The Pope's Medieval Economics - Still and Again

With a brief respite for Thanksgiving, social media and the blogosphere have been astir with conversations about Pope Francis' new apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium ("Joy of the Gospels"), which, despite being a lengthy disputation on the Trinity and other aspects of Catholic theological dogma, has had its few passages on economics singled out for praise and criticism.

I have earlier written about how the top ranks of the Catholic hierarchy are stuck in the Middle Ages when it comes to economic thinking, including Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.

The core problem in the current Pope's thinking is found in this passage from Evangelii Gaudium (slightly truncated):

"In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts..."

This has been "confirmed by the facts" so many times I am confounded by the Pope's ignorance of free-market economics, whose theoretical principles were first propounded by the Spanish Scholastics of the early Renaissance.

This Pope, like his predecessors, adheres to a medieval mode of thinking about economics in which wealth distribution is a zero-sum game: Some people are rich because other people are poor. It completely ignores how wealth can be created (making a bigger pie, not just cutting up smaller and smaller pieces to share) through human ingenuity facilitated by the rule of law, respect for property rights, and freedom of thought and information.

The rise of capitalism -- or, as I prefer to call it, free enterprise -- has historically been the most effective driver of wealth creation and lifting people out of poverty. In the past 30 years alone, a billion people who were once living in dire poverty are now middle-class and even rich (by any standard) just in China and India, where liberalized economic policies have freed them from lives that were, by all accounts, nasty, brutish, and short (if not solitary, given those countries' large populations).

As Matt Welch, writing in Reason, put it in a slightly different way:

More people have escaped poverty the past 25 years than were alive on the planet in 1800. Their "means of escape" was largely the introduction of at least some "laws of competition" in endeavors that had long been the exclusive domain of authoritarian, monopolistic governments.

To be fair, the Pope comes from Argentina, where cronyism and mercantilism have long been presented (falsely) as free enterprise. In that context, it would be easy to assume that capitalism creates poverty rather than eliminates it. The affluence and abundance of the modern world were never envisioned by the Bible, which incorrectly prophesies that "the poor will be with us always."

As we have seen in the unprecedented progress of the past 200 years, there is no inevitability to poverty.

Hagee Goes to Canossa

Pastor John Hagee, whose endorsement of presidential candidate John McCain brought new attention to Hagee's virulently anti-Catholic rantings, has apologized for his maledicta in a letter to the head of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, William Donohue. According to the Los Angeles Times:

The Catholic League called on McCain to repudiate Hagee at that time, stating that he had "waged an unrelenting war" against the church and noting the pastor had referred to the Catholic Church as a "false cult system," among other terms. Hagee also said Hurricane Katrina was "the judgment of God" on the city's "sin."

In the article, correspondent Maeve Reston also notes:

In his letter to the Catholic League today, Hagee said he now understands that other terms he used to describe the church - "the great whore" and the "apostate church" - are "rhetorical devices long employed in anti-Catholic literature." He said he had gained a better understanding in recent weeks of the Catholic Church's relationship to the Jewish faith. Hagee wrote of his "profound respect for the Catholic people" in the letter and said he hoped to advance "greater unity among Catholics and Evangelicals."

The Catholic League said in a statement that it accepted the apology.

I find it interesting that Hagee's "apology" came in a letter to an essentially secular public-relations organization, the Catholic League, which exists outside the structures of the Roman Catholic Church, rather than in a letter to an authentic church leader, such as Archbishop José H. Gomez of San Antonio (where Hagee lives and works) or Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. (Was it cc:'d to that whore of Babylon in the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI?)

Although Donohue accepts the sincerity of Hagee's apology, I doubt it. The apology was clearly motivated by political need -- Hagee's bigotry was beginning to be a drag on McCain's campaign, since he could be, accurately or not, compared with Barack Obama's ex-pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright -- and McCain's constant distancing of himself from Hagee became embarrassing to both.

Like Henry IV's penitent walk to Canossa, Hagee's letter was necessary for political reasons. I wouldn't be surprised to find out, when the history of this year's presidential campaign is written and compiled, that someone in McCain's organization drafted the letter for Hagee and held the pen while he signed it.

When the election is over, Hagee will be free to return to his old ways. Even a hair shirt has to be laundered and replaced every once in a while.

