From the Mar/Apr, 2024 issue of *Touchstone*

Editor’s Comment

A Pope for Our Times?

A Comment on the Editorial

by R. V. Young

In the Year of Our Lord 897, a few months after his own accession to the papacy, Pope Stephen VI, at the behest of the corrupt Roman aristocrats whose interference resulted in his election, ordered that the body of his immediate predecessor, Pope Formosus, be disinterred, put on trial on various factitious charges, dragged through the streets of Rome, and cast into the Tiber.

I mention this insalubrious incident from the distant past only for the perspective it offers on Pope Francis’s most recent folly, Fiducia Supplicans, so astutely analyzed and denounced by Hans Boersma in this issue of Touchstone. While the damage to the Catholic Church and, indeed, to all that remains of Christendom is devastating, the example of Pope Stephen provides a reminder that there have been popes in the past whose malice and folly would have seemed to undermine permanently not only the office of the papacy, but the magisterial credibility of the church as such.

Nevertheless, I urge all Christians, and especially my fellow Catholics, not to despair. For nearly a century after Pope Stephen’s disgraceful conduct, the papacy was largely a prize for various political factions contesting the rule of Rome, and a number of popes whom historians regard as even worse than Stephen were validly elected to the See of Peter. The church survived and grew stronger in the tenth and eleventh centuries with the impetus of the Cluniac reform movement. This is the pattern of ecclesial history: repeatedly, there is decline followed by reform and renewal. Even the cunning ambiguity of Fiducia Supplicans, so immediately perilous to the souls of those tempted by sins against our sexual nature, will eventually facilitate a future pope’s reversal of Pope Francis’s mischievous initiatives.

I am aware that many Christians regard the current pope’s abuse of his magisterial authority as a vindication for dismissing or leaving the Catholic Church, and many who remain in the Catholic fold are nearly reduced to despair. On the other hand, many of Francis’s supporters rebuke his critics for not believing that the Holy Spirit was active in the conclave that resulted in the election of Jorge Bergoglio to the papacy. I have no doubt that the Spirit was at work then, but unless he was unaccountably AWOL at the conclave of 896 that elected Stephen VI, Francis’s supporters must answer whether that makes Stephen a good pope.

The Holy Spirit is always at work, but Divine Providence moves through history in ways that we can not often comprehend. Perhaps we ought to ask ourselves whether the Holy Spirit has not, in fact, given us the pope that we have demanded. When the ancient Hebrews declined into idolatry and depravity, Providence allowed them to be defeated, humiliated, and subjected to Babylonian slavery. Perhaps our visitation is Pope Francis. We ought to be grateful for God’s mercy, considering our deserts.

I write on the Feast of the Holy Innocents, when we commemorate the massacre of small children by the devilishly driven Herod. But we also commemorate the escape of the infant Jesus into the obscurity of a private life, whence he would emerge years later to save the world.

R. V. Young is Professor of English Emeritus at North Carolina State University, a former editor of Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, and the author of Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization (Catholic University of America Press, 2022). He and his wife are parishioners at St. Ignatius of Antioch Church in Tarpon Springs, Florida. They have five grown children, fifteen grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

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