Popes, Presidents, & Precarity
On the gift of a system so stable that you can afford to ignore who runs it
I was talking the other day to a Protestant friend about a meaningful difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy (I have been both, as most of you readers no doubt know). The context of our conversation was his burnout with Evangelicalism, and not knowing where to turn. He’s thinking about ecclesiology.
I told him that though I was baptized Methodist, I had never really taken Christianity seriously until my college years, because I had not grown up in an observant family. (As I like to say, we didn’t often go to church, and the church we didn’t go to often was the Methodist Church.) A turning point for me was Pope John Paul II’s 1987 tour of America, which brought him to New Orleans. It was the summer between my sophomore and junior years at LSU, and I was really torn up about Christianity. I could feel myself being drawn towards it, but I resisted. There was something in me imploring me to drive to New Orleans to the Superdome to see this pope.
When I got to the city, I went by Tulane to see the girl I was involved with at the time. We met in her dorm. She wanted to fool around. “I can’t,” I said. “The Pope is in town.” She thought I was nuts. If I had been her, I would have come to the same conclusion. But hey, something about that old man shook me up, and called me out of myself. (The Pope also broke me and that girl up that day. I imagine she’s still thanking the God she doesn’t believe in for sparing her another day with the likes of me.)
I didn’t become a practicing Christian for five more years; it took six for me to be formally received into the Catholic Church, in 1993. There were several reasons I became Catholic; one of them was that the Catholic Church seemed to be rock-solid doctrinally and otherwise. I had been bowled over by the personage of John Paul. The papacy made perfect sense to me. I believed everything the Catholic Church taught about the papacy, in large part (as I now recognize) because I was totally enamored of Karol Wojtyla. I believed that the papacy was why Rome was going to stay rock-solid while all the other churches eventually crumbled.
What I realized after becoming a Catholic is that the mundane reality within the Church is rather different than it appeared in the imagination of a young man in his twenties who was looking for a hero, and a heroic cause. As most of my readers know, I lost my Catholicism in 2005, after four extraordinarily disillusioning and painful years writing and thinking about the abuse scandal. With my Catholicism went my ability to trust institutional religious authorities in any deep sense — that is, trust them beyond the ecclesiological minimum. It’s like having had ones nerves severed, and losing the ability to feel anything in your legs. I just can’t do it. I went from someone who followed the ins and outs of Catholic hierarchical politics to someone who, as an Orthodox Christian, has become a de facto congregationalist — this, to guard my own faith. I know my weaknesses all too well.
So many of my Generation X conservative Catholic friends have said that the Francis pontificate has cured them of the papolatry (their word) they had developed under John Paul II and Benedict XVI. They had become so emotionally committed to the papacy that they hadn’t understood that the figure of the pope could be anything other than one of awe. None of us were old enough to remember Paul VI, or anybody before JP2. Francis has been a real shock to the system for them, as he certainly would have been to me were I still Catholic.
Here’s something odd I learned from having spent roughly equal amounts of time in both the Catholic and the Orthodox churches. In Orthodoxy, it is quite possible to go for years and years without knowing anything about your bishop. Honestly, if I passed my bishop on the street, I wouldn’t know him. If the two best-known figures of world Orthodoxy — the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Kyrill, the Patriarch of Moscow — passed by in normal priest clothes, I would probably recognize them as clerics I had seen somewhere, but couldn’t quite place.
This is a real gift of Orthodoxy! I mean it. It says that the tradition is so stable that the ordinary believer doesn’t have to concern himself with who the bishop is, or even the patriarch. You don’t have to worry that a new pope, or a new local bishop, is going to come in and shake things up. Orthodoxy doesn’t have a pope, but if it did, the changing of the pope wouldn’t matter nearly as much as it has come to mean in Catholicism these days. The changing of the local bishop doesn’t really matter at all. It is hoped that one’s bishop will be both good and competent, but if he’s not, the stability of the tradition will hem him in. Things don’t feel so precarious.
This came to mind tonight when I read something that the political scientist Mark Mitchell wrote the other day at Front Porch Republic:
In 1960, Willmoore Kendall wrote that, "presidential elections cannot become the central ritual of our system without destroying the system." Sixty years later, as the central ritual of our system plays out around us, it is clear to any attentive person that the system is coming apart.
Kendall’s point was that the American system was not created for an imperial presidency, and that if we get to the point where the president is the central figure in our democracy, we will no longer be what we were. The presidency is not like the papacy, of course, but I think they are comparable in the sense that the centrality of both offices in the minds of the people they govern distorts the nature of both polities. I wonder if Catholics will ever again have the luxury of not having to be concerned with who the Pope is, because they can trust the system to remain stable. I wonder if Americans will ever again have the luxury of being able to trust that whoever the president is, he or she is not likely to do anything too destabilizing.
