But the second point, typified by Frank Bruni’s New York Times Op-ed piece on February 18, is that perhaps all this media attention deceives us into the false notion that the pope matters more than he really does. Bruni claims the pope and his curia are really “a royal family of dubious relevance,” at least to the majority of Catholics in North America and Western Europe. I think Bruni has a point--but he also protests too much, in a way that brings out the old debater in me. So allow me to revert to my former forensic format: I’ll list Bruni’s arguments, and respond to each point, one by one (read Bruni at http://nyti.ms/130cVoA ).
Bruni argues that widespread media attention results from mere “habit and convenience.” The media is drawn to the drama, the “visual backdrops,” the pageant. It is mere spectacle.
But of course spectacle attracts more than media. It attracts the public too, and can entertain, enthrall, even inspire them. The 1,000,000-strong crowd for Barack Obama’s 2008 inauguration may never forget that event. For some, it was life-changing.
The truth is that spectacle does hold sway with the human spirit, and Bruni belittles it needlessly. Catholicism clearly has a knack for spectacle on a global scale. This is an advantage, not a liability. The question that must be asked is: is this merely empty spectacle, or is it a means to a greater end?
Next Bruni argues that the pope gets notice as part of our cult of celebrity. The election holds out drama and the prospect of victory, much like American Idol, Iron Chef, the Super Bowl, the Kentucky Derby, or presidential elections. The election is our “ecclesiastical Oscars.”
This may be true, but once again Bruni seems intent on missing what matters. The fact is that not all celebrities are created equal. Some are merely “famous for being famous,” while others are famous for their impact on people’s lives. Fifty years ago, Ed Sullivan was a celebrity and so were the Beatles, but no one thinks Sullivan had their lasting influence.
Wilt Chamberlain was famous winning the NBA championship the spring before Martin Luther King was shot, but only one earned a national holiday and the Nobel prize. To call the pope a celebrity begs the next question: so what?
Among celebrities in the western world, perhaps the Queen of England is the post closest to the pope’s status, and garners similar media attention for herself and her own royal family.
Even her role as a symbolic leader is similar, but the pope is no mere figurehead. Even Bruni calls him the CEO of a worldwide organization, recognizing that he functions as a genuine executive. And his reach far exceeds the British Commonwealth. So reducing the pope to mere “celebrity” is a half-truth at best.
Next Bruni admits that the Catholic Church is a large and powerful organization (though he fails to note how prevalent and dominant its “charities and agencies” are), but then he argues that today’s U.S. Catholics are “less invested” and “less attached” to the church than 50 years ago.
As a general rule, this is true. But it does not make Bruni’s case against the pope’s relevance. Quite the contrary.
First, because much of the last 50 years of Catholic history has been a case study in how the pope does matter.
Before John, the pope had been a remote, largely invisible figure operating a great distance from US Catholics. The Vatican might as well have been Olympus, or another planet. But then the Council came, and suddenly Vatican events were the stuff of daily coverage by The New York Times’ John Cogley and of insider perspective from Xavier Rynne in The New Yorker’s “Letters from Vatican City” for four years running. Moreover, Vatican events were now (for the first time) a global spectacle thanks to satellite TV. And John’s council soon touched every Catholic at the parish level, especially through changes in liturgy and sacrament. Moreover John altered the church’s image beyond Catholics: today’s warmer Catholic-Protestant and Catholic-Jewish relations are the result of his influence.
Admittedly, this happy profile of papal power and impact did not last long. No doubt millions of U.S. Catholics today are disenchanted with the institution, even alienated from it. But ironically, this strengthens (rather than weakens) my case against Bruni. For rejecting Church teaching is not the same as ignoring it, and disenchantment is not the same is indifference. In fact, I would argue that today’s decline in practice among U.S. Catholics has happened, not in spite of the popes, but because of them.
