[I would like to apologize for missing a few weeks with my column due to family vacation, starting a new job, and getting terribly sick. I will likely occasionally miss weeks in the future, of course. In the meantime, here is a column that answers a desire of mine to write a bit more on specifically Catholic issues.]
An Ultramontanist Manifesto
Of all my various claims to fame (author of the comic strip Bob, director and star of Star Groove, food prep for Mimi's Sodas), one that I'm actually fairly proud of is that I have played a role in a number of people becoming more Ultramontane.
Ultramontanism is not, as you might suspect, a rare disease of the feet, but a theological and personal and pastoral and ecclesiastical emphasis within Catholicism: namely, an emphasis on the authority of the Pope, the bishop of Rome, as the central, universal, infallible, practical authority of the Catholic Church.
In this column, I will aim to give a brief analysis of what this means and why I think it's important:
Ecclesia Universalis
The term Ultramontanism is derived from the Latin phrase ultra montes, and like many archaic terms, betrays the influence of the various periods of French domination of European cultural and political life. Ultra montes means "across the mountains," and refers to the position of Rome when viewed from across the Alps: that is, from France. An Ultramontanist is, then, most basically someone prone to looking toward, and appealing to, the authority of the Pope "across the mountains" against the King of France. Its opposite has generally been termed "Gallicanism," again with the same French emphasis.
Most basically, then, an Ultramontane Catholic is one whose faith and life involve a constant reference to the universal authority of the Pope above and beyond local and especially national and Imperial powers.
The Pope constitutes the one practical, institutional universal authority of the Catholic Church, and one of the few such authorities in the world. Most alleged global authorities in the present day are either abstract and ideological (the UN, "reason," "human rights") or else passive and infrastructural (the Internet, the American army). The Papacy has from at least the 4th century been a very active, very involved, very tangible authority operating on at least a very large scale and claiming, in principle, total (temporal) universality. It is an authority that, in the present day, spans the globe in the most literal sense.
In this, it is hardly surprising that the most common enemies of the Papacy throughout history have been partializing authorities of every sort, from local barons claiming Church property to regional powers trying to appoint bishops to national governments seeking power to great Empires trying to spread their power across the world. Even at its lowest and most shameful points, the Papacy has always possessed ties and horizons beyond those of such bodies: believers among the despised colonized peoples, bishops in the hated enemy nations, monks among the poor and forgotten.
If you ever go to Rome today, you will find the city full of pilgrims, priests, and nuns from everywhere from Sri Lanka to Scotland to South Africa to Nigeria to the Ivory Coast to Boston and back again. And you will realize something very interesting: that if you are Catholic, no matter who you are, you are only a few steps removed from any other Catholic in the world, and the reason for this is Rome and the Papacy. Bishops go to Rome to consult with the Pope; priests go to Rome to be educated and to meet the Pope; laity go to Rome to make a pilgrimage and see the Pope. Because of this, you are intimately and tangibly connected to people in every land and of every nation and tongue.
To possess such a constant, practical, universal reference point, beyond any particular national or Imperial power structure or set of political discourses, makes, I believe, a great difference in the life of an individual believer and a society alike.
Ecclesia Militans
This immediacy and tangibility of the Pope's universal claim to authority, is closely tied to the most offensive aspect of the Papacy to most people, most of the time: the authority itself. Here, though, Americans, and especially American Protestants, are liable to a rather large misunderstanding.
The American language of authority and power is (in)famously bare and austere--indeed, perhaps the barest and most austere in the history of the human race. In Puritan society, leaders are expected to indulge in excess, display, and glory strictly in private: in public, they are supposed to confine themselves to the dress and mannerisms of those most honored of historical public servants, the public executioners. Thus, in the present day, leaders of corporations more powerful and larger than the Roman Empire, and leaders of nations with millions of soldiers, are expected to dress in sober black outfits outwardly identical to those worn by middle-schoolers at the Sadie Hawkins Dance. This originally religious fear of outward pomp and splendor has its advantages, but its effect these days are mostly, I think, negative: creating a single "ritual" of power based much more directly around intimidation, manipulation, and coercion and then applying it indiscriminately to all levels and degrees and types of power regardless of how harmful that equivalency may be.
