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Part One: En Route
So here I am, on my way to the Eternal City to report on the election of a new pontiff, with the memory of my previous visit for the same purpose in 2013 weighing depressingly on my mind.
At that time, finding myself almost clueless regarding the character of Cardinal Bergoglio, I immediately consulted a good Argentinian friend who knows absolutely everything. He gave me two bits of advice which served me well for the whole of Francis’ pontificate. “If you try to understand him”, he began, “you will lose your Reason”. To this rather discouraging initial warning he added the following, even more disturbing comment: “When they inevitably insist that he is a Marxist, tell them that he is indeed one—but a Groucho Marxist”. Then came a line from Duck Soup to emphasize the point. “These are my principles. And if you don’t like them? I have others”.
We now have twelve years of experience of Francis’ all too irrational assault on the Catholic Church; a butchery accompanied by bottomless outpouring of mercy to the Groucho Marxism of the most incredibly arrogant and stupid global Oligarchy ever to be found active in the long historical list of elites that have openly rejected the teaching and grace of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. To make matters worse, Francis’ twelve year reign has given us a College of Cardinals filled with Princes of the Church named according to no discernable guidelines other than personal whim. With these facts of life weighing on me, how could I not ask the question “can anything good come from Rome”? From “Franciscan” Rome? Why not just stay home and await the arrival of Francis II in my apartment in Greenwich Village, even closer to the real center of oligarchic contempt for the Redemption than Vatican City?
As always in my life, history intervened to save me from beating a despairing retreat, to begin with, due to an “historical” commitment to attend an annual conference in Spain which always takes place the week after Easter. Then there was the need to come to Northern Italy to put the final touches on what, after thirty three years, has become an “historical” Roman Forum Summer Symposium on Lake Garda. Finally, sitting there, every day, in my traditional cafe in Gardone Riviera, could not help but give me the time to evoke all the reasons that can come to an historian’s mind as to why the response to the question “can anything good come from Rome” is that “you can never know for sure”.
If Rome were not built in a day, her return from her many wayward paths in the past to rebuild a better Catholic future has also often been an all too frustrating and much interrupted construction project. But sometimes that return has come through an unexpected lightning bolt clearing out the rubbish as well. Better to be present, just in case of an expedited restoration! God’s time is not our time, and who am I not to adjust my schedule to His?
In any case, given the fact that I have no special, current, “inside” information at my fingertips, it is only as an historian that my reporting can be of any value to OnePeterFive readers. And I do have to say that my daily glance backward while there in Gardone did yeoman service in stiffening my resolve: both to continue en route to Rome this Monday morning, as well as to strengthen my conviction that a little papal election history might also help encourage you not to abandon hope entirely.
For it is all too true, as the Romans say, that “Peter often falls asleep”. He repeatedly needs to be awakened from his slumber and shoved back onto his feet: not just to pray piously with the crowds from the papal window, but also to undertake proper, consistent, and militant Catholic action. More pertinent to our own situation today, it is also all too true that Peter’s awakening from slumber almost always comes through the help of “outside” forces; forces like ourselves.Without going into too much detail, let’s take a brief glance at what has happened throughout the ages in this regard.
A Peter that was not doing badly in fulfilling his difficult pastoral functions nevertheless fell into a dangerous dogmatic slumber at the beginning of the 600s, and found himself guilty, in consequence, of turning a blind eye to heretical machinations. Almost no Catholics know that this flaw was corrected by a rather sudden booting-out of the Latins from papal bunk, and this through the arrival on the seventh and early eighth century scene of a series of “foreign”, Greek speaking, and theologically savvy pontiffs. Ironically—given the anti-papal attitude of the Orthodox in our own time—these oriental popes and their equally eastern advisors were immensely important in enhancing the Latin Church’s grasp of the full significance of the Roman Primacy and the need to make its authority felt.
Rome returned to native Latin speaking popes in order to solidify a new and necessary alliance with the “outsider” Frankish barbarians that was disapproved of in a Constantinople that could do precious little to defend Italy. But the failure of Charlemagne’s revived Roman Empire saw the Papacy fall into its most scandalous rut in the tenth and eleventh centuries at the hands of the wretched, venal, simoniac, and highly parochial-minded local oligarchy. Again, salvation came from the “outside”, from a new dynasty of Western Roman Emperors emerging out of Germany.
A series of lightning strikes on the part of the Emperors Otto I (936-973) and Otto III (996-1002) looked as though they would shake Peter awake rather quickly, but their widespread geographical duties and the immensity of the task they had undertaken prevented them from blocking further backsliding. It required another “outsider” Blitzkrieg, guided, to begin with, by the Emperor Henry III (1028-1056), to bring to Rome an army of cosmopolitan reformers from the rest of Europe who ultimately shaped the entirety of High Medieval Catholic Christendom. That Blitzkrieg very quickly gave us the College of Cardinals as an international corporate entity that would hopefully elect nothing other than future fully-awakened pontiffs, and eventually the conclave as a tool for assuring its greater independence in performing this highly desirable task.
Alas, nothing in our Valley of Tears lasts forever, and Peter, always ready for a carefree and totally irresponsible snooze, “fell asleep” in a big way by the time the fourteenth century dawned. In one way or another, that nap lasted several centuries. In 1534, when Protestantism seemed as though it were dancing its way to an inevitable victory through the scandalous wreckage of a Christendom both financially exploited and spiritually neglected by the woozy Papacy, the conclave elected Cardinal Alessandro Farnese as Pope Paul III (1468-1549).
