All the Pope's Men Read Online Free Page B

balances" as in a modern secular state. It’s often said that the Catholic Church is not a democracy, and from a canonical point of view that’s right on the money. (This leads to the old joke that the Catholic Church is an absolute monarchy tempered by selective disobedience!) That should not be understood, however, in the pejorative sense that the Church is not accountable to anyone. The Church has its own system of accountability, and we will say more about that later.
    Yet to put the accent on the Pope’s power is, in a sense, to put the cart before the horse. Many non-Catholics don’t realize, for example, that the Catholic Church had popes for nineteen hundred years before it had a formal dogma of papal infallibility. The Church has clarified the powers of the papacy over a long historical process, which implies that the Church knew what the Pope’s job was well before it could list all the tools popes need to do it. The papacy is in the first place an
idea
, the conviction that Christ commissioned Peter to be the head of his Church, and that this role is passed on through time to Peter’s successors. As the successor of Peter, the Pope is the agent of unity who holds the Catholic Church together across space and through time. The powers of the office are the institutional expression of this spiritual and sacramental identity.
    One traditional way to understand what the Pope does would be to list his titles: His Holiness; Bishop of Rome; Vicar of Jesus Christ; Successor of St. Peter; Prince of the Apostles; Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church; Patriarch of the West; Servant of the Servants of God; Primate of Italy; Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province; Sovereign of the Vatican City State. Such language, however, doesn’t mean a great deal to modern ears. A more illuminating way to proceed is to consider the papacy’s various real-world functions, which will be discussed here in terms of concentric circles representing different zones of responsibility.
    The first and tightest circle is constituted by Rome, because the Pope is the Bishop of Rome and hence responsible for the affairs of his local diocese. Historically, the Pope came to govern the universal Church largely because Rome was its most important point of reference. Rome today has 2.5 million Catholics, according to 2003 figures from the
Annuario Pontifico
, with 334 parishes and 5,331 priests. Rome is a complex urban archdiocese, with all the spiritual, pastoral, financial, and administrative challenges that entails. In fact, the Pope doesn’t take the government of the diocese personally into his own hands. He appoints a vicar, currently the powerful Cardinal Camillo Ruini, to handle its daily business. At the same time, however, the Pope remains an unsurpassed moral authority in urban affairs. In the summer of 2000, for example, the Roman city council rescinded a $200,000 contribution and official backing for an international gay rights festival because the Pope disapproved. (The march went ahead, however, thus illustrating at the same time the limits of the Pope’s influence.)
    Moving to the next circle, the Pope is also the supreme governor and legislator of the Catholic Church. He is responsible for setting policy, such as what theological ideas are acceptable, what liturgical practices pass muster, which saints to canonize, which bishops to appoint, and how to use the Church’s charitable resources. He makes decisions about finance and personnel, scholarship and service, morality and metaphysics. Further, just as in the ancient Roman empire every citizen had a right of appeal to the emperor, every Catholic has the right to take his or her case to the Pope. This does not mean that Mrs. Smith’s complaint about her son’s third-grade religion teacher is necessarily going to end up on the Pope’s desk. Most appeals are handled much further down the chain of command. But a few of these matters do reach the Pope, because they