Catholic Carnival Points Here

The 169th edition of the Catholic Carnival, hosted by We Belong to the Lord ("Domini Sumus") celebrates Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Washington and New York (with many photographs) and points to my retrospective piece on the 1979 Papal Mass on the Mall during Pope John Paul II's first pontifical trip to the United States, which included a digitized reproduction of the Mass program.

This was the third time that this blog has been recognized by the Catholic Carnival. Earlier, Catholic Carnival 122, hosted at Living Catholicism, pointed toward "Jesus, the Pope, and a Rabbi."

And before that, a now-defunct blog called Profound Gratitude (you'll get a 404 if you click on that link), hosting Catholic Carnival 114, noted my post on Pope Benedict XVI's economic thoughts.

The Pope Comes to Washington

Pope Benedict XVI arrives today in Washington, marking his first trip to the United States since he was elected as the 264th successor to St. Peter almost exactly three years ago. I have twice written about Pope Benedict -- most recently just over a year ago, in reference to his old-fashioned view of economics, and previously just after his election, when I looked into his choice of a papal name.

Today's arrival also marks the first time in nearly 30 years since a reigning Catholic pope has visited the U.S. capital. Pope John Paul II (often designated "the Great") came to D.C. rather early in his papacy, in October 1979. He met at the White House with President Jimmy Carter (the first pope to do so) and presided over an open-air mass on the National Mall. Fourteen years earlier, Pope Paul VI offered Mass at Yankee Stadium, an event memorialized in the play The House of Blue Leaves, by Georgetown alumnus John Guare.

I was fortunate enough to be one of the singers in the massed choir that sang at that October 1979 Mass. The musical selections that Sunday included familiar hymns like "All Creatures of Our God and King," with original lyrics by St. Francis of Assisi and Mozart's "Ave Verum Corpus," but also the premiere public performance of contemporary composer Tom Parker's "Praise the Lord, My Soul." (We were singing that one off photocopies of the manuscript.)

The "Gloria" and "Agnus Dei" were sung in Latin and drawn from Anton Bruckner's Mass in E Minor, which was written in the mid-19th century with a woodwind accompaniment designed specifically for performance outdoors, where stringed instruments tend not to carry well and pipe organs are unavailable.

The song for the preparation of the gifts was Randall Thompson's haunting "Alleluia." Harvard Magazine, in a 2001 biographical sketch of the composer (who taught at the University of Virginia but was also a Harvard alumnus), noted the origins of that piece:

To many music lovers, the name Randall Thompson '20 brings first to mind the lofty sounds of his most famous anthem, based on the single word "alleluia"--whether heard in church service, choral concert, or academic ceremony such as Harvard Commencement.

The work was commissioned by Serge Koussevitsky and the trustees of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the spring of 1940 for the opening exercises of the new Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood. The head of the center's choral department was Thompson's future Harvard colleague G. Wallace Woodworth '24. Koussevitsky wanted "Woody" to lead the entire student body in the new anthem to symbolize the center's mission: the performance of music.

The date for the opening was July 8. Thompson had been preoccupied with another commission, but from July 1 to July 5 he was able to turn to Koussevitsky's request. Woody had his large chorus ready to rehearse, but opening day approached and no music arrived. On July 8, with 45 minutes to go, it appeared. Woody got his first look at the score and reassured his charges, "Well, text at least is one thing we won't have to worry about." The performance successfully launched a tradition: to this day Alleluia is performed each summer at the center's opening.

The anthem's tempo mark of lento was very important to the composer. France had just fallen to the Nazis, and Thompson later explained, "The music in my particular Alleluia cannot be made to sound joyous...here it is comparable to the Book of Job, where it is written, 'The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.'"

Other songs included "Gift of Finest Wheat," which had been composed for the Eucharistic Congress held in Philadelphia during the U.S. Bicentennial of 1976, and the traditional German hymn, "Holy God, We Praise Thy Name." Other parts of the Mass included Clarence Joseph Rivers memorial acclamation ("Christ Has Died"), representing the African-American gospel tradition, and Alexander Peloquin's "Great Amen" from his oft-heard Mass of the Bells.

