Category: The Pope

Because I don’t want the feature to become stale, I ordinarily try to keep the Quote of the Day posts to once per month. (Don’t ask me why I haven’t changed the title to Quote of the Month. As Ralph Waldo Emerson liked to say, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.) The following quote though tickled me so much I just had to share it now rather than wait for some future date.

"It often happens that I wake at night and begin to think about a serious problem and decide I must tell the Pope about it. Then I wake up completely and remember that I am the Pope." –Pope John XXIII

Who was Blessed Pope John XXIII? I know you know, but in order to be foolishly consistent with the pattern of these quote posts, I’ll tell you anyway.

CLICK HERE.

By the way, did you know that John XXIII kept a diary that has been published, titled Journal of a Soul?  If not, now you do.

GET THE BOOK.

A reader writes:

I have heard you talk on "Catholic Answers" several times about what exactly is the Church’s stance on capital punishment.  Invariably you quote from the Catechism that the death penalty is permissible under appropriate conditions and concede that there is some area for discussion over what constitutes those appropriate conditions.

However throughout his long pontificate, Pope John Paul consistently and repeatedly condemned capital punishment at all times in the strongest terms, usually in the same breath as abortion and euthanasia.  Since abortion and euthanasia are considered objectively evil under all circumstances couldn’t this linking the death penalty to them by John Paul (who never spoke an unconsidered word) to be taken as an ex cathedra statement that supercedes the Cathechism that it too is always an objective evil at all times?

I’d take exception to a few of the ways that you’ve characterized JP2’s statements on the death penalty. He didn’t consistently condemn it. He certainly didn’t condemn it when he promulgated the original edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which took a more positive line regarding the use of capital punishment than the later edition.

He also didn’t condemn it in the strongest possible terms. He never said that it is intrinsically evil, as he did with abortion and euthanasia. His statements on the matter frequently include qualifiers and nuances and reservations, because he knew that it is a settled part of Catholic moral teaching (and biblical teaching) that capital punishment is legitimate in principle. It’s only a question of when it should be used (i.e., under what conditions and do they exist today), not whether it is legitimate to use it at all.

Also, while JP2 was a man of enormous intellect and thoughtfulness, he was still a man, and thus could speak unconsidered words (particularly when reading the text of a speech prepared for him by someone else–there are examples of things that had to be corrected in the official editions of speeches he gave that weren’t delivered orally in the way the official edition shows; the most likely explanation here is that he ordered the official edition changed to add or remove a nuance that was in the draft presented for him to read).

Even if he superhumanly never said an unconsidered word, though, and even if he had consistently condemned the death penalty and even if he had done so in strong, unnuanced terms, this would not amount to a ex cathedra statement.

There is no "creeping infallibilism" in the teaching of a single pontiff. If the pope wants to make an ex cathedra statement, he has to make one. One cannot point to a long series of fallible statements by a pope–even one with a twenty six year reign–and say that they add up to an infallible one.

None of the things JP2 said on the dealth penalty used anything like the language popes traditionally use when making ex cathedra statements (the giveaway language for that is "I/we define . . . ," usually buttressed by a direct appeal to his authority as the successor of Peter).

The most authoritative thing JP2 wrote on the death penalty was the brief discussion he gave of it in Evangelium Vitae 56, and there he loaded up what he said with qualifiers and with an acknowlegement of the death penalty in principle.

While he expressed great reserve about the use of the death penalty in this passage, it is (a) a fallible statement and (b) expresses elements of the pope’s prudential judgment rather than matters that belong properly to the deposit of faith given to the Church by Christ and the apostles.

Thus, as Pre-16 noted: "There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia."

MORE HERE.

Y’know how B16 just dropped his title "Patriarch of the West"?

The place that he dropped it from was the list of official titles he has in a book known as the Annuario Pontificio ("Papal Yearbook") that the Vatican publishes every year.

If you want to look up the pope’s official titles, this is the place to go.

So how about the Seventh-Day Adventist (and others’) claim that one of the pope’s titles is Vicarius Filii Dei ("Vicar of the Son of God") and that this adds up to 666 in Latin?

Well, t’aint so!

For a start, we can quibble about whether they’ve done their Latin math right. When you put a smaller number to the left of a bigger number, it subtracts rather than adds. IV is 4 in Latin, not 6, and VICARIVS FILII DEI has a IV in it, which would pull the total down to 664. Also, if you let IL count as 49 instead of 51 then the number comes down to 662.

But we don’t need to go there, because if you look at the pope’s official titles, Vicarius Filii Dei ain’t one of ’em!

Above is the page from the 2004 Annuario listing the pope’s official titles. Because this edition is a couple of years old, it lists John Paul II as the reigning pope, and it still has Patriarca Dell’Occidente ("Patriarch of the West") listed as a title.

