As of yesterday, the eyes of the Church and the world are looking intently at Pope Leo XIV. (No, the sea gull was not elected pope. He did not even directly participate in the conclave process.) But as we eagerly, and I hope prayerfully, examine the record of the new pope, the excitement and anticipation of the coming pontificate might be mixed with a feeling of anxiety. After all . . . what if the cardinals chose a bad pope?
I don’t just mean “the cardinals chose someone other than my preferred pick.” I think most of us knew the strong likelihood of that, and that the cardinals know one another better than we know them. But what if the next pope—and I’m not talking about Leo specifically here, but rather more generally—is actually just . . . not a great pope?
Although Catholics sometimes speak of the conclave process as if it were a certainty that the next pope will be chosen by the Holy Spirit, then-cardinal Ratzinger pushed back on this in 1997, saying, “Probably the only assurance he offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined.”
Ratzinger’s view seems to better account for the facts of history, in which there were at least a handful of popes whose pontificates seem completely indefensible. To take just one instance, Pope Victor III lamented that his predecessor, Benedict IX, led a “life as a pope so vile, so foul, so execrable, that I shudder to think of it.” Few today would disagree with this assessment.
But if the College of Cardinals can resist (or misunderstand) the promptings of the Holy Spirit, why shouldn’t we give in to the voice of anxiety? I’d like to suggest two reasons, supported by the recent readings at Mass.
The Pope Is Still Called by God
Liturgically, one could hardly find a better Sunday Gospel for the week of the conclave than the one we just had: Jesus entrusting his flock to the care of St. Peter, the first pope. As John records the event, “when they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, ‘Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?’ He said to him, ‘Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.’ He said to him, ‘Feed my lambs’” (John 21:15).
After two similar (but not identical!) questions, Jesus entrusts Peter also to “tend my sheep” and “feed my sheep.” As Pope Pius VIII observed, Peter being entrusted with the care of the “sheep” as well as the “lambs” matters, for “the duty of our office is not only to feed, rule, and direct the lambs, namely the Christian people, but also the sheep, that is the clergy.”
This is a good reminder that even if the cardinals don’t do a great job of discerning God’s will for the Church in their election, God still is ultimately the one who calls the pope. This is squarely the Catholic concept of a “vocation,” or calling. When God calls, it is ultimately invitational. Fr. Brett Brannen, the former vice rector of St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, stressed the importance of discerning well in his book To Save a Thousand Souls, a popular resource for men discerning priesthood.
But what about the man who balks at God’s invitation to the priesthood and gets married instead? Obviously, the man isn’t called to divorce his wife, nor is he called to despair that he’s missed his chance to be a saint. In Brannen’s words, “the man in this situation should not live his life thinking that he has blown it forever, that he will have to struggle through life with great unhappiness, hoping to squeeze into heaven in the end. God never stops calling anyone to holiness, not matter what decisions he has made in the past.”
We can go even beyond this: Sacramental marriage is possible only with God’s blessing. So the man in this situation is objectively called by God to be married. We need not worry that the Holy Spirit prompted the College of Cardinals to choose another man as pope, and they ignored or resisted this call. Whoever is chosen as pope is objectively called by God to be there . . . even if he was not (as it were) God’s “first pick” for the role.
The Petrine and Johannine Church
There’s something else about Jesus’ questions to Peter that we should pay heed to. In his first question, Jesus asks, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?”
There are different views of what this means, but the majority view is that Jesus is asking Simon Peter if he loves Jesus more than the other apostles love Jesus. That’s a startling question: How can Peter possibly answer such a thing? And indeed, Peter demurs. But St. Augustine points out how odd it is that “the Lord loved John better, when he himself was better loved by Peter.”
Augustine draws our attention in this seeming contradiction to what Peter and John represent. The Church on earth, living “in blessed hope through this troublous life,” is “personified in the Apostle Peter, on account of the primacy of his apostleship.” The Church “founded in Christ received from him the keys of the kingdom of heaven in the person of Peter, that is to say, the power of binding and loosing sins.” In other words, we see in Peter the personification of the Church on earth, since it was Peter who was entrusted with the care and governance of that Church in a unique way. Pope Leo will similarly serve in this Petrine role.
But John is depicted as the personification of something else: divine contemplation. It’s why the traditional image of John is the eagle, as the beautiful prologue of his Gospel begins with a contemplation of God and his Word. Whereas Peter is the man of action, John was “lying close to the breast of Jesus” (John 13:23) at the Last Supper. Peter represents this life of journeying toward Christ amid the “toilsome and perilous temptations on the one hand, but the consolations of God, both bodily and spiritual, on the other,” whereas John represents the life of the world to come.
For Augustine, this accounts for Jesus saying to Peter of John, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!” Contemplation and divine love will remain (cf. 1 Cor. 13:13), while the call for this life is the “follow me” of discipleship.
Here on earth, we love Christ more for what he’s already done for us in this life than for those heavenly glories that “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived” (1 Cor. 2:9). Hence we can speak of the love of Peter being greater than the love of John. But God wants for us more than we can imagine, which is why the life represented by John is specially beloved by Christ.
The Petrine dimension of the Church is important, but if we find ourselves losing our peace over the next pope (or conversely, of putting too much of our hope in the next pope), it might be time to remember that the Johannine dimension is the more beloved, and the more important. Whether the next pope makes your journey easier or harder, your calling is the same: Follow Christ, and grow in both discipleship and in that prayerful contemplation that will endure for all eternity.