Conrad Black: High time for an American pope

National Post

17-05-2025

There are two principal takeaways from the election last week of Pope Leo XIV, one reflecting on the condition of the Roman Catholic Church, the other that the new Pope is an American, albeit one who has spent much of his career in Latin America. Despite centuries of effort by millions of people to portray the Roman Catholic Church as a superstitious anachronism, it endures. This is the first pope whose native language is English since Adrian IV (Nicholas Breakspear), who died in 1159. English is the most widely spoken language in the world and although that singular self-nominated 'defender of the faith' Henry VIII of England caused the English-speaking peoples to be more heavily influenced by the Reformation, and not necessarily its best aspects, than the other great western cultures, it is high time that there was an English-speaking pope.
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People of my venerable age group will recall that St. Pope John XXIII attempted a substantial modernization of the Roman Catholic Church and made it more accessible by increased use of contemporary languages in place of Latin and other liberalizations, and that this is a process that generally has continued gradually. His successor, Paul VI, initiated the practice of popes travelling widely and the subsequent elections of Polish, German, Argentinian and now an American Pope, are steadily wrenching that organization free from the secretive and easily caricatured Roman cohort of its curial governors, and have brought it closer to and made it more reflective of its far-flung constituencies. With any organization, ecclesiastical or secular, the challenge of reform is to make the basic tenets more available and popular without modifying them in a way that undermines the raison d'etre of the institution. The Catholic Church, in walking this line, has tested the faith of many and forfeited the respect of some.
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Of the approximately 1.4-billion nominal Roman Catholics, about one billion attach a significant amount of credence to being members of that faith. It is an organization united by concepts of the sanctity of life and the existence of a divine intelligence that can be propitiated, and that does assert itself in human lives. Anyone who entertains any religious views is thoroughly aware of the widespread practice, particularly prevalent in our atheistic media and academic and other cultural communities that religion is merely a fetishistic heirloom of the Dark Age when people generally had an insufficient respect and ambition for what human ingenuity and diligence could achieve; a consolation for the fact of death. Perversely, our anti-theistic elites profess a respect for Islam, which is in some measure a violent replication of theoretically pacifistic Christianity (including the annunciation of both by the Archangel Gabriel). This indicates that non-western support of Islam is really, in many cases, just antagonism to Christianity. It requires more faith and is intellectually more difficult to deny the existence of any spiritual or supernatural forces in the world than to uphold them. There has always been a zone in the human psyche that ponders the unknowable regions of the cosmos and attempts to replace authentic faith with a vacuum, which has sometimes led to the most horrible pagan aberrations in history, including Nazism and communism.
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The immense crowd that packed St. Peter's Square and the approaching Via de la Conciliazione last week, conspicuously largely composed of younger people waving the flags of most of the countries of the world, indicated that the papal election is not just a Roman municipal tourist celebration. Interest in ecclesiastical matters has fluctuated very widely throughout history, from the dawn of Christianity when Christ and most of his early disciples were brutally murdered, through centuries when Rome was more powerful than any secular government, and times of terrible lassitude, degradation and corruption, when the public's respect was thoroughly alienated but the faith that had been dishonoured survived.
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There are now evidences of growth of Catholic religious practice, partly in reaction to the oppressions of Christianity, partly in recognition of the spectacular failure of secularization and the unsustainably incompetent performance of most secular governments, and partly because of a resurgent sense that spiritual forces do exist and persist despite the antics of charlatans and publicity-seeking iconoclasts. While the rigorous non-believers regard the Roman Catholic Church as an institutional bumble bee, flying laboriously in defiance of all laws of nature and logic, the election of the new Pope has demonstrated its imperishability again. Secularism and parts of the Enlightenment have not delivered a human plenitude of knowledge, any more than unspontaneous piety did. When Christianity fields its intellectual first team from St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas to modern thinkers such as St. John H. Cardinal Newman and Jacques Maritain, it always defeats the atheists.