AP
Following the death of Pope Francis, the conclave of cardinals that gathered at the Vatican wasted little time choosing a new pope: Robert Prevost, 69, astoundingly a Chicago-born American, who assumed the name of Leo XIV.
As often happens with the Catholic Church, magnificent ritual and the weight of tradition has obscured the importance of the occasion.
A new pope isn’t just the chief executive of a little country or the supreme pontiff of a big denomination.
He personifies a fresh take on ancient values that will be transmitted to the faithful in every corner of the earth.
Because we live in a political age, a great deal of interest will be focused on Pope Leo’s political orientation.
Will he be another trendy semi-progressive, like Francis, or has the church tacked in the opposite direction?
Before his election, some had called for the second coming of John Paul II, the bold conservative whose convictions challenged the power of dictatorial regimes.
Power of personality
I am not a Catholic, nor particularly religious — but if an outsider may be allowed an opinion, I would say that the world doesn’t need a political pope.
We have more than enough political nonsense, at the moment, buzzing inside our heads.
We are sick unto death with politics.
We desperately need a man of the spirit.
Historically, popes have been churchmen rather than God-men.
In 476 AD, Pope Leo I faced the frightful and barbaric Attila the Hun and somehow persuaded him to turn away from Rome.
Six hundred years later, Pope Gregory VII forced the brilliant monarch of the Holy Roman Empire, Henry IV, to walk barefoot in the snow for miles before granting him forgiveness at Canossa, Italy.
Nine hundred years later, John Paul II traveled to Poland and sparked the fire that was to consume European communism to its foundations.
These were mighty personalities who believed that the church, as an institution, embodied the teachings of Christ and had to be protected against the usurpations and corruptions of secular power.
Pope Celestine V, on the other hand, was a saintly man who persuaded himself that the papacy would damn his soul and resigned in 1294, less than six months after assuming the office.
We encounter Celestine in Dante’s “Inferno,” tormented by wasps and hornets, among those whose lives were so worthless that they aren’t even allowed inside the gates of hell.
What can I say?
Times have changed.
Changing institutions
The value and purpose of institutions have changed.
They are no longer conduits of top-down information or thrones for the ample posteriors of high authority, but a receptacle for the remnants of community.
Institutions are where we gather in a time of dispersion.
Like every institution in our century, the Catholic Church has been battered and diminished by changes in the surrounding society.
In the United States, Mass attendance has declined sharply.
The vultures of the news media are interested in church activities only when they can discover a scandal.
The church’s traditional role as interpreter and intermediary has been made redundant by immediate, searchable communications.
Members of the congregation who wish to learn Pope Leo’s views won’t need the parish priest to explain them.
They’ll just look him up on YouTube and make up their own minds.
The new pope will speak from a digital pulpit in an immense basilica filled with the entire human race.
That’s why the spirituality of his words and character are of such tremendous importance.
What we tend to call our “culture” is sick at heart.
Our way of life has been thoroughly disenchanted — divorced from the mysterious and the sacred.
We are quite literally obese with material consumption but starved for meaning.
A peculiar trait of humans as symbolic animals is that we wish to live above ourselves.
We demand explanations and justifications of the universe, connected to something better and higher than we are.
When the universe is disenchanted and our demands are met with silence, we feel cosmically disinherited.
We belong to nothing.
We have no idea of who or what we are.
The current obsession with identity can take root only among people with no identity, who experience life as a doomed struggle against disintegration.
Cosmic disorientation
Our great-grandparents — primitive creatures — never gave a thought to their identities.
Adrift in a great void, unplugged from the spirit of things, we suffer deaths of despair — suicide, overdose, murderous violence.
The young stop reproducing because the end is always near.
The only article of faith depressive Zoomers have retained from Christianity is an unshakeable belief in a Last Judgment.
What of our secular values — justice, equality and so on?
Can’t we forge a framework of existential meaning around these ideals?
We can, but only if these connect to something higher than human law.
Our rights and freedoms, let’s recall, depend on “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” according to the Declaration of Independence.
The secular values we espouse today descend directly from Christian virtues.
If the original is obliterated, we are back to that feeling of cosmic disorientation. We are lost in space.
Why should I respect anyone’s freedom but my own?
Why should great power be accompanied by great responsibility?
The answers to such questions arise spontaneously from long-standing habits and traditions, and can’t be deduced from a utilitarian calculus.
There are some who would point to science as an irrefutable source of meaning.
More than once, I’ve heard clever individuals say, “I believe in science.”
In a general sense, of course, we all believe in science.
But science portrays organic evolution as a struggle among selfish genes to replicate themselves.
If this is true, the perfect human life would be the imitation, not of Christ, but of Genghis Khan.
Finally, techno-utopians imagine they can sidestep the whole problem of meaning by achieving the Singularity.
Rather than seek after God, they will acquire the necessary technological enhancements to become God.
In our feeble spiritual state, however, we are more likely to become slaves than masters to new technology.
Look at what transpired with the smartphone.
The singularity, among our kind, will rather resemble that “Star Trek” episode in which a supercomputer ruled a planet and was worshipped as a divine being.
Technology has built a brave new world but the human condition is old.
We feel there’s more to life than living, but we’ve forgotten the language to attain it.
Meaningful legacy
We are orphans in the storm, hoping for rescue.
The last thing we need is for spirituality to be updated, modernized, “made relevant” to our alienated souls.
Since modernity has made us poor in spirit, it’s hardly likely to be the cure.
Insisting that profound and inexplicable mysteries be made relevant to our transient fashions is a particularly shallow form of narcissism.
All we can change is ourselves.
All we can hope is to awaken from the dead-end despair of materialism to the possibility of connection with ineffable things.
But we need guides on this journey.
The popes hark back in a line to Saint Peter, a Galilean fisherman who was told by Jesus to be a fisher of men. We need the new pope to be less about the institution of the church and more about spiritual leadership — to be a fisher of souls.
So let’s get the formalities out of the way.
Let’s congratulate Robert Prevost, Chicago’s own, on his becoming Pope Leo XIV — though congratulations may not really be in order given the heavy burden that has been placed on his shoulders.
Let’s feel proud, for strictly tribal reasons, that an American has been chosen to head the oldest hierarchy on the planet — one that commands no divisions, as Stalin once observed, but endures on the faith of millions even in this unbelieving age.
And let’s hope Pope Leo will excel not in power but in spirit — that he will assist us in the long sojourn out the valley of the shadow toward higher ground, where we will see, at last, in the clear light of day, that every moment of life is infused with significance.