Dead Pope Society
When Pope Benedict XVI retired, I was fourteen and I was shocked. All my life had been spent in Catholic Schools, where we prayed for the Pope every Friday at Mass. I can still recite the intention: “For Paul, our Bishop, and Benedict, our Pope, that they may receive your wisdom and lead the Church.” Popes were like kings; they ruled until they died. When John Paul II died, we watched his funeral on the television and everyone told me, “He’ll be a saint.”
But Benedict retired. He knew his health was declining, and he told the Cardinals, gathered in a room, that he would be retiring. He told them this in Latin, and most of them didn’t understand. What was he saying, in this dead language few spoke? To me, this juxtaposition of an admission that the Church is subject to the world, to age and infirmity, with a firmly reactionary mode of communication, stands in for the tightrope act the Church has been walking for at least fifty years.
When Benedict died yesterday, I was shocked again, not at his death, but at the cosmic coincidence of it. Not two nights earlier, I sat around the table with my parents and sisters and we discussed Benedict. “An excellent theologian, but a bad administrator,” my father said. “Isn’t he really sick?” Meadow asked. “Retiring was a great precedent to set,” my mother told us. I hadn’t talked about any pope in months, and two days after this conversation, the subject of our discussion was dead.
My sister referred to the pope as “a magical king.” One man, chosen from a sea of other men, ordained by the holy spirit to lead the Church. It is meant to be a divine moment, the choosing of a Pope, and I saw it that way for almost all of my life. I was certain that the Pope was blessed, distinct, special. When Francis was chosen, we watched a video of the smoke coming up from the Vatican and we saw him emerge, hand raised in greeting. I thought, this is the man I will follow. This is Christ’s representative on earth.
This is at the heart of Catholicism: a belief that certain men are holy in a way that the rest of us are not. Most Catholics I know would deny this, but the simple fact is that without a priest, you cannot celebrate the Eucharist. Everything about the Mass elevates the clergy, and everything about the clergy is exclusionary. If you are not a cis man, if you are mentally ill, if you have ‘deep-seated homosexuality,’ you cannot be a priest. And priests are not just spiritual actors; they are administrators and politicians. They decide the policy of the Church.
This, more than anything else, is what drove me from the Catholic Church. In August of 2018, the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report on clergy sexual abuse was released, and I read it. I sat on my narrow twin bed and I felt sick, but I made myself read the whole thing. Bishops protecting abusers, priests conspiring together to abuse children. All these men, with all this power, harming the very people they were instructed to protect.
I didn’t give up yet. That fall, I led a Bible Study and a Social Justice discussion group for the Catholic Campus Ministry. I tried harder than I have ever tried. Fr. James spent months obfuscating, denying that the Report was that serious. He told us, “It’s going to be a weird time for the Church, and we need to circle the wagons.” I wanted to throw up.
When I left, it was because I could no longer be a part of this institution when I saw how its very structure enabled abuse. I do believe this: the Catholic Church, because of its deep clericalism, is organized to protect men who hurt children. It is not the only such institution, but it is unique in its power.
As I explored other faiths, I found myself with a conditioned aversion to clergy. Any service I attended with a priest or pastor turned me off. I wanted to understand the theology of my distaste for spiritual leadership, and I found an explanation in Quakerism, which has no clergy. There is no need, they say, for anyone to mediate between you and God. No person has more of a connection to divinity than any other person; we can all connect to God on our own terms. I do not need a preacher to explain faith to me; if I have any, it comes from me.
This has proven a barrier to my own search for a spiritual home. There is some kind of spiritual leader in almost every congregation. Even when they are queer and profess a liberated theology, I still balk. I suspect that, in my heart, I am an anarchist, and nowhere does this come through so much as in my approach to religion.
What do I want? I want friends gathered around a table, discussing what lies in our hearts, sharing a meal, reading sacred texts as we define them. I want care and compassion, a direct connection to the work my spirituality demands of me. I want collective decision making and collective joy and collective grief. I want a spiritual practice that does not rely on magical kings or selectively ordained men. I want a spiritual practice that acknowledges the intrinsic equality of all people. Such communities are not immune to deep harm, but at the very least, mechanisms for promoting and protecting perpetrators are not built into their structure.
Pope Benedict XVI is dead. There is still a magical king at the head of the Catholic Church, and he is not the open-minded reformer both conservatives and liberals in the Church make him out to be. I often think about returning to the Catholic Church, but as long as it is based on a hierarchy, I know I can’t. When Francis dies or retires, they will choose a new Pope. And at my local Church, there is still one man allowed to consecrate the Eucharist while the congregation watches.
Six months into this newsletter, I’m no closer to knowing what I want my spirituality to look like. But it is nice, in a way, to be reminded emphatically of what I don’t want it to look like.
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