The Papacy and the Hinterlands

I sometimes muse about how our spiritual forebears in the Middle Ages experienced the advent of a new pontificate. News of the new pope would wend its way slowly to the hinterlands, taking months or perhaps years, and by the time the new pope’s name was added to the Canon of the Mass the Chair of Peter might have already passed to someone else. Though priests prayed daily for the pope, who the pope was must have been less significant than the sheer fact of there being a pope in the distant city of Rome. Doubtless those who had a hand in the choosing of popes—for a while prominent Roman families and later the College of Cardinals—paid attention to the personal qualities of the candidates, but this was of no concern for most Catholics, who would never lay eyes on a pope. This deficit of knowledge fit well with the teaching, dating from at least Leo the Great, that there was a kind of mystical identity between Peter and his successors, so what mattered was the office of Peter and not the person who held it. Most knew nothing about the pope apart from his name—if they even knew that—yet trusted that he was in some way fulfilling Jesus’ mandate to Peter to feed his sheep.