(But you watch: if we ever reached that state again, everybody would complain that we were stagnant, that nothing ever changes.)
I can thank the rock star Pope for playing a key role in leading me to a mature Christian faith. But I would have been a lot better off if, having become a Catholic, I had spent far less time thinking about Peter, and more time thinking about Jesus, if you take my meaning. This was not John Paul’s fault, but mine. Similarly, how many of us spend so much time and worry on thinking about the President, but won’t exert any effort to learn about politics in our own towns?
Well, me, for one. When I voted on Tuesday, I left my ballot blank for several local offices because I had done no research on any of the candidates, and I was not going to cast a completely uninformed vote. It embarrassed me, frankly.
I had dinner tonight with a friend in town. He is Christian. He is black. He is a Democrat. And he is feeling very down about the election and its aftermath.
He said it’s about social media. So many of his conservative Christian friends, including pastors, have been posting red-hot takes on Facebook. He showed me some of them. They are standard conservative rhetoric — kind of spicy, but not overly so to my eyes. But then, I live online, and have developed dinosaur hide about this stuff. My friend doesn’t.
He explained that it was hard for him to read these takes and not feel that his friends think badly of him because of his politics. I told him that the reason I got off Facebook years ago is primarily because I hated seeing what it revealed to me of my friends, both liberal and conservative. I didn’t like seeing them say things, and say things in such a way, that they would never do face to face — even if they thought them. That’s it, my friend replied: “I wish I didn’t know this about them.”
“If you could see what was inside my head, you would run away in horror,” I replied.
“Yeah, mine too,” he said.
That’s how it is with us sinners.
Later, I was thinking about this passage in the Czech novelist Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, about a contrast between two lovers having an extramarital affair:
Social media seems to have given us the worst of both: a world in which everybody shares all their secret thoughts, and nobody cares what others think.
Speaking of things Czech, here is part of a letter I received from a Bohemian friend tonight. He’s an émigré to the US from Prague, and was lamenting tonight both our lousy American politics, and how thin Catholicism is in this country. I asked him for permission to quote this part of his letter, and he agreed:
Tragic sense (things were different before the Reformation)
And then, again, things got different after the Counter-Reformation. The Habsburgs were rather good at it. A century after they won the 30-year war, a myriad of baroque churches, chapels and religious artifacts dotted the Czech countryside appealing to emotion and devotion, cautioning against reason. When I was growing up it was virtually impossible to take a walk in the woods or through the fields without encountering one of these gems. It was wonderfully depressing in a very satisfyingly melancholic way to grow up as a Catholic in Czechoslovakia. I miss that feeling every day. (Barokní boží muka … do a google image search on that; or on kříž v poli.) It was a constant reminder of: all this is temporary, while you are here you will suffer.
Suffering, in my opinion, is what separates us from animals and makes us human. I don’t mean physical pain. I am thinking more along the lines of sacrifice. That is a uniquely human trait, something which is, as I believe, a generator of both consciousness and time. Channeling Jordan Peterson here a bit: sacrifice is our bargain with the future. That’s how we perceive the future. Current efforts to remove all forms of suffering will undo us as humans. That brings us back all the way past the Reformation to the Renaissance. That’s when we decided that if God would not rid us of suffering, we would do it ourselves by applying reason and science.
All Souls’ Day
In the context of the Counter-Reformation, All Souls’ Day was made a prominent part of Christian (read Catholic) life in the Habsburg Empire. When I was a kid, every November 2nd, we would walk to the local cemetery. We did not have any family buried there so we cleaned the graves of people we used to know, said a prayer and made three small crosses on the stone. The curious thing was that the whole town was there — people 99% of whom were atheists. That was the day to meet all my classmates and their families. I loved that day and have very warm memories of it. My father is buried in a town where he was born, about 25 miles from my mom’s house. He wanted to be with his folks not some strangers of those 25-mile-distant lands. My mom does not drive and public transport options in that direction were sparse even in the good days (virtually nonexistent in COVID times). Nonetheless, every November 2nd in the morning, my mom in her 80s, fills a bucket with water (in case the cemetery shut it off for winter), packs some rags and candles and embarks on a 3h long train and bus trip to that town, scrubs the grave, quietly cursing the ancient linden trees with their black sap looming over the graveyard, and then takes a 3h trip back. In her mind, taking care of and praying for the dead is one of the most important tasks of the living. At least in the Habsburg lands, All Souls’ Day transcended its religious context and has become a solid national tradition.
Curiously, the communists, who purposefully destroyed almost everything else, missed both the Tragic Sense artifacts and All Soul’s. That was their fatal mistake.