I have not yet seen the programs for Pope Benedict's masses at Nationals Park in Washington and Yankee Stadium in New York, but I suspect they will include hymns, anthems, and responses from a wider range of ethnic traditions, especially recognizing the greater number of Hispanic-American Catholics who make up the fastest-growing segment of the Church in the United States. (If one looks at the program of the October 1979 papal Mass on the Mall -- see images below -- the most striking thing about it is the absence of music from the Spanish-speaking Catholic communities, or any acknowledgment of their presence at all.)

Robert Thomson, who writes the "Dr. Gridlock" column for the Washington Post, noted some other changes in the scene in an article on Sunday, in this case in the area of transportation:

Back then, transportation planners were worried about whether there would be enough gas for the spectators and worshipers driving to see Pope John Paul II.

That was October 1979. The region was smaller, and so was its transit system.

The gas shortage had passed its crisis level, but, in that auto-dependent environment, the planners made sure 35 service stations on major routes received extra fuel.

Metrorail had opened in 1976 but was a scrawny version of today's robust 106-mile, 86-station system. For a Sunday afternoon papal Mass on the Mall, Metro stayed open from 6 a.m. until midnight and suspended the Farecard system, asking instead that riders throw 50 cents into barrels.

Passengers heading for Pope Benedict XVI's Mass at the new Nationals Park on Thursday will be riding to a station that didn't exist in 1979. Many will pay their fare with a $9 commemorative Metrorail Mass Pass.

So is our bigger, more sophisticated transportation system ready for the new pope? I think so, but it will require the public as well as the planners to pay attention.

The 1979 visit was on a holiday weekend. This time, the pope will be in the capital on four weekdays.

That weekend -- Columbus Day weekend, as it happened -- was exciting. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the Mall to see the Pope (perhaps fewer than were anticipated, as the weather turned overcast and chilly in the afternoon, despite a gloriously sunny morning); a week later, the Mall would host tens of thousands of gay-rights activists in the first-ever national march for gay and lesbian rights. No doubt the papal gathering gave the Park Police and other law-enforcement agencies practice for crowd control seven days later -- not that either crowd caused much trouble. (Ironically, given my later history, I attended the October 7 event but not the one on October 14 -- but what happened the weekend of the march is a story for another day.)

I had a primitive camera with me that day. Because of the location of the choir, the angle of the shots I took is rather odd, but I was able to snap one photo that actually includes Pope John Paul in it. Most of the others are pictures of large groups of priests and musicians.

Here you can see part of the crowd gathered along the street for a glimpse of the Pope, pre-Popemobile.

You can see how the wind had picked up in the mid-afternoon in this sole photo I took of the Pope himself; he is wearing green vestments (the Mass was in Ordinary Time) and has an elliptical line drawn around him. (Click to embiggen.)

Hundreds of priests concelebrated the Mass, and many dozens of seminarians (or more) participated as acolytes.

Here you can see some of the priests who were on the stage, which had a specially-constructed altar built just for this occasion.

It was easier for me to photograph the orchestra than other members of the choir, given the way we were perched off to the right of the stage.

Thousands of programs for the Mass on the Mall were produced. How many of them survived? At least one, the one I have kept for nearly three decades, and which I scanned a couple of hours ago in order to make this documentary artifact available for examination by my dear readers. Call me a pack rat, but here it is:

















Sadly, in this post-9/11 era, the chances of there ever being another papal Mass on the Mall are increasingly slim. The logistics of searching and x-raying every person in attendance are just too daunting.

Jesus, the Pope, and a Rabbi

Jesus, the Pope, and a rabbi walk into a bar.

The bartender looks up and says, "What is this, a joke?"

A scholarly variation on that gag can be discerned from an article in Friday's edition of The Forward, a Jewish newspaper based in New York.

In the article, Rabbi Jacob Neusner, a professor of the history and theology of Judaism at Bard College, explains how a 14-year-old book of his ended up playing a central role in a new book by Pope Benedict XVI called Jesus of Nazareth.

Rabbi Neusner writes:

In my 1993 book “A Rabbi Talks With Jesus,” I imagined being present at the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus taught Torah like Moses on Sinai. I explained why, for good and substantial reasons based in the Torah, I would not have followed Jesus but would have remained true to God’s teaching to Moses. Much to my surprise, Pope Benedict XVI, in his new book “Jesus of Nazareth,” devotes much of his chapter on the Sermon on the Mount to discussing my book.

