Memoir Politics

The Final Conclave

For some strange reason, one of my obsessions is with the higher hierarchy of the Catholic Church. My mother and father were Catholics. My mother’s family were devout Slovak Catholics who intentionally lived across the street from their parish church on land that my grandfather donated to the church of that purpose. But my mother was a modern (for her time) first generation American who was far more pragmatic about life than any church doctrine could possibly accommodate. By the time we moved back to the tropics when I was five, she had already been excommunicated by dint of her divorce from my father. When we moved to a small tropical valley to the southeast of San Jose in Costa Rica’s wild jungle we had a simple choice. If we wanted to stick with Catholicism, we had a local village church where pigs and chickens roamed in and out quite freely and the sermons not in Latin were in Spanish. All three of us kids had been baptized into the Roman Catholic religion, but my mother was not so willing to toss out her proclivity for modernity in favor of staunch adherence to Catholicism, especially not if that price were being borne by her kids. So, we, along with all the other American in that small community attended Presbyterian services offered by a missionary family spending a few years in the tropics from their home in Iowa.

When we returned to America in a few years, it just so happened that the nearest congregation to our little crackerbox of a house which my mother rented while she attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, was a Presbyterian church. Therefore, I spent my formative youth in Sunday School and going to after-service pot-luck picnics on the side lawn of the church. My biblical training was entirely Protestant to be sure. That was reinforced during my one year at prep school in Maine, where we had to attend Sunday Protestant service and also go to Vespers on Sunday night where we would raise our voices in songs like Jerusalem the Golden. So, when we moved to Rome a few years later still, I found myself on the doorstep of my new high school, Notre Dame International School for Boys, at the mercy of the Brothers of the Holy Cross. During my interview, I was asked if I was Catholic and I said I had been baptized as such, but raised as a Presbyterian. With an ever so slight shake of his head, the admitting Brother asked if I preferred to take Religion with the other catholic boys or Ethics with the non-Catholic students. I opted for Ethics. They brought in a local seminary student from the American Seminary of Rome, situated on Vatican grounds, to teach us Ethics. I actually found the course quite interesting and I particularly liked the teacher, who was nowhere near as stodgy and regimented as the Brothers of the Holy Cross that taught us our other courses were.

That seminary student befriended a few of us (he was only a few years older) and invited us to come up to his seminary at the Vatican to see what was what. He was simply being cordial and was certainly not trying to proselytize us or convert us to Catholicism. I found the hallowed halls of a seminary on Vatican sacred ground a very interesting place to visit. It amazed me the peaceful and opulent yet sparse lifestyle that the Church afforded these young priests in the making. I came away thinking it was a very special and secretive club that they had and the resources to perpetuate that club for eternity (literally and figuratively). When my seminary teacher invited me to attend his installation into the priesthood, i readily accepted and had a front row seat in St. Peter’s Basilica for the closed-door early morning service where the Pope (Paul VI) came down from the golden high alter in the middle of the Basilica and sprinkled Holy Water on the 100 or so seminarians that were being initiated into their priestly bonds on the ancient marble floor of St. Peter. It was a moving and grand ceremony that I will always remember.

It is to that rich history with the Roman Catholic Church that I attribute my deep interest in the conventions of the Vatican. I have revisited the Vatican a dozen times since leaving Rome and it never disappoints. It is called the heart of the Eternal City for good reason. When the DaVinci Code was first published, I was fascinated by the story, less for the mystery and more for the stories of Opus Dei and the other aspects of the Church. And then, a few years ago when the movie The Two Popes came out about the turnover from Benedict to Frances, I was again fascinated by the story. Today we are going to see the new Ralph Fiennes movie, Conclave. It is an attempt to take the audience inside the Sistine Chapel after the death of a liberal pope as the 108 voting Cardinals gather to select a new pope. Today there are 234 Cardinals in the church, but only 121 of them are eligible to vote and are therefore included in the conclave. Apparently the other 113 cardinals who do not vote are those who are over 80 years old. That tells you a lot about the management of the Roman Catholic Church. I have found statistics that say that the average age of the entire Cardinal population is 78, but the average age of the voting Cardinals is 72. That means that the average age of the non-voting Cardinals is about 85. It is interesting to note that the Roman Catholic Church has adopted the equivalent of age or term limits despite the lifelong appointment Cardinals enjoy. That “retirement age” of 80 is not something we have in place yet for our American political leadership. With a exiting president at age 82 and one of the candidates running for a four year term at age 78, it seems we are less focused on age limitations than the Church. That’s not to mention that the control of the Senate is in the hands of an 82 year old and our last Speaker of the House was 83 when she left office. It’s a sad day when we run our country with fewer guardrails than the Vatican.

Conclave is a reminder to us that the politics of any large organization (is there any larger than the Catholic Church?) is challenging. To put it in perspective, Walmart is considered the largest global employer with 2.3 million employees. The U.S. government, including military, civilian and postal workers employs 4.1 million. But the Roman Catholic Church employs clerical and lay people over 5 million in number globally. Think about that for a moment. With 1.36 billion members, its constituency is only surpassed by the citizenry of China and India, but its membership is spread out all over the world. I think that qualifies as saying that the pope is probably the most powerful person in the world. Conclave shows us how the leadership of that institution and the installation of its leader takes place. Imagine what would happen if the Church chose its leader by election as we do here in the U.S.. The movie makes us think that the same red and blue divide exists within the confines of the College of Cardinals, so maybe its not so different than our elections after all.