BUT IT DOES NOT HAVE VICARIUS FILII DEI (or its Italian equivalent; this page in the Annuario is in Italian rather than Latin).

The closest it comes is Vicario di Gesu Cristo ("Vicar of Jesus Christ"). In Latin, that would be Vicarius Jesu Christi. So what does Vicarius Jesu Christi add up to?

Let’s see. . . .

VICARIVS IESV CHRISTI = VI (6) + C (100) + IV (4) + I (1) + V (5) + C (100) + I (1) + I (1) = 218

So there you have it: The number of the pope’s main, official title (the one in big bold print in the Annuario) is 218. (Unless you want to count IV as I + V, in which case it would be 220).

Not so scary after all, huh?

EXCERPTS:

An Italian parliamentary commission concluded "beyond any reasonable doubt" that the Soviet Union was behind the 1981 attempt to kill Pope John Paul II _ a theory long alleged but never proved, according to a draft report made available Thursday.

"This commission believes, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the leaders of the Soviet Union took the initiative to eliminate the pope Karol Wojtyla," said a draft of the commission’s report obtained by The Associated Press. Wojtyla was John Paul’s Polish name.

The draft has no bearing on any judicial investigations, which have long been closed. If the commission approves the report in its final form, that would mark the first time an official body had blamed the Soviet Union for shooting John Paul.

The Italian report said Soviet military intelligence _ and not the KGB _ was responsible.

GET THE STORY.

GET THE STORY FROM HEAVEN’S PERSPECTIVE.

THE TEXT OF ALL THREE PARTS OF THE FATIMA SECRET.

You’ve heard of name-dropping, haven’t you? That’s where someone likes to show off how important he thinks he is by working into the conversation the names of all the famous people he knows personally (however slightly). Pope Benedict XVI is too humble to engage in that. So he’s taken up title-dropping instead.

"In the new edition of the Vatican yearbook, the German pontiff is no longer referred to as Patriarch of the West.

"He is simply Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Primate of Italy, Metropolitan Archbishop of the Roman Province, Sovereign of Vatican City and Servant of the Servants of God.

"According to sources in the Vatican publishing house, the move — noticed by only the most observant of Vatican-watchers — was requested by the pope himself.

"It is seen as a sign of Benedict’s desire to overcome the 992-year division between Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians.

"It is a ‘sign of ecumenical sensitivity,’ officials said."

GET THE STORY.

Interestingly enough, it can also be seen as Pope Benedict’s continuing efforts to preserve the legacy of John Paul II. According to the article, the move was originally considered by JPII, who was passionate about reconciliation with Orthodoxy.

In the aftermath of the death of Pope John Paul II, there was a lot of speculation about his "first miracle." One cleric, commenting on CNN during the Pope’s funeral, said it was when Israeli and Arab leaders shook hands during the sign of peace. Many faithful Catholics said that it must have been when Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger was elected as Pope Benedict XVI. These are miracles in the looser sense and don’t count toward sainthood.

Now, though, the Vatican may have found a miracle that could count in the process of canonization for JPII: a nun miraculously cured of Parkinson’s Disease after praying to him for his intercession:

"Monsignor Slawomir Oder, the Catholic Church official in charge of promoting the cause to declare the late Pope a saint of the Church, told Reuters on Monday that an investigation into the healing had cleared an initial probe by doctors.

"Oder said the ‘relatively young’ nun, whom he said he could not identify for now, was inexplicably cured of Parkinson’s after praying to John Paul after his death last April 2.

"’I was moved,’ Oder said in a telephone interview. ‘To think that this was the same illness that destroyed the Holy Father and it also kept this poor nun from carrying out her work.’"

GET THE STORY.

It looks like those who suffer from Parkinson’s Disease now have someone on the fast-track to becoming their patron saint.

Cardinal Georges Cottier recently retired as the theologian of the papal household.

But why would the pope need a theologian? I mean, isn’t it the pope’s job to be a theologian–a top theologian?

Well, yes. But there’s something a lot of folks don’t realize:

The papal theologian’s main task is to vet the many thousands of words prepared by Vatican aides for the pope to speak or publish. He checks for statements of dubious theology and otherwise hazardous phrases that could come back to haunt the pope.

"People have to understand that nowadays the pope is obliged to make so many speeches and send so many messages that he needs a lot of collaborators to prepare them," Cardinal Cottier said. "The theologian of the papal household is charged with reading all these texts and give(s) a theological opinion on them."

Cardinal Cottier said that given the number of papal speeches, sermons, messages, prayers, telegrams and other documents it would be impossible for the pope to write them all. The cardinal said he worked daily with the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, going over the papal texts prepared by others.

