Habemus Papam!

Well, I guess my parochial vicar called it right in his prediction that the conclave would be over in two days!  So much for all the speculation about deadlock!

As far as I know, however, in all the recent speculation hardly anyone was particularly predicting the 76-year old, Jesuit Archbishop of Argentina, Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, whose first public words to the world were: "You know that it was the duty of the Conclave to give Rome a Bishop.  It seems that my brother Cardinals have gone to the ends of the earth to get one... but here we are... I thank you for your welcome. " 

Latin Americans represent 42% of the Church's population worldwide. So it is more than about time for a Latin American pope. What a joyful moment this is - not just for the 501 million Catholics that live in Latin America and for the Latino immigrants that are forming the future of the Church in the United States, but for the whole Church, whose universality has again been demonstrated and displayed to the world as the first non-European in more than a millennium is elected Successor of St. Peter.

Precisely because Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, was such a surprising choice (at least to most of us), the professional analysts on whom we tend to rely so much in the media  were obviously much less ready than they might otherwise have been to analyze what his election may mean for specific concerns in the Church - what his election may mean for the new evangelization, for the Church's response to secular modernity, for the Church's identification with the poor, for vocations, for ecumenism and interfaith relations, etc. Substantively certainly, Pope Francis will be on the same page as Pope Benedict was on fundamental doctrinal matters. But that would be true, of course, of anyone who might have been elected pope. What remains to be seen, however, is how the new pope's personality, evident humility and spirituality, his experience, Latin American background, Jesuit formation, etc., will inform his personal style and his papacy's priorities.

Meanwhile, our new pope has stepped out onto the world's stage by humbly requesting the faithful to pray for him. 

O God, who chose your servant Francis in succession to the Apostle Peter as shepherd of the whole flock, look favorably on the supplications of your people and grant that, as Vicar of Christ on earth, he may confirm his brethren and that the whole Church may be in communion with  him in the bond of unity, love, and peace, so that in you the shepherd of souls, all may know the truth and attain life eternal (Collect, Votive Mass for the Pope).

Conclave: Day 2

My parochial vicar is confident this will be a short conclave. I am not quite so certain. But, either way, we’ll know soon enough! Meanwhile, midway into the second day and after three thus far inconclusive ballots, speculation continues. And the longer it goes on, of course, the more speculation there will be about why. Perhaps it is inevitable that a vacuum of actual information invites speculation and gossip.

 

The longest papal selection – in Viterbo in 1268 - lasted over two years, resulting in the modern (i.e.,strictly enclosed) procedure of the papal conclave. The longest conclave in recent centuries was that of 1740, which went on for 181 days. (Four cardinals died during it!) The 1758 conclave lasted 53 days. The 1769 conclave lasted 94 days. That of 1774-1775 lasted 133 days. (Two cardinals died during that one!) The 1799-1800 conclave, the last outside of Rome (then occupied by Napoleon), lasted 105 days. That of 1823 lasted 27 days. The 1829 conclave lasted 36 days. That of 1831-1832 lasted 51 days.

Then the conclave of 1846 – the last at the Quirinale Palace – lasted all of only 3 days. That of 1878 also lasted only 3 days. The 1903 conclave lasted 5 days. (This was the last conclave at which a secular ruler - Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph - vetoed a papal election. It was also the first one at which an American – James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore – participated). The 1914 conclave, held during the first month of World War I,  lasted 4 days. That of 1922 lasted 5 days. The 1939 conclave took only 2 days. That of 1958 – the first one in my lifetime – lasted 4 days. The conclave of 1963 lasted 3 days. The first 1978 conclave took just 2 days; and,the second 1978 conclave 3 days. Finally that of 2005 lasted a mere 2 days.

So, starting in the mid-19^th century, conclaves have become significantly – and consistently – shorter. No one seriously expects a contemporary conclave to go on for more than 5 days. (That would be 17 ballots!) Even though the cardinals now come from all over the world and may not all know each other all that well, the presumption is that most of the serious papabili are already more widely known – or certainly have become better known during the interim between the vacancy of the Apostolic See and the start of the conclave. And, of course, the pace of modern life is so much faster today that a lengthy conclave would probably be seen as intolerable to modern sensibilities and would likely project an undesirable image of the Church as very divided internally. Inevitably, as I said above, a vacuum of actual information invites speculation and gossip - all the more so a prolonged (by modern standards) vacuum of information invites speculation and gossip. So the factors contributing to a shorter conclave are many. The only real question then is how short? The 1939 and 1963 conclaves had clear frontrunners, whose accession to the papal throne was widely anticipated. If not quite the obvious frontrunner, Cardinal Ratzinger was in 2005 certainly a frontrunner, certainly the best known and one of the most widely respected members of the sacred college. So his selection was hardly surprising. In retrospect, Cardinal Roncalli in 1958 and Cardinals Luciani and Wojtyla in 1978 were also serious contenders internally, although their elections were certainly not widely anticipated on the outside.

