A New Pope!

I am not a Roman Catholic, in fact, I am a very Protestant Episcopalian, but I loved and respected Pope Francis, who died on Easter Monday, after blessing the people on Easter Sunday. I can’t think of a more fitting way for him to end his life.  He was a humble man who looked out for the poor and marginalized.   I think that when you look at his whole life, he embodied what it means to be a Christian. If you want to know more about the life of Pope Francis, I heartily recommend the movie “The Two Popes”. Although the plot has been changed and embellished in some areas, critics agree that it is a good depiction of the rise of Jorge Bergoglio to the papacy.

The office of Pope has had its ups and downs. I am by no means an expert in papal history, in fact, what I know I mostly learned on a “need to know” basis as background for Bound by an Oath, but during the period of Fra Paulos’s life there were six popes, beginning with Innocent I and ending with Leo I who was given the title Leo the Great.

At first, I thought that was a lot of popes, but then I realized there have been six popes in my own lifetime, and soon there will be seven, so maybe it's not! Considering the weight of the responsibility and the experience required, most popes are rather “mature” when they are elected, and often quite close to the end of their lives, so it stands to reason that the turnover would be considerable. (Wikipedia says the average age for popes to be elected since 1400 is 62.4 years, and before that the data is unreliable!)  

In the fifth century there was only one Christian church. We call it the “holy catholic church” with a lower case “c” which means “universal”. Therefore, it would be more correct to say that the six men who led the church during Fra Paulos’s time were bishops of Rome, rather than popes. It was in fact Pope Leo I who centralized the church and made Rome its headquarters. The first schism in the church occurred in 1054 when the church in the east (headquartered in Constantinople) formally separated from the church in the west (headquartered in Rome).

I have many friends from seminary who will be well able to pick the eyes out of what I have written (and are welcome to do so in the comment section below), so I’m going to stop right here! But I will be watching the process of electing a new pope very closely and praying for God’s will to be done.

Oh, and I watched “Conclave” recently and loved it!