Opinion: The Universal Dimension of the Disaster When a Bad Man is Elected Pope, by Rod Dreher

Reposted from Gavin Ashenden on X – Rod Dreher on the universal dimension of the disaster that takes place when a bad man is elected pope.

I find that this kind of thing deeply irritates Catholics, even those who fully acknowledge how destructive Francis’s papacy has been. They say, understandably, that the Catholic Church has known bad popes before. And this is true! What might be hard for them to grasp is how this looks from the outside. One of the big things that won over Protestants to having a more sympathetic view of Catholicism is the witness of Pope St. John Paul II. What a giant he was! It caused lots of non-Catholics to rethink their hostility to Catholicism — or, as in my case, gave me a massive new respect for Catholicism, to which I had never paid serious attention.

Yes, JP2 failed badly in administering the Church, but that scarcely obscures the glory of the holiness he embodied. Many Protestants came to admire that; some converted. But now, as Carl Trueman says, they see in the current pope precisely the kind of thing that upsets them so much about many Protestant churches! This is not something that can be waved away, not with the immense power that Catholicism grants to the pontiff. …

I’m not trying to start an argument about the truth of Catholicism! I’m simply pointing to this new Carl Trueman piece, and pointing out that you are not going to find a conservative Calvinist intellectual who respects Catholicism as much as Carl does. If he is saying that Francis is a huge stumbling block to becoming Catholic, take him seriously. I am friends with a very faithful Catholic who left Anglicanism over all the usual things, but who is now grieved by what he sees is Pope Francis introducing into Catholicism, the same processes that are destroying the church of his birth. He thought he had found refuge from all that.

Obviously many small-o orthodox Catholics understand what a destructive figure Francis is — did you read the latest? — and of course they can do nothing about it, except bear up. There is also far, far more to Catholicism than the papacy. And yes, there have been bad popes in the past — but there’s something about having a pope (good and bad alike) in the age of global electronic media that massively magnifies both their virtues and their vices. And there is this, from the Catechism:

“Full, supreme, and universal power over the whole Church, a power which he can always exercise unhindered.” That is massive. And in the hands of a pope like Francis, fairly terrifying, at least to many otherwise sympathetic Christians on the outside. One of the big things that attracted me to Catholicism as a young man was the figure of the pope — not only the sitting pope, John Paul II, but the papacy itself — as a bulwark against the strong dissolving currents of modernity, against which so many Protestant churches were failing to stand. It never once occurred to me, naïf that I was, that the same power held by a bad man could open the floodgates of destruction into the Catholic Church. As an Orthodox, I recognize that we have many problems — the schisms within Orthodoxy, and the general lack of unity, for example — but I am grateful that no patriarch has that kind of power within our ecclesiology.

Again, I do not want to start an argument over the truth or falsity of Catholicism! And I hope you won’t do that in the comments. I am more interested, though, in a discussion of the various advantages and disadvantages of ecclesiology in the various Christian churches, and how we are to think about how authority manifests. I find the “just me and my Bible” approach of many contemporary Protestants to be completely untenable, for reasons I doubt need clarification. Every man his own pope is utterly unworkable; had there been no authority in the patristic era, Christianity would not likely have survived. But if not “just me and my Bible,” then what? And why?