What are popes good for? In the quarter-century I’ve been writing about Catholicism, I’ve learned that popes are good for the pope-arazzi and for a bit of exotica on the nightly news. On occasion, of course, they are good for producing reams of copy. Time’s Man of the Year! The cover of Rolling Stone! Ten thousand words of aggrieved vindication—“A Radical Pope’s First Year,” insists the recent tendentious headline—in The New Yorker! Apparently there is something about popes that a mass media otherwise skeptical of religious authority finds almost irresistible—which is why, from time to time, popes have even been good for getting me on television, called upon to comment on this or that papal action or utterance. Modern popes also function as job creators for church historians and for biographers. Wait a week, and we’ll get yet another instant life of Jorge Mario Bergoglio or collection of his table talk. How else would we know that Pope Francis was once a bouncer? Essential training, one presumes, for a guardian of orthodoxy.
What Are Popes Good For?
On this first anniversary of Bergoglio’s elevation to the throne of Peter, kudos and lamentations keep piling up. To some extent it’s not difficult to understand the allure—after all, there aren’t many celibates or absolute monarchs left, let alone one who can claim the allegiance of a billion people. Still, there is something mismatched about this dalliance between the vicar of Christ and the celebrity-obsessed mass media, and one can’t help but wonder at the secular fascination with the papacy that it signals. In a world of limitless choices and seemingly unresolvable conflicts, here is a man and a creed that preaches the renunciation of worldly things and a promise of otherworldly justice. Is the pope offering merely an escape from the burdens of modern freedom or a real alternative? For many Catholics the question still matters. Churches are not quite as empty as rumor has it.
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