 

Meanwhile, the world waits, and hopefully ma learn something about the virtue of patience in the process! As I wrote yesterday: cut off from the world, the cardinals must make their choice, however long that takes. Cut off from further insider information, we in the world must await their choice, however long that takes.

The Conclave Begins!

This morning, we will pray the Rosary and offer a Holy Hour of Adoration at the parish, at the very hour that the Cardinals in Rome will be chanting the Litany of Saints and entering the conclave. One ballot will be cast this afternoon, then four each day until someone acquires the necessary 2/3 vote. Cut off from the world, the cardinals must make their choice, however long that takes. Cut off from further insider information, we in the world must await their choice, however long that takes.

Meanwhile, speculation continues - not just on who the next pope may be, but about what sort of pope might be best for today's Church in today's world. Last Saturday, The Wall Street Journal's "Saturday Essay" featured the opinions of several voices of the Catholic commentariat. Some - George Weigel on the right, James Carroll on the left - offered predictably ideologically caricatures,  of which, enough said. Others, however, offered some surprisingly interesting suggestions.

Some 30+ years ago, a colleague noted how I seemed to be seriously worried that the world was going awry, while remaining "on the whole somewhat cheerful about it." I was reminded of that by Peggy Noonan's hope for a pope "who can greet the world with a look of pleasure on his face. He should not come forward with the sad, bent posture of one who knows the world is in ruins and only the facades remain. He should be joyous anyway." Noonan recognizes and appreciates the intelelctual caliber and contributions of the last two popes, but her current view is that "for now, in the ruined world, what's needed is a reintroduction of Christ to the rising and post-Christian nations alike, always with an eye to meaning."

Michael Sean Winters wants the next pope "to identify himself more closely with the world's poor." Unfortunately, he couples that with an utterly unnecessary swipe at Pope Benedict's "penchant for elaborate, baroque dress." He acknowledges Pope Benedict's "commitment to the ideal of beauty in the church's liturgy," but believes "a simpler attire can be beautiful too." But in fact it can't - or at least not in our contemporary experience. If the ugliness of recent decades - whether in secular architecture or in "liturgical environment" - has taught us anything, it has highlighted the price we pay - the poor most of all - when we banish beauty from the public square! But, back to his main argument, I think a renewed emphais on "spending time with those whom the rest of the world tends to shun" really would greatly enrich (no pun intended) the pope's ministry - both as Bishop of Rome and as Universal Pastor. I also agree with Winters that "Identifying with the poor would allow the new pope to give visible evidence of Catholicism's deep-seated suspicions of modern consumer capitalism."

Mary Eberstadt of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center makes the conventional case for an assertive doctrinal orthodoxy "that galvanizes the faithful, mints new recruits and succeeds, literally, in reproducing itself." (Personally, I have long thought that Blessed Pope John Paul II's most lasting legacy was the revival of confidence in the Church's message and mission after the spiritually suicidal decade-plus that preceded him.) Eberstadt stresses the link between sound orthodoxy and the health and strength of families. As an aside, she adds an interesting suggestion - "a monastic order dedicated to penance for the sins of the sexual revolution," what she labels "that North Star of modernity." (It is an interesting suggestion, but personally I think the best alternative to the sexual revolution is modern men and women living out their sexuality in the world in more healthy and productive ways than those endorsed by our cultural and media elites.)

Finally, Paul Baumann of Commonweal counterbalances Eberstadt by proposing "a change in tone and a refusal to condemn what it cannot yet understand" and a willingness "to be joyously surprised by what is new."

Genuine joy, coupled with a visible commitment to the poor, and a doctrinal fidelity that undertands why what we believe really is good for the world, while still being able to appreciate and learn from what's actually happening in the world - that's not quite a complete job description, but it certainly makes a good start at one!