A playboy in his youth, the prosperity of his children, grandchildren, and other relatives remained always painfully dear to Farnese’s nepotist heart. Nevertheless, it was this highly unlikely figure who nevertheless jolted the papal machinery back into laudable action once again, opening the door to the work of a new group of gifted outsiders – these included cardinals whom he commissioned to publish a study that placed the blame for the Protestant Revolution squarely on the centuries-long, debauched papal snooze; the intercontinentally active Society of Jesus; and a Council at Trent that, with great difficulty, maneuvered the Church through its three sittings to another jointly dogmatically and pastorally awakened attempt to transform all things in Christ. Lest those with bad habits might think that this revived Blitzkrieg would fizzle out, the election in 1553 of the ferocious “outsider” Pope Paul IV confronted them with a surprise: a crotchety old timer who had spent a lifetime working to shake Peter out of his slumber, and who purged the torpor of wayward monks and clerics by condemning them to row the galleys of the papal navy in the Mediterranean.
Centuries later, revolutionaries were convinced that the death of Pius VI on the way to prison in France would surely mean the end of a Church that had already humbled itself before the powers-that-be for a long time before 1789. But the cardinals crawled their way to Venice to elect Pope Pius VII (1800-1823), who would preside over a Church which throughout the nineteenth century would experience a remarkable and totally unexpected revival. This, once again, was the work of activists from outside Rome; from other parts of Italy, from France, Germany, Spain, Britain, and even the Americas. Their labors would be felt in the rebirth of Thomistic and Augustinian theology, in a spirituality of the Incarnation and the Mystical Body of Christ, in devotions in Mary and the Sacred Heart, in a new traditional-focused liturgical splendor, and in the development of the Social Teaching of the Roman Church.
My train has finally brought me to Rome, my taxi to my digs on the Piazza San Giovanni della Malva (about which more tomorrow), and my thirst to a great big glass of red wine. While I drink it, allow me to indulge in my own conclave fantasy and the sad problem that prevents me from too deeply reveling in it. It involves plunging back once again into the miserable fourteenth century and the papal election of 1378.
That election was the first to take place in Rome since the move of the papal residence to Avignon some seventy years earlier. It came about all too unexpectedly, due to the swift death of Pope Gregory XI, who had just recently brought the French dominated College of Cardinals back to a rough, tumble, and disease-ridden Eternal City to which it in no way desired to return.
The Romans of that time saw themselves in an interesting light. On the one hand, they were the ultimate “insiders”—the honest to goodness subjects of the Bishop of Rome in the place he ought to be. On the other hand, they were rather pathetic “outsiders”—expelled from the center of things by the time-serving, politicized prelates of the time, who preferred to stay not in the city of St. Peter, but on the other side of the Alps. In their outrage, these heartfelt insiders who were sick and tired of being on the outside looking in mobbed the cardinals trapped in conclave and demanded a pope who was “a Roman or at least an Italian”. This they immediately obtained in the form of a non-cardinal, Bartolomeo Prignano, who took the name of Urban VI (1378-1389).
Now the reason why this conclave allures me is because I fantasize the following. On the one hand, we Traditionalist Catholics consider ourselves to be the true “insiders”; the real voice of orthodox Christianity. On the other, we have been thrust into the position of “outsiders” due to the maneuvering of time-serving progressive prelates who prefer that Peter not be awakened but that he dream the dreams of Bill Gates, George Soros, and the Alphabet Communities.
In my fantasy, I see hordes of us storming the Sistine Chapel on May 7th, demanding a pope who is “a Traditionalist, or at least some kind of believing Catholic!”, immediately achieving our goal with Cardinal Sarah or (as Prignano shows is possible) Bishop Schneider. Blitzkrieg! Victory! The Ancient Roman Liturgy! Syllabi of Errors galore and the hills alive with what Dietrich von Hildebrand called “the glorious sound of the words ‘anathema sit’”. Happy days are here again!
But risks there are—as the aftermath of the 1378 Roman Conclave soon made clear. Most of the terrorized cardinals claimed they were brutalized, elected an anti-pope, and returned to Avignon. Meanwhile, Pope Urban II “lost it” and is thought by some even to have gone stark raving mad. The Church remained divided—even more badly divided—until 1417. Christendom as a whole was lost in a perplexity recounted by a popular ditty of the time:
In Rome itself we have a Pope–in Avignon another;
And each one claims to be alone–the true and lawful ruler.
The world is troubled and perplext—’twere better we had none;
Than two to rule o’er Christendom–where God would have but one.
He chose St. Peter who his fault–with bitter tears bewailed;
As you may read the story told–upon the sacred page.
Christ gave St. Peter power to bind–and also power to loose;
Now men are binding here and there–Lord loose our bonds we pray!
Do not misunderstand me. I would happily accept all the risks to hear a serious “Sia lodato Gesù Cristo!” from the balcony of St. Peter’s later this week and a Traditional Mass in its nave immediately thereafter. But it is also horrifyingly true that Groucho Marxism has left us with a Christendom whose perplexed state makes that of the fourteenth century look paradisical in comparison.
I cannot tell you how many paeans to the “never-to-be matched and humble pope, poor-in-spirit, broken hearted by the sins of the world, buried without red shoes”, so different from his “cold, proud, and unlamented” Teutonic predecessor I have heard this past week, and from people whom I thought recognized a mean-spirited dictator when they saw one. The most irrational and politically-compromised pope in the modern revolutionary world, filled with nothing but insulting contempt for those whom he disliked is treated like a merciful hero; the most truly inquisitive, understanding, and pastorally welcoming pontiff since the Council continues to be dragged mercilessly through the mud.
“Bring it on!”, my own spirit cries out. But the historian in me warns that the fight will perhaps be even more bitter still, and for a good long time to come.