Sociologist Andrew Greeley documented as early as the mid-1970s that U.S. Catholics were distancing themselves from the institution, and famously argued that there was a single cause: Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which rejected his own papal commission’s recommendation that church teaching on contraception be revised, and instead reasserted the existing prohibition against all “artificial” means of birth control.
Perhaps Greeley overstated his case, but certainly after 1968 millions of Catholic parents opted to reject Paul’s position in good conscience. Baby boomers, barely emerging from adolescence in 1968, typically decided there own path into marriage family and parenthood would not be guided by Humanae Vitae. And they in turn raised kids for whom official church teaching on contraception--and indeed on masturbation, premarital sex, and most other matters sexual--was in fact irrelevant to their lives. In short, three generations of Catholics have not simply drifted away from the institution--they have been pushed by, or ran from, papal action. Their alienation stands as proof that the papacy, far from meaningless, is capable of significantly affecting people’s lives--for better or for worse.
More recently, of course, the clergy sex abuse scandal has further tainted the church’s credibility on matters sexual--and handed young Catholics their silver-plated alibi to ignore the institution. John Paul II’s handpicked U.S. bishops transformed the face of U.S. hierarchy: once committed to Catholic renewal and public dialogue, the U.S. hierarchy in the 1980s and 1990s became a corps of company men devoted to protecting their own interests. Beginning with Boston’s Bernard Law and ending with LA’s Roger Mahony, these men earned a self-inflicted reputation for hypocrisy in high places that has scandalized millions of U.S. Catholics. This was not some random, accidental occurrence. This was the effect (albeit unintended) of papal strategy and action.
Even John-Paul’s illness illustrates my point: at the very moment that decisive papal action might have provided the damage control needed to rehabilitate the hierarchy’s good name, his age and illness (in concert with the custom of the pope serving until death) made him incapable of the crisis management the church needed.
So once again, the fallout among U.S. Catholics traces to the pope’s doorstep.
The rest of Bruni’s argument is a parade of polls documenting the gap between Catholic officialdom and the rank and file. The portrait that emerges is indeed bleak. But since these statistics are themselves the product of papal and hierarchical mismanagement, they cannot demonstrate that it makes no difference who the next pope is or what he does.
On the contrary, the examples of John XXIII, Paul VI, and John-Paul II over the last 50 years suggest that the pope’s performance affects the life of rank and file Catholics more than ever before.
Imagine, for example, if the next pope were to revise the mandate of priestly celibacy. A century ago, this news would spread out gradually from Rome via print media. Today, it would be an instant media firestorm that would alter the Church’s--and the pope’s--public image literally overnight. And it would transform seminaries and dioceses, as well as our priest shortage, in short order.
Or imagine that the next pope calls Vatican Council III. We could foresee several years of virtually non-stop coverage of the institutional Church once again transforming itself. It defies such imagining to argue that no one would pay attention.
Finally, Bruni’s whole argument depends on glossing over its most significant weakness: his focus is almost exclusively on U.S. Catholics (with a token nod to Canada and Europe). But our 60 million Catholics represent only 5% of the world’s Catholics. And the Church’s standing in South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia is vastly different from the American Catholics scene. Assessing the papacy’s impact requires a separate account for each region. And certainly the overall posture of the pope cannot be gauged by his response to the situation of a 5% segment of Catholics.
(I am reminded of a similar mistake the French made when the pope’s World Youth Day was held in Paris in 1997. Assuming the rest of the world to be as blasé about the pope as themselves, they were caught flatfooted--and ankle deep in overflowing toilets!--when 2 million kids showed up.)
But given Bruni’s narrow focus, this much can be said: the actions of four popes since 1962 have either helped or harmed the institutional church’s standing among American Catholics--and the same will be true for the next pope. Perhaps the media’s superficial, celebrity-and-spectacle driven interest will wane soon after the election, but Catholics everywhere, including the U.S., will be affected by the papacy that follows--for better or for worse!
© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2013
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