Still, because of this, and even more because of the powerful anti-Catholic tradition in American society, most Americans' image of the Papacy is to at least some degree based on the idea of the Pope as a foreign, exotic, practically "Oriental" "Potentate" presiding impassively over his legions of slaves, dressed in jeweled robes and tiaras, and likely from behind a golden curtain. Every few months, yet another documentary or youtube video breathlessly promises Americans to draw the curtain back from the jeweled Arabian courts of the Vatican to reveal the titillating orgiastic excesses of power behind it.
Even most of these, though, are at some point forced, however grudgingly, to acknowledge the basic reality that, in point of fact, the Vatican is a lot more like a somewhat top-heavy, understaffed, poorly run military bureaucracy than the Sassanid Persian court.
It is, in fact, impossible to understand the Papacy, either for good or for ill, without realizing that at its core it has always been a basically militant, basically bureaucratic institution, whose primary raison de etre was not to sit around bathing in rubies but to manage and to intervene and to give urgent responses and commands throughout the world.
This, depending on one's perspective, is either the saving grace or the dark secret of the Papacy: that it is, thoroughly and through and through, a crisis institution. The claims to universal immediate ordinary jurisdiction made by Popes from at least the 5th century on-wards mostly had very little to do with any practical ambition to take over the ordinary quotidian governance of any of the Churches around the world: they were instead based on a highly emphatic desire to have the freedom and authority to be able to give commands anywhere, at any time, where it might be needed to defend against an urgent threat or resolve an urgent crisis.
Even before Constantine, the bishop of Rome spent most of his time managing the institutions of the Church, economic and social and ritual, and responding to appeals and requests from all over the Roman Empire and beyond: and he had a bureaucracy to help him with that task. A perusal of the surviving letters of Late Antique and Byzantine pontiffs, above all Gregory the Great, show an astonishing breadth of attention to issues and groups throughout the world: political diplomacy, ecclesiastical diplomacy, management of farms and grain shipments, grand sweeping theological declarations, answers to technical and practical sacramental questions, even resolutions of minor monastic disputes. This is still, mostly, the business and inner nature of the Papacy, which operates as a global bureaucracy in intimate touch with organizations throughout the globe and possesses a vast number of priceless artistic and cultural treasures (that it cannot sell and which are immensely expensive to preserve) but has an annual operating budget roughly 1% the size of that of the US State of North Carolina.
The Papacy, then, is above all the institution that makes the Church on earth most like an earthly military in being an institution aimed at abnormal circumstances, crises, problems, and activity, and not like an earthly government, aimed at preserving the status quo, stability, prosperity, and earthly peace. It is the Papacy, above all, with its fundamental activity of giving commands, its tendency towards bureaucracy, its impatience with disobedience and delay, its frequent historical impetus towards reform and alteration of previous structures and methods, that makes the Church on earth truly Ecclesia militans, and not Ecclesia regnans.
Most other Church institutions, diocesan institutions, national institutions, have a natural tendency to make the Church more like a government: more aimed at stability, temporal peace, wealth, well-being, accommodation. It is hardly an accident that the strongest opponents of the Papacy at virtually every stage of history have been local or national or Imperial governments: and it is hardly an accident that in every such struggle these governments found plenty of helpers in their local and national and Imperial Churches.
Temporal governments, aimed at temporal peace and plenty, can take any number of forms, and operate with any degree of ponderousness and complexity and resistance and balance. The modern American government has any number of legal mechanisms designed to vastly slow down and place obstacles in front of decisions and their execution. A military, however, whether in Rome or America, must be able to respond swiftly to crises, and must have a clear chain of command.
This, I believe, reveals a central reality of the Church, especially of the Church on earth: that it is not fundamentally an institution aimed at temporal peace and stability, aimed at life in this world. It is an apocalyptic institution, aimed at a transcendent goal, at the meeting of crises and above all of the great crisis of life: the urgent salvation of precious souls and the conquest of this world for God.
Without the Papacy, the transcendent horizons of the Church fail remarkably quickly. The Ultramontane Catholic, then, is someone for whom there remains a constant, practically and essentially and even aggressively transcendent reference point for earthly life and history.