“More than other interpretations known to me, this respectful and frank dispute between a believing Jew and Jesus, the son of Abraham, has opened my eyes to the greatness of Jesus’ words and to the choice that the gospel places before us,” the pope writes.

He ties this exchange of ideas to a lamentably lost tradition of disputation between religions, a tradition that was lively in the Middle Ages but began to decline during the Renaissance and nearly disappeared during and after the Enlightenment, when theories of religious tolerance gained ground (a good thing in comparison to the persecutions and pogroms that preceded it).

Says Rabbi Neusner:

In ancient and medieval times, disputations concerning propositions of religious truth defined the purpose of dialogue between religions, particularly Judaism and Christianity. Judaism made its case vigorously, amassing rigorous arguments built upon the facts of Scripture common to both parties to the debate. Imaginary narratives, such as Judah Halevi’s “Kuzari,” constructed a dialogue among Judaism, Christianity and Islam, a dialogue conducted by a king who sought the true religion for his kingdom. Judaism won the disputation before the king of the Khazars, at least in Judah Halevi’s formulation. But Christianity no less aggressively sought debate partners, confident of the outcome of the confrontation. Such debates attested to the common faith of both parties in the integrity of reason and in the facticity of shared Scriptures.

Disputation went out of style when religions lost their confidence in the power of reason to establish theological truth. Then, as in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s “Nathan the Wise,” religions were made to affirm a truth in common, and the differences between religions were dismissed as trivial and unimportant.

Disputations between religions lost their urgency. The heritage of the Enlightenment, with its indifference to the truth-claims of religion, fostered religious toleration and reciprocal respect in place of religious confrontation and claims to know God. Religions emerged as obstacles to the good order of society. Judeo-Christian dialogue came to serve as the medium of a politics of social conciliation, not religious inquiry into the convictions of the other. Negotiation took the place of debate, and to lay claim upon truth on behalf of one’s own religion violated the rules of good conduct.

Of course, religious toleration is a good thing. In the Middle Ages, after all, disputations often were not conducted in an atmosphere of civility. Jews frequently faced persecution, rather than respectful theological debate.

Rabbi Neusner views his interlocution with the Pope with optimism:

What we have done is to revive the disputation as a medium of dialogue on theological truth. In this era of relativism and creeping secularism, it is an enterprise that, I believe, has the potential to strengthen Judaism and Christianity alike.

Given this, wouldn't it be a marvel to be a fly on the wall when Jesus, the Pope, and a rabbi walk into a bar?

The Pope's Medieval Economics

Pope Benedict XVI, in a new book scheduled to be published next month, condemns the West for exploiting the Third World. News reports about the book -- called Jesus of Nazareth and excerpted earlier this week in the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera (which happens to be owned by Rizzoli, the publishers of the book) -- do not indicate whether the pontiff similarly condemns the rulers of Third World countries for their kleptocratic practices that serve to keep their subjects in poverty while the government elites party like the wealthy title character in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus.

Somehow I doubt he does, since -- whatever the Pope's merits as a theologian and rhetorician, which are considerable -- he lacks an understanding of basic economics. In fact, given what I have seen (again, based just on news reports), his views on economics are positively medieval, offering a sense that economics is a zero-sum game. That is to say, he seems to think that some people are rich because other people are poor. (All I can conclude from this is that Benedict somehow missed studying anything on economics written since before the Spanish Scholastics were around.)

Here is one quotation from the book that Reuters chose to illustrate Benedict's thought:

"If we apply it [the parable of the Good Samaritan] to the dimensions of globalised society today, we see how the populations of Africa have been plundered and sacked and this concerns us intimately," the Pope says in his book, which comes out on April 16, his 80th birthday.

He drew a link between the lifestyle of people in the developed world and the dire conditions of people in Africa.

Oddly enough, Reuters correspondent Philip Pullella refers to Jesus of Nazareth as Pope Benedict's "first book," when the Pope is, in fact, a prolific author. (A quick Amazon.com search results in 93 entries in which the Pope -- under his previous name, Joseph Ratzinger -- is listed as author. Even discounting those books in which he contributed only a chapter or a preface, Ratzinger's books as sole or primary author number in the dozens.)

