As someone once said, history does not repeat itself so much as it rhymes. Well, it is rhyming like a 10-minute Bob Dylan song from 1975 right now. The tension that erupted between Pope Leo XIV and the president of the United States is gone, but not forgotten. Odds are it will reappear. That is OK.
While it was happening, I blissfully resisted engaging, although there were many friends and family who wanted to. It was an act of will that I was not going to allow this kerfuffle to move my needle. I was sent myriad online articles and commentary taking the pope’s “side” and taking the president’s “side.”
One close friend, someone who takes his faith seriously, sent me a Wall Street Journal article written by a rabbi who apparently had a lot to say about the Pope Leo vs. Donald Trump dustup. I would guess the rabbi has a lot of wise things to say about the situation — I say “guess,” because the link has remained unclicked in my inbox since my friend sent it. I do not need to read it because the pope is not my president. He is my pope.
I know this may make me sound a little “old school,” but I come by it honestly, having inherited this gene from my father. You would have had to travel a long way to find a man who had less volatile political opinions than my dad. But if he were alive today and had just witnessed public figures openly lecturing the pope, we all would have heard his opinion around the Sunday dinner table.
He would not have taken some kind of “my pope, right or wrong” approach to the issue. My dad’s faith was uncomplicated, but it was not simple. He understood, though, what apparently a lot of Catholic and certainly non-Catholic politicians do not. The Petrine Office is unique in human history and though there is a temporal aspect to the office, all popes in one way or another must be out of touch with the “times.”
My dad’s “first” pope was Pius X. Mine was Pius XII. Combined, we have experienced 11 pontificates. That is a lot of popes. A lot of men from various backgrounds with strengths and weaknesses, political acumen, and naiveté.
Together, my pop and I have lived through 4% of the total population of popes. And those popes navigated a world that began with Model T Fords as state-of-the-art automobile excellence to a return to humans orbiting the moon. If you try to calculate the wars, famines, catastrophes, and human hubris that occurred during this same epoch, your calculator will break.
Every pope in this percentage was honored as often as they were vilified, listened to as often as they were discounted. Whenever a pope is declared by secular media as being “not with the times,” my heart glows just a little. Seems to me the primary objective of any pope, from St. Peter to Leo, is to be exactly that — a man in his time but not of it. That is why the pope sometimes says things that make us uncomfortable.
It was easier in my dad’s young life to understand the pope as something different, not just a figurehead or some blend of the political and the spiritual. He lived in a time when being Catholic in America really did mean one was different, even at times suspect. My American Catholic world was a lot smoother. Now that I am older than my dad ever got to be, the Catholic world in the United States is even more blended into the American fabric, to the point of being indistinguishable.
I believe because of Leo’s American pedigree, a lot of American Catholics just assumed he would think, act, and behave like an American. In some ways, I am sure he does.
But a man who has spent so much time out of his home country working among the poor of Peru is not going to be your average American. He may be your average pontiff, though.
As Pope Leo’s pontificate completes its first pass completely around the sun, I will strive to keep the legacy my father bequeathed to me. I will trust the Lord and I will not be correcting or admonishing the pope any time soon. He has made it clear that where I belong is not to any single political party.
My dad learned all this with just eight popes. It has taken me 11 — but it should only have taken one.