Conclave Eve

“WANTED: CEO of largest international institution in the world, 60+ and in excellent health, must be perpetually on stage and fluent in Italian, Spanish, and English, several other languages desirable, must have pastoral experience and also be excellent administrator, diplomatic skills essential, large-group charisma and small-group people skills absolutely required, must be deeply spiritual and suitable for canonization after death.”

To hear people talk – especially in the media – all of that (and more) may be required of the next pope. Of course, different constituencies have different wants and would rank the above qualities in various ways. Many –“not a few,” as they say in Rome – have not been shy about articulating those wants and rankings! “Frankly, if there is to be outside pressure on the cardinals,” blogged Michael Sean Winters the other day, “I would rather go back to the days when it was the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons exercising such pressure than to let single issue advocacy groups do so” (“Distinctly Catholic,” March 8, 2013).

 

Well, whatever is to be said has probably by now been said. In some 24 hours, the 115 Eminent Lord Cardinal-electors will walk in solemn procession into the Sistine Chapel, where they will swear yet another oath, hear yet another exhortation, and then be locked up until at least 2/3 of them agree on the next Successor of St. Peter and Vicar of Christ on earth. If being pope is a daunting job, daunting too must be the awesome responsibility of the electors. Having internalized whatever information they have learned in the General Congregations and informal prattiche, and having processed what they have heard and seen since February 11 through the filter of their varied experiences of Church, the Cardinals will each now cast his vote alone before the altar of God – the seriousness of his responsibility before God and for the Church highlighted by Michelangelo’s awesome fresco of the Last Judgment staring down on him.

Like any pastor, the pope must take seriously the administrative and organizational dimension of his office. But the pope is not a CEO, nor is the Church a corporation. As the Body of Christ, the Church is gloriously gifted in so many respects, an oasis of grace in the world’s desert, the word of God for the world to hear, the face of Christ for the world to see. Still, its members remain frail and wounded. Wounded for sure by the onslaughts of the world, the Church is as much or even more wounded by the sins of its members, who pray this week that this challenging time of testing may also serve as a time of purification for each of us, for the Church as a whole, and for the world. Perhaps Pope Benedict may have had something like that in mind when he timed his retirement to coincide with Lent?

Tomorrow, as the Cardinals enter the conclave, may the entire Church be united with them, praying with them and for them. Peter’s job description was more succinct than the one above, but said it all – Disciple and Apostle, Fisherman and Shepherd..

Machiavelli's Prince at 500

This year 2013 is the 500^th birthday of The Prince, written by Renaissance Italy's premier political theorist, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527). When I studied modern political theory, Machiavelli was routinely included at the beginning (along with more paradoxically early modern figures like Luther and Calvin). Yet it is not unheard of in survey courses on modern political theory to start right away with Hobbes, then to move predictably on to Lock and Rousseau, and maybe end with Marx (or Rawls). There are even surveys that cram the whole history of political thought into one course, starting with Plato and Aristotle, then leaping over the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to Hobbes, etc. Well surveys are, of course, surveys. And in today's environment even that much political philosophy is something to celebrate. But missing out on Machiavelli would certainly be a loss.

Those familiar with the TV series The Borgias (soon to start its 3rd season) have at least an image of what Machiavelli's world was like. (He himself actually appears in the series, reflecting his real-life interactions with Cesare Borgia.) Of course, Renaissance Italy was a world wildly different from our own. (But so was the US 50 years ago!) But there are points of contact between Renaissance Italy then and the post-modern now.

On the one hand, Machiavelli's Florentine republic exhibited an intensely vibrant political life - of the sort that is perhaps only possible in a city of such size and circumstances. But it was also a time when the quasi-classical style of city-state republican politics was in decline - a decline not unlike that of the original Roman model,which Machiavelli studied and elegized in his other memorable work, The Discourses. Because of its size and scale, the US could never have been a quasi-classical republic, but its founders did aspire to emulate what they saw as applicable from that model. Today, however, genuinely republican participatory politics on that quasi-classical model seems to be suffering a fate similar to its ancestors n Hellenistic Greece, imperial Rome, and Renaissance Italy.