Enough digression. What is particularly surprising and disappointing about the excerpt that appeared in the Italian press is that the German-born Pope appears to refer approvingly to the sociological analysis of Karl Marx, the father of modern Communism. According to EarthTimes,

Pope Benedict XVI draws from Karl Marx's theory of alienation in his forthcoming book on Jesus Christ to illustrate his point that the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan is still relevant today. The reference to the 19th-Century German philosopher and founder of modern communism is found in chapter seven of Jesus of Nazareth, extracts of which were published Wednesday by Italian daily Corriere della Sera.

"Karl Marx describes man's alienation in a drastic way; although by limiting his reasoning to the material sphere he fails to reach the true depths of alienation, he nevertheless provides a clear image of the man who falls victim to the robbers," Joseph Ratzinger writes....

"Is it not true that man ... during the full course of his history, finds himself alienated, mangled, abused?" the pope writes.

At least the Pope tries to distance himself a bit from Marx; still, it is jarring to see the progenitor of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot quoted in a papal document in anything other than terms of anathema.

The Catholic Church's skewed views on liberal economics are not new. While I was digging through some old files earlier this week, I came across an article of mine that was published precisely 20 years ago today.

At the time I was living in London, going to graduate school by day and attending as many plays and musicals as I could (using my substantial student discount for tickets) at night. Because the British university system is not quite so rigid in terms of requirements as is its American equivalent, this left me much time for pleasure reading. In ten months, I read dozens of books, many of which had little or anything to do with my studies.

One of those books, which turned out to have a profound effect on my political philosophy, was Jane Jacobs' Cities and the Wealth of Nations. (I often say that the two writers who were most responsible for making me realize I was a libertarian were Jacobs and Charles Murray.) A Vatican statement on global economics provided the news hook I needed to write a brief review of Jacobs' book. It was published in the New York City Tribune, a now-defunct sister publication to the Washington Times, on April 7, 1987 (coincidentally my 28th birthday).

I wrote a lot for the New York City Tribune that year I was abroad, averaging about one article or book review per week for several months, all without benefit of email or even a computer; the checks I received were the pocket money I needed to continue enjoying London as an impoverished student. (Food or theatre? Food or theatre? The answer was always clear.)

Here is that article, which I was surprised to find is still fresh and applicable today; I can identify a few phrases I might reword, but nothing I wince at after two decades:

The Hidden Causes of Third World Poverty
Richard Sincere

LONDON – The Vatican has issued, through the Pontifical Commission on Justice and Peace, an 8,000-word statement on the international debt crisis. “Political officials and economists, social and religious leaders, as well as public opinion throughout the world,” it begins, “recognize the fact that the debt levels of the developing countries constitute a serious, urgent, and complex problem due to their social, economic, and political repercussions.” That is VaticanSpeak for: Third World debt levels are precipitating a crisis of unprecedented proportions.

Average citizens in the industrialized countries of Western Europe and North America might be inclined to shrug off Third World debt as a problem, but no concern of theirs. Leaders in developing countries, they might say, made bad political and economic decisions and are now paying the consequences; it doesn’t affect us.

In fact, though, it does. As the Third World debt whirlpool swallows up capital from all over the developed world, the effects are felt in shrinking national budgets, declining industries, rising interest rates, and increasing trade deficits. For the ordinary person, it means more difficulty in purchasing a home or a car – particularly if he or she is a first-time buyer.

A unique perspective on Third World debt – indeed, on a whole range of issues regarding the world political economy – may be found in a 1984 book, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, by Jane Jacobs. The book was widely reviewed and critically acclaimed when it was first published by Random House in the United States and Canada and by Penguin in the United Kingdom.

Jacobs is respected worldwide for her research and writing on cities. Her 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is required reading for most students of urban planning. The secondhand department at the Economists’ Bookshop in London informs me that they get more requests for Jacobs’ The Economy of Cities (1969) than for any other out-of-print book. These observations reinforce her credibility and scholarship almost as much as the fact that she is a careful and thoughtful writer – averaging one book every seven to 10 years – as well as vibrant, witty, and commonsensical.

Cities and the Wealth of Nations begins by questioning the very structure of the world economy – its division into “nations” as distinct economic entities. They are political and military entities, but this does not mean they are also “the basic, salient entities of economic life or … the reasons for the rise and decline of wealth.” Jacobs argues that the failure of national governments and “blocs of nations” to control economic life effectively “suggests some sort of essential irrelevance.”

