The Pope is The Pope

Stalin famously asked, “How many divisions has the Pope?” With this sneering question he meant to point out the weakness of a mere church before a nation; these days, the Church looks to have the last laugh. It looks healthier than Stalin’s birth home, Georgia, his adopted home, Russia, or his empire, which no longer exists. The army Stalin built isn’t in great shape these days, either. But the Church endures.

Endurance and longevity are the main characteristics of the Catholic Church; they go beyond its politics, beyond its actions in any given century, beyond the motives of any of the men (and it is all men) who control it. You can’t really talk about it in the vernacular of any age and expect to reach any relevant conclusions. It’s just too vast, too old, and too likely to prove you wrong with whatever new trick it has up its sleeve in the twenty-first century. The Church could give us the Borgias again, and become mired in the corruption and greed at the heart of the Boston abuse scandals. Or, it could become the radical institution that speaks for poor people that the proponents of liberation theology desire it to be. There is the sense, though, that neither of these things, should they happen (and both could), will change the fundamental nature of this two millennia-old institution.

Pope John Paul II gave an illustration of this aspect of the church in Nicaragua in 1983; heckled by the crowd, which desperately wanted him to speak out in favor of the Marxist Sandinista movement, he told the assembled masses, in Spanish, that Catholics were required to put aside such ideologies. The Pope also famously told a 1979 Mexico City gathering of liberation theology priests that the way to justice in the world was “neither capitalism nor communism, but communion.” It was the obligation of Catholics, he said, to eschew even good ideas in favor of the Church’s teachings.

This argument sounds quite odd, even slightly batty (reject good ideas? Huh?), but you have to look at it as a statement made by a deeply conservative man representing a deeply conservative institutions. By “conservative,” I mean not that the Pope opposed abortion and birth control, though of course he did both those things. I mean that, as the leader of the Church, he was concerned primarily with the Church’s preservation. He wanted to keep it around, healthy, and mostly unchanged.

This, in the end, is the most important thing to remember about the Pope and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, especially for anyone who wishes to invoke his name or his principles to justify their own. The Catholic Church is too big a tail to wag; it always, always ends up wagging you.

This is not to say that the Church is sinister; I don’t think that great power always necessarily corrupts, despite the saying. The Church may be too vast to be considered either good or evil. The Pope may speak out against rampant capitalism, but he’ll never be a communist. The Pope may speak out against the evils perpetuated by communism, but he’ll never be a capitalist. The answer, for the Pope, will always be communion.

Soon, there will be a new pope. We should all listen to what he says, because he is the leader of a lot of people. But we must remember that he will always say basically the same thing, and speak with basically the same principles, unaltered in the face of generational, even epochal upheavals. He’ll always be the Pope. And the Pope has no divisions.