The Next Pope

With all the talk of who might be the next pope, there’s one thing you can count on.

You can count on all the talk being wrong.

Listen to news media commentators and you’ll get a very strange understanding of the Church and the papacy.

They’ll tell you that we need a new pope who will have less power — and then they say he should exercise unilateral power to change 2,000-year-old doctrines and disciplines they don’t like. They will tell you that the pope should follow the Second Vatican Council and empower the laity to have a bigger role in the life of the Church — but what Vatican II said was that the Church should have a bigger role in the life of the laity.

They’ll say they want a pope with this trait or that trait, that we need one who will start this new thing or end that old thing.

But they will be wrong.

Look back and see what they said — twice — in 1978.

Some wanted a thundering pope who would restore the Church’s past. Others wanted a crusading pope who would re-invent the Church’s future.  Who knew that we needed a pope with patience to build an infrastructure of young people who would one day mourn his passing and build his legacy?

If anyone had the right idea about what the pope should be, it’s unlikely anyone would have listened.

It would have looked like wishful thinking if a commentator had said: “What we need is an Eastern European pope so holy that people will weep in his presence. He should travel the world leaving re-energized Catholics in his wake.”

It would have looked like over-reaching to say: “We need a pope who will sap the Soviet bloc of its power, oversee a revival of authentic Catholic teaching, and then lead the Church on a years-long retreat of Jubilee repentance, prayer and the Eucharist.”

And it would have been bizarre to say: “We need a pope who will get really old, then insist on making public appearances in a severely compromised state, because that will move people to understand the true value of life, and the supernatural commitment of the pope.”

The truth is that nobody — not a single soul — knew what the Church needed in 1978. Not even Pope John Paul II, really. That’s because the Church is bigger than us, infinitely bigger. It’s the Kingdom of God himself.

And God, we can be absolutely certain, knows exactly what kind of pope the Church needs.

What will the next papacy be like? The truth is, we have no idea.

Will he be a wildly popular, beloved figure? The popes of the 20th century were. Pius XII was dearly loved. The world stopped to mourn him, too. John XXIII was a smiling St. Nicholas of a Pope — his tomb in the Vatican gets more visitors than the tomb of Peter himself. Handsome Paul VI was the first Pope to be the subject of pictorial coffee-table books.

But, then again, the first 21st century pope might not be like that at all. In the Wall Street Journal five years ago, a front-page article listed one cardinal’s qualifications for pope: “He has a personality that will capture the imagination of the world.”

Happily, having a magnetic personality is not a prerequisite to be pope. Maybe he will appear at the window of St. Peter’s for the first time, awkwardly face the crowd, and not be quite sure what to say.

We’ll love him still. And we will remember John Paul’s words: “Be not afraid. The Church is in God’s hands, and no man’s. The pope is merely God’s instrument.”

Whoever he is, we’ll know, as an article of faith, that the pope is the Vicar of Christ on earth, and that he’s guarded from error when he teaches dogmatically on faith and morals. We’ll remember the Holy Spirit’s role in his selection.

And we may even stop to remember how much less charismatic John Paul’s personality was in the last half of his papacy, and how it didn’t seem to make him any less effective.

But we will trust. The remarkable circumstances of Pope John Paul II’s life seem scripted to teach us that God is in charge. John Paul was a Pope who had been foreseen at Fatima, a Pope whose life was intertwined with another instrument of God, St. Faustina – the 20th century apostle of mercy.

We needn’t worry about the Church. God promised from the beginning that it would prevail — and he is watching it as much now as he was in the beginning.

We can look forward to the new pope with confidence. And who knows? Maybe we’ll want to call him “the great” when he dies, too.