Paradoxes in Papal History

How the Papacy prevails through failure.

Habemus Papam! After a sede vacante period of seventeen days, the seat of Peter is occupied once more, with Pope Leo XIV taking the place of Pope Francis. As a Catholic living in Rome, I was quite excited by these developments, and I spent much of my energy in the days leading up to the conclave reading about the papacy, both modern and ancient. In the long hours of waiting for white smoke in St. Peter’s Square, I finally completed Eamon Duffy’s Saints & Sinners: A History of the Popes. I have studied historical popes before, but reading through the entire history of the papacy all at once has provided me new insights on the nature of the papacy which, in celebration of Pope Leo’s election, I thought I might share.

Popes, I have found, are wont to fail. They fail morally, of course: we all know that. I was surprised, however, to discover how often they further fail to fulfill their apostolic mission, both to spread the Gospel and effectively combat heresy. They fail in pursuing their most worldly ends: in diplomacy and in governing their own territory, in waging wars or negotiating peace. All of this, for a faithful Catholic, can be hard to take in. But every dismay and every disappointment in the history of the papacy is followed, if you read on far enough, by a confounding and previously unimaginable success. The papacy always survives, triumphs, even, despite its manifest failures. It is an institution which seems providentially dedicated to demonstrating the Gospel promise of victory through death, for in the same way that Christ rose after his crucifixion, the papacy rises again and again after every humiliation and defeat. 

Consider the ancient papacy’s battle with heresy. We tend to remember the early popes as heroic guardians of orthodoxy: when the bishop of Rome was massively outnumbered and politically outgunned, as in the Arian and Monophysite controversies, for example, when emperors and Eastern patriarchs alike adopted and pushed heresy, early popes held fast to orthodoxy. But though the papacy was the most consistent Christian institution on matters of orthodoxy, popes certainly succumbed to heresy. The strong desire for Christian unity combined with devious political machinations and sometimes outright violence compelled a number of popes to compromise or obfuscate on crucial matters of doctrine. Pope Liberius (352-366 AD) consented to an Arian re-writing of the Nicene Creed which accommodated Arianism. Pope Vigilius (537-555 AD) abetted the emperor Justinian’s efforts to establish Monophysitism in Church doctrine. The stand-out example is Pope Honorius I (625-638 AD), whose endorsement of a compromise with Monophysitism (monothelitism) earned him the label of heretic.

These cases marr the image of a courageous papacy facing down emperors and fellow-bishops alike in defense of orthodoxy. Perplexingly, however, in the aftermath of these failures we find not the erosion of papal authority but rather its growth. The humiliation of Pope Honorius registered nothing in the popular imagination compared to the more enduring legacy of his predecessor, St. Gregory the Great (590-604 AD), a doctor of the Church. Papal claims to doctrinal authority only grew in the following centuries, culminating in the 19th century in the codification of the doctrine of “infallibility.” In the modern day, the compromises of Liberius or Vigilius are so unthinkable as to be virtually forgotten.

The Middle Ages saw further conflict over papal authority, with a similar dynamic of papal claims not measuring up to reality. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the subsequent rise of regional monarchies, the papacy found for itself a previously unthinkable role as an arbiter of power in Western Europe. This role was not dignified: weak popes were repeatedly manipulated or forced into crowning or supporting kings and emperors. In the eleventh century, Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085 AD) sought to set the record straight, claiming for his office perfect independence from the influence of secular rulers and the authority not only to elect emperors but to depose them. He promptly exercised this authority by excommunicating and deposing Emperor Henry IV for refusing to accept the pope’s right to invest bishops in his territory (the Investiture Controversy). The emperor was forced to plead the pope’s forgiveness, standing barefoot in the snow outside the castle at Canossa, where the pope was lodging on his journey to Augsburg. Even this victory was followed by disappointment: Henry invaded Rome and established the antipope Clement III (1080-1100 AD) as Gregory’s replacement. Gregory died in Salerno, exiled from Rome, having fallen in a few years from spectacular victory to utter defeat.

We would expect this failure to spell the end of papal claims to authority over the temporal rulers of Europe. On the contrary, subsequent popes would continue to expand upon Gregory’s legacy, and history came to remember the triumph at Canossa far more distinctly than the humiliation at Salerno. “If he was defeated in the short term,” writes Eamon Duffy, “the spirit of papal reform owed everything to him, for after him the papacy never receded from its claims to freedom from secular and political control in spiritual matters.” To this day, the pope maintains the authority to appoint bishops in any country (except China, where a new Investiture Controversy seems to be brewing), and the notion of secular authorities attempting to depose the pope and elect their own is almost unthinkable.

For a final example, we may consider the papacy’s apparent loss of all temporal power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1870, the new Kingdom of Italy captured the Papal States and Rome, stripping the papacy of its 1,500-year-old claim to sovereignty over Rome and the surrounding territories. Pope Pius IX (1846-1878 AD) and his successor Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903 AD) believed that the papacy could not properly exist without the Papal States. They rebelled against the Kingdom of Italy and would not formally surrender their claim to the land. Only in 1929, 59 years after the Kingdom of Italy’s capture of Rome, did Pope Pius XI accept the loss and establish peace with the new Italian state. 

It is difficult to measure the consequences of this change. A century is not so long in the history of the papacy, and another may need to pass before we can be certain about the meaning of the loss of the Papal States. However, we can see that the papacy did not “lose” in the way anybody might have expected it to. The pope may no longer command an army, but he remains capable of effecting profound geopolitical change. The most obvious example of this is Pope John Paul II’s campaign against the Soviet Union, which many have argued was instrumental in the fall of that regime. More recently, the swarming of Rome with foreign delegations at the recent funeral of Pope Francis and the inauguration of Pope Leo XIV demonstrate quite well the enduring significance the pope has to world affairs. 

Pope Leo’s election is also an example of the propensity for victory-through-defeat within this Church. For twelve years under Pope Francis, the Roman Catholic Church’s historical affinity for the Latin language has been ignored and even suppressed, with the critical example being the pope’s apostolic exhortation Traditionis Custodes, which severely restricted the availability of the Tridentine rite, a Latin-language liturgy dating to the 16th century. One of the most notable things about Pope Leo’s first weeks in office, therefore, has been his willingness to speak Latin. In his first appearance as pope on the Loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica, in his first Sunday address a few days later, and in homilies since then, the new pope has demonstrated his comfort and even talent for the Latin language (actually, in his inauguration mass homily, he even exhibited some knowledge of Ancient Greek). Observing these signs, many suspect and hope that the new pope will lift the restrictions on the Tridentine rite. If he does so, it will prove to be yet another example of the paradoxical nature of change in the Catholic Church, as the choice to translate the mass into the vernacular made during Vatican II and the explicit disdain for Latin exhibited during the Francis papacy will seem only to have deepened and renewed many Catholics’ appreciation for the language.

These few examples in the long, long history of the bishopric of Rome call attention to an even grander paradox: how can any single priest exert so much influence over the affairs of the world and the turnings of history? The pope’s temporal power has never been remotely comparable to that of emperors and kings, and yet the papacy has outlived and outperformed every empire, every monarchy. Since St. Peter hung upside-down in Nero’s Circus, the papacy has been winning in the only way that Christians can: through the cross.