Ecclesia Historiae
The fundamental reality of the world is persons; and likewise the fundamental reality of the Church, and the fundamental reality of God. Persons, however, in this life, exist in history: that is, they exist in conditions, cultural and economic and political, that are deeply imperfect, essentially transitory, and frequently changing.
The Papacy does not, however, merely present a transcendent reference point to the world: it does so in a profoundly and indelibly historical way. The Papacy operates, not in timeless eternity, but in human history.
This is, in the properly theological sense, the most offensive aspect of the Papacy; that it is constantly and publicly and necessarily involved in tangling up the Church with the muck and mud and filth of human life and human history.
Here, though, distinctions are very important. Every ecclesial and religious institution is of necessity also a human and historical institution, embedded in time and place and history and culture. Still, many religious institutions do their best to hide this, or (at best) to extricate themselves and others from it.
I am far from dismissive of such efforts. The most important and perfect ecclesiastical institutions, from the perspective of eternity, are without a doubt the contemplative religious orders. These orders have as their avowed goal the fuga e mundo, the flight from this world in order to enable the Christian life to be lived in as perfect, and as eternal, a fashion as is possible to human beings existing (temporarily) in time and space and history.
Still, in making this effort, these religious orders possess a basic honesty about the difficulty of this effort, and the impossibility of totally achieving their goal. There are many religious institutions that are far more dishonest, and far more based around a pretense of having transcended human culture and human life without ascesis and without withdrawal from the world.
Here it is good to be direct. The Papacy is not an eternal institution; it is not an institution of the New Heavens and the New Earth. The Marian Church, the Church of faith and hope and charity practiced by believers within their own souls, as persons, is the essential and great and eternal reality of the Church. The Petrine Church is merely the shadow of this eternal reality, a temporary means that is essentially constituted by, and aimed at, imperfection.
This, though, is not its shame, but its glory: that the Papacy is essentially made for history, for fallen and imperfect humanity, as it is and was and will be, at every time and place in this age, and not in the next. Its task is not to conserve the life of eternity, but to make it actual in the temporal world. Its task is not to be perfect, but to draw imperfection toward God. Its task is not merely to be transcendent, but to bring transcendence into immediate, tangible, active contact with this world of shadows.
This is why, above all else, I am not really much scandalized by the much-touted scandals of the Papacy. Grieved yes, but not scandalized. They are signs of many things, but among other things signs of the Papacy fulfilling its essential mission of being a part of the human, historical world Christ would save.
Religious and ecclesial institutions without a tangible, central reference point like the Papacy get off very easily, and usually very dishonestly. The Russian Church may enable and bless every sort of atrocity and every sort of human pride: but in the end, they are merely the Church, merely the representatives of eternity, standing safely to one side from the acts of temporal power or praying in their monasteries away from the world. They claim no responsibility, and no guilt, and most people are happy to take them at their word. Evangelicism in America may commit its share of crimes, fund death squads in Latin America, enable sexual abuse, confuse politics and doctrine and culture, the permanent and the contingent, the real and the fake, to the point of utter madness, but in the end, it is only a series of congregational and denominational bodies, each with its own corporate structure and its own asset portfolio. There is little impetus to take responsibility for all this; indeed, in a deeper sense, there is simply no one to take responsibility for it. There is no tangible historical institution, no tangible historical authority, no tangible historical person to do so, only a chaos of individuals with their beliefs and their sins and their crimes.
As I write this, the Pope is in America to acknowledge and apologize for all the sins committed by Christians in the course of the colonization of the Americas, and above all the sins committed by Catholic religious in administering the state-funded residential schools aimed at extirpating Native American identity. This is, in an odd sense, one of the most profound claims to authority made by the Pope: that he can speak for, claim responsibility for, and even apologize for, all the members of the Church, and, in some sense, the whole world. This kind of public claiming and taking of responsibility for the actions of imperfect people in the chaotic depths of human history belongs to the very essence of the Papacy.
Ecclesia Personalis
The above represents, to a degree, the harsher, more obnoxious side of the Papacy. There is, however, a much more basic and much more positive dimension of Papal authority, which I personally never understood until I went to Rome and attended a Papal audience, where I heard crowds of Italian schoolchildren shouting to "Papa Francesco."
In my darker modes, I think that the single greatest obstacle to Americans and other Anglophones understanding the Papacy is the wicked, no doubt originally Satanic fact that we call the Pope the Pope, when virtually every other language in the world addresses him, properly and accurately, as the Papa.