Political sovereignty is the only thing various nation-states really have in common, and Jacobs thinks it “affronts common sense, if nothing else, to think of units as disparate as, say, Singapore and the United States, or Ecuador and the Soviet Union, or the Netherlands and Canada, as economic common denominators.”

The basic unit of economic development, Jacobs asserts, is the city, and regions surrounding individual cities, and enlarging that unit inevitably leads to bad economic feedback and bad decision making. This problem cannot be overcome without a radical restructuring of the world economy – but the new structure must reflect free markets, attention to private enterprise, promotion of new industries, and (most important) trade among equals. That means underdeveloped Third World states should concentrate their commerce on other underdeveloped Third World states, learning “import replacement” and avoiding direct competition with the industrialized world unless and until their levels of development are more nearly equal.

Jacobs identifies what she calls “transactions of decline,” which include heavy lending to impoverished or underdeveloped areas. Such lending takes useful capital away from productive cities and sinks it into unproductive rural areas and uncreative towns and cities where it can do no good – and, indeed, often does harm. Transactions of decline like this may initially stimulate commerce and industry, but within a short while both economies – the lender’s and the borrower’s – begin to stagnate and then to decline. The downward spiral continues because policymakers, oblivious to the root causes of the decline, take more money from the pockets of productive workers and entrepreneurs and attempt to induce “development” in depressed areas at home or abroad. In the end the whole process is futile and frustrating. “Subsidies milked from cities,” notes Jacobs, are “profoundly antidevelopment transactions.”

To achieve genuine and lasting development, cities, regions, and whole countries must generate their own capital. Development must come about the old-fashioned way – you earn it.

There is no specific solution available from Jacobs’ analysis. But her arguments are worth pondering. The radical change suggested by Cities and the Wealth of Nations is precisely the opposite of the one demanded by Third World states called the New International Economic Order. Instead of authoritarianism, this change invokes free enterprise; instead of central planning, it calls for pluralism; instead of stagnation, it offers creativity and growth. If we are to solve the international debt crisis – an apparently insoluble problem – this is a good place to start

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based policy analyst who writes frequently on African affairs.

Unfortunately, I don't think anyone at the Vatican was reading the New York City Tribune in the late 1980s; at least not anyone in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was.

The Pope, the Washington Times, and Me

I was pleased to learn that the Washington Times picked up my piece on Pope Benedict XVI and the previous popes named Benedict. The article appeared in the "Forum" section of the Sunday (May 1) Commentary pages. Oddly, the article can be found only in the print edition of the Washington Times; the newspaper's web site has another article in its place. (The other two "Forum" articles that appeared in Sunday's paper -- one on Social Security and the other on outsourcing -- can be found there.)

I would not be averse to loyal readers of this blog responding to the piece in the Times with a letter to the editor, perhaps encouraging him to publish more of my articles.

Update, May 4: After I sent an email expressing curiosity to the Commentary staff, the anomaly was corrected and my article now appears on the Washington Times website.

Pope Benedict XVI and His Namesake Predecessors

While there is no substitute for looking at the actual record of a new pope – his work as a pastor, his writings as a theologian or philosopher, his sermons, his interviews with the news media – it is also useful to divine some insight from his choice of a pontifical name.

When Albino Cardinal Luciano of Venice was elected pope in 1978, he took as his name John Paul I – the first compound name in papal history – as homage to his two immediate predecessors. After he died just 34 days later, his successor, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, the first non-Italian pope in 450 years, took the name John Paul II to signify continuity.

With the death of the pope many are calling John Paul the Great, it was probably too much to expect that his successor, whomever it might be, would take the same name. Some might view such a choice as hubris, since John Paul II, over 26 years of his pontificate, had raised expectations of what a pope should be and do.

Now comes the election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who has taken the name Pope Benedict XVI. What meaning can we glean from this choice of name? Who is the new pope trying to emulate? What might the name Benedict say about the church’s immediate future?

The first significant Benedict of church history (a monk who lived circa 480-547) was not a pope or even a priest, but the Rule of St. Benedict laid the foundations for what we have come to know as religious orders – the Benedictines, of course, but also the Dominicans and Jesuits and Franciscans and all the rest. Summarized by the Latin motto, “Orare est laborare, laborare est orare” (“To pray is to work, to work is to pray”), St. Benedict’s rule prescribed “common sense, a life of moderate asceticism, prayer, study, and work, and community life under one superior,” according to John Delaney in his Dictionary of Saints. The rule, Delaney continues, also “stressed obedience, stability, zeal, and had the Divine Office as the center of monastic life; it was to affect spiritual and monastic life in the West for centuries to come.”

