Pomp, Progress and the Papacy
by Aemilia Scott

Fed up with the pomp and circumstance of the pope's final days? Had enough images of tearful Eastern Europeans watching their dead pontiff for the last time? Creeped out by the attention to the minutiae of his entombment? Don't be.

One could say that dying is the most important thing a pope will do as pope. Dying, and the intense focus on his death, is less about grandstanding and legacy-building for himself and more about the survival of the institution of pope altogether. The papacy is the oldest surviving power structure in the Western world, and it takes a lot of agreement — and faith, one could say — to keep it ticking.

The papacy and the surrounding hierarchy not only needs to keep power in its hands (latin potestas), it also needs to keep the authority (auctoritas), or the just reason to rule. You can't simply have a big stick; you need to walk softly so people believe you are justified in having and wielding such a stick.

This theory of auctoritas and potestas was used first by Pope Gelasius I in 496, and it was important then because while Christian hierarchy in the West was just beginning to fill the power vacuum left by the barbarian invasions, the emperor in Constantinople was making the East a formidable seat of power. So Gelasius theorized that auctortias was superior to potestas, both because auctoritas was given by God, and because the Church at this time had no stick to wave.

Today a similar argument could be made about the Catholic Church, considering that modern systems of commerce and government have all but eliminated the potestas of the Church. This makes the declaration of its auctoritas all the more important. The pope, being the Church's most potent representative, is the natural focal point for this theological struggle.

What is papal auctoritas? It's the declaration that the pope is the Bishop of Rome, the Vicar of Christ and the living manifestation of St. Peter on earth. When Christ said to Peter "Thou art Peter [Latin: petrus], and on this rock [Latin: petram] I shall build my Church," he was not only making the first-ever documented pun in Western history, but according to ancient theologians he was also laying the foundation for an institutional Church on Earth, not simply a loose connection of believers.

When someone is declared pope, a profound and miraculous change occurs. He is no longer simply the man who is pope: he gains a second person, the person of St. Peter, who was a part of the pope before him and will be a part of the pope after him. St. Peter does not fully inhabit the pope, because this new pope still fully a man and fully able of living, sinning and dying like all men. But this second body he receives is eternal and unchanging, and gives the man auctoritas to rule as St. Peter over the most ancient and far-reaching of hierarchies.

It may seem creepy, but this medieval theory of power (or authority) transfer lies just beneath the smooth veneer of many modern institutions. The US Supreme Court has endured as a single Supreme Court for hundreds of years, though no single justice has lived that long, try as they might. The president's inauguration is a large ceremony supporting the transforming of a man into an office, which he will be for four or eight years, after which he will turn back into a man and a private citizen. This understanding of power is everywhere.

The thing is, this transfer of auctoritas, be it a king's coronation or an Oscar ceremony, must be surrounded by dramatic ritual of some form in order to realize the theoretical reason for the ritual. This is the flipside of the purely theological reason for the ritual — it is the more Humanist idea that in order for a system of power to work, everyone has to buy into it.

Traditionally the choosing of a pope is signaled by the burning of the papal ballots with wet straw, causing a plume of white smoke to rise up above the Cistine Chapel. Then the camerlegno stands before the people and says "Habemus papam!" and speaks the name of the new pope. Then in a six-hour coronation ceremony, the pope is crowned with the papal tiara (tiregnum) and paraded around St. Peter's Square in the papal throne. If that sounds a bit too close to monarchy for comfort, Pope Paul VI felt so too, and in 1978 he abolished the papal coronation ceremony and laid his tiregnum down as a symbol of the papacy's renunciation of temporal power.

And therein lies the paradox of the papacy. It is an earthly institution representing a mystical power, and it is an organized power structure that embodies a powerless and suffering man. Christ Himself was wholly man and wholly God, and this paradox of power and powerlessness is one of the cornerstones of Catholic theology. Nowhere is this theological headache more splitting than with the papacy, which has gone from powerless to massively powerful and back.

Thus the gesture by Paul VI of laying down his crown, in effect the refocusing of the papal mandate back to "serve the servants," was meant to snap the papacy out of issues of nationalism and political power and recreate the image of pope as a shepherd. What it also did was take away the public's fun.

The pomp and circumstance of the Vatican's ceremony is the most necessary element to the transfer of power, second only to the rite of transfer itself. In a ceremony already shrouded in more than 1,000 years of secrecy, the papal coronation ceremony was the closest thing to actually being there that the public could hope for. It may have been an opulent symbol of a wayward papacy, but for the public it has always been an absolutely divine afterparty. If you think Elvis' Viva Las Vegas tour was spectacular, imagine a celebration where the jewels are real, the throne is real and the man you're waiting in line to see is literally an apostle of Christ. Who wouldn't want to be a part of that?

And so in this era of papal austerity and humility, there is a vacuum in the public's vision of the transfer of power, or rather, transfer of authority. Imagine a situation where American party conventions were still held in secret, and then imagine that Gerald Ford had asked to abandon the inauguration ceremony altogether. You can bet that by now America would be criminally obsessed with the goings on of the presidential transfer of power. Many have argued that the ceremony is icing, but in both democracy and religion, it is the cake.

Thus, with whatever level of pomp the new pope is chosen and declared, the public will likely fill in the rest. It's as if there's an equilibrium of spectacle that a transfer of authority and a display of power must reach — and whether the spectacle is provided by those with the power or those adoring it, there must be a certain amount to make the authority real.

The ceremony, for ceremony's sake, is absolutely key. Especially if you hold the key to the kingdom of heaven.

E-mail Aemilia Scott at aemilia at gmail dot com.

— graphic by Benjamin Chandler (blchandler at sbcglobal dot net)