The fact that many papal addresses are written by others is something that many people don’t realize, and it’s one of the reasons that they don’t have as much weight as documents prepared in a more careful and deliberate manner–like encyclicals and apostolic constitutions. Even the latter are often ghosted in whole or in part by others, but in their cases the pope and his advisors spend a lot of time going over them meticulously before they are issued. In the case of things like Wednesday audiences and speeches to particular groups, the process is much more informal–hence the need for the papal theologian to serve as censor.

LEARN MORE.

That sound you hear is the bottom of the Fiction Writers Think Tank being scraped for the last residue of an original idea. An author who came up short when he did the scraping was Portuguese author Luis Miguel Rocha, who had to rely instead on the old, discredited canard that Pope John Paul I was murdered before he could shovel out the stables of the Vatican Bank.

"Portuguese author and scriptwriter Luis Miguel Rocha said he based The Last Pope on documents he obtained through an undisclosed Vatican source, which he will make public when the novel is published in April.

"The novel puts the theory that John Paul I had become a threat because he was aware of money-laundering involving the Vatican Bank and also because of his plans to liberalise aspects of centuries-old church doctrine.

"’He wanted to be the last wealthy pope. John Paul I wanted to redistribute the riches of the church, open the church to women and authorise the use of contraceptives,’ said Rocha, 29, in a weekend interview.

"The novel depicts the assassination of John Paul I as the result of a conspiracy involving top financial officials, several European governments and a Mafia group that counted top officials of the Roman Curia, including the pontiff’s personal secretary, among its members."

GET THE STORY.

GET THE REAL STORY ON JPI’S DEATH.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen once told the story of being approached by a young priest who demanded to know why the Church was so rich. Archbishop Sheen gave him the standard answer to this common question but the priest wasn’t satisfied. He kept pounding on the question until finally Sheen took him aside and asked him bluntly, "Father, how much have you stolen from the collection plate?" Sheen’s guess was on-target: The young priest was skimming from the parish funds and rationalizing his behavior by convincing himself that the Church was too rich anyway.

I’m no Archbishop Sheen, but my guess is that we can trace Luis Miguel Rocha’s dissatisfaction with the Church not to the alleged "murder" of Pope John Paul I, who Rocha claims would have liquidated the Church’s material assets, but instead to Rocha’s desire for women priests and contraceptives.

Michelle here.

Unlike Mark Shea, who has confessed to his Northern European squeamishness over relics, I happen to love them and to enjoy a lot of the folk piety of Catholics throughout history. But even I have to admit that a report of a Polish Dominican friar trying to obtain a recording of John Paul II’s heartbeat for playback at a Christmas Mass is just, uhm, how shall I say it gently … weird.

"A Polish Dominican monk [sic] has asked the Rome clinic that treated John Paul II to give him recordings of the late pope’s heartbeat, which he hopes to play to ardent Catholics at Christmas midnight mass.

"’For years, our hearts beat for him. Today, we want to symbolically listen to his heart,’ Brother Jan Gora was quoted by the Glos Wielkopolski daily as saying.

"’We have taken the first steps’ to obtaining recordings of the heartbeat of John Paul II, who died on April 2 in his private apartment at the Vatican, after being hospitalised at the Gemelli Clinic, he said.

"If Brother Gora obtains the recording, the late Polish-born pope’s heartbeat will be played back during the Agnus Dei at midnight mass in Lednica, in southwestern Poland."

GET THE STORY.

(Nod to Mark and to Amy Welborn for the link. Be sure to see the discussion of the story over at Amy’s.)

My guess is that John Paul II would be flattered but insist that the sound of his heartbeat is not an appropriate liturgical hymn and that the congregation’s focus ought really to be directed to the Eucharist.

In a new twist on the old routine of men not elected to the office claiming to be pope, one Puerta Rican man has claimed to be the incarnation of the late John Paul II.  According to CNN, he has now been excommunicated by Mayaguez Bishop Ulises Casiano Vargas.

"A Roman Catholic bishop here has excommunicated members of a communal sect whose leader allegedly claims to be a manifestation of the late Pope John Paul II.

"Sect leader Edwin Gonzalez Concepcion and his followers can no longer receive communion or participate in [C]hurch activities, according to the order issued by Mayaguez Bishop Ulises Casiano Vargas.

"Gonzalez, a former firefighter in the town of Aguada, has told his followers that he became a manifestation of John Paul when the pope died in April and that Pope Benedict XVI is the ‘antichrist,’ according to the order, which priests in the diocese read to their congregations Sunday."

GET THE STORY.

You’d think that someone claiming to be a "manifestation" of John Paul II would have done enough research into his role to know that the real JPII would never denounce Joseph Ratzinger as "the Antichrist."

NOTE:  The image accompanying this post was chosen because it reminded me of an old This Rock cover image of a Mr. Potato Head Pope that illustrated an article on "Do-It-Yourself Popes."

GET THE ARTICLE.