To make my point, try taking any set of anti-Catholic and anti-Papal sentences you can find and rephrasing them correctly with "the Papa" instead of the Pope.
"The Papa Slams Gay Marriage."
"The Papa is poised to crush American liberties and impose universal Sunday observation."
"The Papa has always persecuted the true Baptist believers of this earth."
See what I'm saying?
Papa means in the original Latin exactly what it means in English: and it came to be applied to the Pope, not solely or even primarily as a sign of respect, but as a sign of affection. "The Papa" is the Vicar of Christ, the Successor of St. Peter, the ruler of the rulers of this world, and many other things: but "the Papa" he remains, most essentially and fundamentally.
Ecclesia Salvans
I think the thing that most contemporary Catholics really resent the most about the Pope has very little to do with any of the above. Yes, we are heirs to a broadly anti-Papal tradition full of ludicrous caricatures. Yes, we have a hard time grasping the most basic grammar of Papal authority and action.
Beyond all this, though, there is the simple and undeniable fact that we live in a society of vice, a society where all authorities whatsoever, whether immediate and familial or distant and Imperial, are hated, resented, distrusted, despised, and rejected. In such a world, even the most beaming "holy grandfather" becomes an immensely hard sell.
The Pope is a very active, very immediate, very commanding, very interventionist, and very personal authority figure. In this, he naturally drives us all crazy.
Obedience is a virtue. Devotion is a virtue. Love is a virtue. And it is exceptionally difficult for people in our society to practice these virtues.
What really bothers most American Catholics about the Pope is simply that he says and does things, gives commands and makes decisions, that they would not have. This may seem elementary, but I think it is really at the core not only of the contemporary crisis, but also of the Catholic spiritual life.
Obedience, devotion, and love all have as their sine qua non that they are virtues practiced in relation to another person. As Aristotle said, a love that has as its aim only one's individual pleasure or profit is not love at all, since it is essentially aimed at oneself. That the other person is a helpful (or perhaps even necessary) means for that does not change this.
In the same way, an obedience that is aimed only at the fulfillment of your own will, given only to decisions that you imagine that you would have made, is not obedience at all.
In this is the real core of contemporary politics, especially post-Trump. Trump could not govern, but what he could do better than virtually anyone else in history is to convince people that he was them, that his every decision was what they would do, practically what they had already done or were doing, that his every victory was their victory, his every humiliation of their enemies their revenge.
It is very hard, if not impossible, to relate to the Pope like this. For one thing, he is a universal authority, and is constantly dealing with realities and peoples and Churches at the end of the world, about which you know nothing. For another thing, he is a deeply interventionist authority, prone to popping up where you least expect him to give a highly specific command. The Papacy occasionally makes universal, binding, normative statements, but more often is a highly prudentialist authority, making highly specific decisions for highly specific situations. It is very hard to pretend that you care about all these things, and even harder to pretend that you really made all these decisions.
Of course, obedience, on a prudentialist model, is not a one-sided thing. The Papacy gives commands, but it frequently modifies them, frequently on the basis of the response or resistance of those to whom it gives it. A person closer to the problem or crisis has a great deal of leeway, both theoretically and practically.
Still, the irritation remains: one has to deal with the Pope. One has to be constantly reminded that he is not you, and yet is wielding authority over you and making decisions that have to do with you.
This is, I think, most of the time, for most people, the most important and the most beneficial aspect of the Papacy. The absolute center of the Christian and Catholic spiritual life is the cultivation of an attitude of receptivity, obedience, and love that allows one to accept, internalize, and respond appropriately to, first other people and realities small and great, and ultimately God. This is a goal that is achieved, like all other virtues, by practice. There is, I think, no better practice for this than really trying to be a Papist.
For me, too, this has been ultimately a decisive consideration. I have simply noticed that, in my own spiritual life, how I related to the Pope was immensely important. When I gave in to irritation and hatred towards him, my relationship with the the much more immediate and tangible and authoritative and interventionist God I was trying to worship, always suffered. When I tried to obey and love the Pope, I found it far easier to obey and love God.
This is, I think, in the final balance, the chief reason to be an Ultramontanist.
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