic.
“The term comes from two Greek words that together mean ‘throughout the whole.’ This single word, ‘catholic,’ means throughout all time and places and also points to the essential unity or wholeness of the church in Christ. No one English term captures that dual sense of this ancient Greek term quite as well as ‘catholic.’ So when the creed states, ‘I believe in the holy catholic church,’ it refers to the wholeness of the whole church in all times and places rather than to any specific branch of Christianity.”
When I went to public school, Daniel Dickinson in Binghamton, NY, at the bottom of a wide driveway was Saint Cyril’s parochial school, with the church nearby. The kids from Dickinson and Cyril’s would occasionally get into mild skirmishes. Dickinson kids would call them St. Cheerios, and I’m sure they also offered some nicknames.
The ashes
But I was fascinated that some of my Catholic friends at Dickinson would go out at lunchtime on Ash Wednesday and return with dirt on their foreheads. Or so I thought.
During the decade before 1982, when I wasn’t attending church very much, I’d occasionally attend a Christmas Eve service. As often as not, it would be at a Roman Catholic church. I liked the ritual, and I tended to love the music.
Around 2005, I attended a FOCUS churches’ Ash Wednesday service at Israel AME church in Albany. They applied ashes to the foreheads of the congregants. Huh. I thought it was a great idea because I’m pro-ecumenicalism. My current church follows this tradition.
It’s like when I went to the Cathedral of All Saints in Albany for an anniversary concert, and they allowed, even invited, the Protestants to take communion, something that was otherwise not done. As I noted, some of my Protestant friends refused, but I felt that if they offered, I’d accept.
Pontiffs
This morphed into knowing all of the popes in my lifetime. When I was on JEOPARDY in 1998, there was a question in the category PUT ‘EM IN ORDER. The clue was Paul VI, John Paul I, Pius XII. Easy-peasy.
I wrote about them back in 2013. The first pope in my lifetime was Pius XII (1939-1958). There’s been a reevaluation of his papacy regarding his attitude toward the Holocaust.
He was followed by John XXIII (1958-1963), who named the first cardinals to Africa, Japan, and the Phillippines. Paul VI (1963-1978) was followed by John Paul I (1978), who was in office for five weeks before he died.
John Paul II (1978-2005) was the very popular Polish Pope in many circles, particularly for his anti-communist cadence. He tended to oppose the death penalty. He did apologize for many of the sins of the church, from complacency in the African slave trade to, late in his tenure, the first recognition of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy and others.
I didn’t like Benedict XVI (2005-2013) from Germany as pope or afterward. But I didn’t know one could resign. “In 2019 [as Pope emeritus], Benedict released a 6,000-word letter that attributed the Church’s sexual abuse crisis to an erosion of morality driven by secularization and the sexual revolution of the 1960s. The letter was in sharp contrast to the viewpoint of his successor, Francis, who saw the issue as a byproduct of abuses of power within the Church’s hierarchical structure.” He died in 2022.
The current guy
Francis (2013-) from Argentina “is the first pope to be a member of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuit Order), the first from the Americas and the Southern Hemisphere, and the first born or raised outside Europe since the 8th-century papacy of the Syrian pope Gregory III.”
“In December 2019, Francis abolished the pontifical secrecy privilege in sexual abuse cases, clarifying that bishops do not need authorization from the Vatican to turn over to materials from canonical trials upon request of civil law enforcement authorities. The lifting of the confidentiality rule was praised by victim advocates, but did not require the Church to affirmatively turn over canonical documents to civil authorities.”
While progressive in many ways, “Francis has categorically rejected the ordination of women as priests. Early in his papacy, he initiated dialogue on the possibility of deaconesses, creating in 2016 a Study Commission on the Women’s Diaconate to research the role of female deacons in early Christianity.” But his position seems to have hardened.
Anyway, that was part of the reason I had to see a movie about selecting a Catholic pope.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ was a “Jesuit paleontologist who worked to understand evolution and faith….