Machiavelli's background as what we might call today a career civil servant in the diplomatic bureaucracy inevitably made foreign relations a main interest for him, and his analyses remain relevant. After all, his was an Italy of competing but modest powers - his own Florence, Milan, Venice, Rome (the Papal States), and the kingdom of Naples - which lived in constant conflict but of a modest and manageable scale in a kind of balance of power, until all that was disrupted by foreign French, then Spanish, and Imperial (German) interventions on the peninsula, interventions beyond the capacity of Italy's small states to manage effectively for Italy's advantage. (The last chapter of the Prince was, after all, an exhortation - to a rising prince - to liberate Italy "from the barbarians.) International relations operate on a larger, world-wide scale today, which considerably complicates things. But the basic realities of what's needed to maintain a secure balance of power and what happens when that balance is lost remain more or less similar.  And the morally problematic dimensions of governance seem most on display in international affairs. And it is his appreciation of the morally problematic parts of politics that have earned Machiavelli  moralistic condemnation, while making him remain so relevant.

In the famous chapter 15 of The Prince, Machiavelli articulated the moral problematic he faced as a theorist of politics: "A great many men have imagined states and princedoms such as nobody ever saw or knew in the real world, for there is such a difference between the way we really live and the way we ought to live that the man who neglects the real to study the ideal will learn how to accomplish his ruin, not his salvation" (tr. Robert M Adams, 1977). In thus breaking with the classic "Mirror of Princes" tradtion, Machiavelli put behind him not only the utopian traditon in political theory that began with Plato's Republic, but also much of the ethical underpinnings of political theory since Aristotle. It is this which traditonally has identified Machiavelli as the first serious theorist of modernity. As Ernst Cassirer wrote (The Myth of the State, 1973), Machiavelli "cut off all the threads by which in former generations the state was fastened to the organic whole of human existence." On the other hand, it is an oversimplificaiton, at best, to portray Machiavelli simply as some power-obsessed cycnic (as the historical Cesare Borgia most certainly seems to have been). Indeed, Machiavelli recognizes the rightness of observing convenional ethics in stable situations. The problem which he was more willing than some of his predecessors to face up to is simply that politics - and especially international relations - often presents the opposite of such a stable environment. One of the accomplishments of modern Western political institutions has been to minimize that dissonance in ordinary domestic democratic politics. Even then, as the movie Lincoln suggests, sometimes the exercise of public power seems to have to follow its own rules. In the real world, the current debate about what authority exists or might be claimed to exist to target US citizens in the US with drones further demonstrates that point. The case is even more relevant, of course, when it comes to international relations, in which stable supra-national institutions simply do not exist or are very limited in their effective scope, and the actual experience of states may at time more resemble Hobbes's "war of all against all." It is possible, for example, to define "war crimes" and even to create tribunals to prosecute them. It remains the case, however, that the only available cure for "war crimes" is war. Only when the alleged war criminals have been defeated militarily is it possible to bring them to "justice."
Two things follow from this in my opinion. The first is the perennial task of defining the moral parameters of our public life. As my one-time professor and mentor Sheldon Wolin once wrote, Machiavelli's theory "did not mean that politics was to be conducted without ethical criteria, but that the criteria could not be improted from the 'outside'." For Wolin, Machiavelli's point was rather "to urge that precisely because of hte unescapably autonomous nature of politics, it was all the more compelling that criteria for action be established and that appropriate means be fashioned for their implementation" (Politics and Vision, 1960). In short, the task of articulating and formulating a moral framework for our post-lapsarian political world remains an ongoing challenge - one not susceptible to glib ethical posturing.
The first is an ongoing but old challenge. It seems to me, however, that the problematic Machiavelli identified in the difference between the requirements of public life and the traditonal norms operative in private life has been radically broadened by the gneral politicization of all social life. As the recently deceased, esteemed political scientist James Q. Wilson (1931-2012) once observed:  “Once politics was about only a few things; today, it is about nearly everything.”
The fact is that, thanks in large part to that politicization of all things, contemporary social life is itself increasingly bereft of the sorts of stable anchors in which moral sentiments are cultivated and ethical reflection thrives. A society in which people must navigate their way thourgh life lacking widely acknowledged norms about human nature, human sexuality, family relations, and the world of work (just to name the most basic and also most obvious) becomes a society likewise lacking in the sort of moral stability which makes not just convnetional ethics but any sort of coherent ethical orientation culturally dissonant and problematic. Machiavellian relaism is helpful here in acknowledging the resulting social consequences of this collapse of moral consensus.