The enormous power of the Papacy

Two decades ago, when news was broadcast over television that the Pope had been shot and was in danger of death, the shock and the concern were felt worldwide. More recently, when the Pope became seriously ill, the concern was again worldwide. Many (perhaps millions) were praying for the Pope’s recovery. His death is mourned not only by Catholics but even by non-Catholics and by non-Christians.

This illustrates a modern phenomenon: the almost universal recognition of the Pope as a moral leader not only for Catholics but for the world.

Beginning with Paul VI, every Muslim state maintains an ambassador to the Holy See. Even the Jews, so hostile in the beginning, have begun to thaw. As for Communist Russia the enemy of all Religion, the almost unthinkable happened when no less than the head of the Soviet Union, Michael Gorbachev, went to Rome to visit the Pope. Not long afterwards the Communist regime itself collapsed, and there are responsible scholars who believe that one of the factors to bring that about was the anti-communist cooperation between the Pope and the President of the United States (Ronald Reagan).

This worldwide respect for the Papacy did not always exist. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the almost universal cry was a demand for reform of the Head and members of the Church. Napoleon dragged the Pope to Paris. Pius VI died a prisoner in exile.

As long as the Pope was the temporal head of a kingdom (the Papal States), he had friends and enemies among the rulers of nations. It was when the Pope was stripped of all temporal power and became the helpless, powerless, purely spiritual leader that his prestige began to grow enormously.

In the 1960s, I invited for lunch an internationally recognized Protestant minister, author of several books and professor in the Divinity School of a great American university. It was a very cordial meeting, a Filipino Catholic priest and an American protestant minister. He told me, "You know, I often pray for the Pope." (The Pope at that time was John XXIII).

There are those who despise or even hate the Pope. They attack him in the papers, or on the stage. There are caricatures mocking the Pope, the Virgin Mary and the Catholic Church. But these bigots belonging, not to the mainstream, but to what Franklin Delano Roosevelt called the lunatic fringe.

But the gigantic crowds that invariably gather to hear the Pope whenever he visits a city are proof that the lunatic fringe does not really count. Their hatred for the Papacy is irrelevant.

The largest crowd of course, unprecedented and unsurpassed, was that in Manila the last time the Pope was here. The dense multitude was estimated by some at five million people, by others at "only" three million. So dense was the crowd that the Pope could not get to the altar. President Fidel Ramos (a Protestant) came to the rescue by putting the Pope in a helicopter and bringing him direct to the altar.

Popes do not live forever. Eventually one Pope will be replaced by another. But the Papacy itself – no matter who is Pope – will be acknowledged as a great spiritual force that has won the respect (if not always the agreement) of all people of good will.