So there we see one model for the new pope. How about some Benedicts who are anything but role models?

Benedict VIII (reigned 1012-24) has been described as a “ruthless soldier” while the “depraved” Pope Benedict IX (1033-45), according to William J. La Due in The Chair of St. Peter, “obtained the papal office through overt acts of bribery and treachery.” As Hans Küng notes in On Being a Christian, Benedict VIII also inserted the “filioque” clause into the Nicene Creed, which says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. This belief conflicts with Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which holds that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son. To our contemporary ears, this may seem like a minor semantic point, but the theological dispute ended in a schism between East and West that has continued for more than 1,000 years.

There were two popes known as Benedict XIII. One ruled from Avignon in France and was deposed in 1417. Historian Thomas Bokenkotter calls him “a formidable prelate of incredible tenacity and guile,” who by breaking an oath to resign after his election delayed the healing of the rupture between Avignon and Rome – a virtual schism in the Western Church – for nearly two decades.

The other Benedict XIII reigned for six years, 1724-30, and delegated the administration of the church to a corrupt underling who sold ecclesiastical offices (a practice known as “simony”) and engaged in endeavors both avaricious and bungling. This Pope Benedict focused on his pastoral responsibilities as Bishop of Rome – visiting parishes, celebrating Mass, teaching the catechism – but despite this was widely despised by his episcopal flock.

Pope Benedict XIV (1740-58) was, according to La Due, “without a doubt the most capable and successful pontiff in the eighteenth century. He was open to the scientific advances occurring at that time, enjoyed a correspondence with Voltaire, did not play favorites, and avoided any tendency to nepotism.” (It says something about the quality of 18th century popes that Benedict must be praised for lacking negative characteristics.)

Benedict XIV permitted the first translation of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate into vernacular languages. He promulgated reforms in regard to the liturgy, marriage, and the censorship of books. La Due writes that “even during his last years as pontiff, Benedict continued to radiate energy and vitality.”

Perhaps it was Pope Benedict XV (1914-22) who was closest to mind when the new pope chose his name on April 19. In an interview with Robert Siegel on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Thomas Groome, a professor of religious education at Boston College, said that he thought it “significant that he chose the title of Benedict XVI because Benedict XV was indeed a bridge-building pope. He came into the pontificate in 1914 and inherited a church terribly divided around theological issues between the conservatives and the 'Modernists' as they were called at the time. Benedict XV managed to bring the sides together and to be a real reconciler. Hopefully, in choosing this name, Cardinal Ratzinger now intends to do something likewise.”

In his book A Concise History of the Catholic Church, Thomas Bokenkotter agrees with this portrait of Benedict XV. The cardinals who elected him, Bokenkotter writes, “were looking for a peacemaker, and Benedict did not disappoint their hopes. Peace and conciliation were the objectives he unswervingly pursued from the first moment of his pontificate. Peace – first in the Church, which was bitterly divided by the anti-Modernist zealots who had been allowed to run riot during the previous administration. And one of his first acts was to call a halt to the witchhunt after ‘Modernists.’” (The Modernists, I might add, were well-represented among American church leaders.)

This Benedict also helped bring the church into the modern world with his encyclical, Maximum Illud, which established, as Bokenkotter explains, three “fundamental principles” of the Church’s missionary project: “promotion of a native clergy, renunciation of all nationalistic attitudes, and respect for the civilization of the mission country.” In other words: no cultural imperialism. While it took a long time for the church to absorb this lesson, the irrepressible growth of Catholicism in Africa, Latin America, and Asia over the past several decades proves Benedict XV’s prescience as well as his sensitivity.

What qualities will Pope Benedict XVI inherit from his namesake predecessors? Only time will tell. After all, the shoes of the fisherman are hard for any man to fill.

Biographical note: The beneficiary of 16 years of Catholic education, Rick Sincere has contributed articles to such publications as Homiletic and Pastoral Review and America, as well as to several diocesan newspapers, such as the Arlington Catholic Herald, the Catholic Standard (Washington, D.C.), and Church World (Brunswick, Maine).