Power of the Papacy

[Big RR]

I've been watching a CNN series on the history of the papacy and several times they have called the pope "the most powerful man in the world". Now while this may have been historically true (at least at times), I seriously doubt this is the case today, and probably since the reformation took hold, the holy roman empire fell apart, and secular governments became the norm. Today I doubt the pope has much power; he has no army (except those Swiss guys with spears), has to deal with a lot of politics in and out of the church (and as John Paul I showed, he'd better pay attention to it), and can hardly mobilize catholics worldwide to follow him (hell how many western catholics ignore the Vatican and practice birth control?). He may have some moral authority, but even this has been eroded by the Vatican silence (politically expedient or not) to the atrocities of Nazism, as well as the recent cover-ups of sexual abuse by clergy. At best I think the pope may enjoy some limited diplomatic power--he (or his representatives) can likely get a seat at many negotiating tables, and he will be tolerated, even if he is ignored in the backrooms; he may even be able to be seen as a viable mediator or honest broker in some cases, but I think this may be waning as Vatican scandals continue.

So, what power do you think the pope has in today's world?

[wesw]

the pope is just a man.

john paul was old and frail...., and powerful

benedict was old and frail and weak

CNN has an agenda, always.

[Big RR]

I see no agenda--more an advertising ploy. But face it, every world leader is a man (or woman), some old, some young, some physically frail, some physically robust. And yet none of this is generally related to the tremendous power some of them wield. I just don't see the pope in that latter group for the reasons I stated above.

BTW, what agenda do you ascribe to CNN with this series and the advertisement thereof?

[wesw]

just a denigration of faith, in general.

me, I think that the pope is just a man, others may feel differently.

[Burning Petard]

Agenda? same as anywhere in tv today--attract more views, sell more ads, make more money. Even the Weather Channel has gone for entertainment shows, briefly interrupted with weather data reports.

snailgate.

[Big RR]

Actually BP, the series itself is pretty good and seems to be pretty evenhanded in its treatment of the papacy throughout history; I found the discussion of the Western Schism and the Avignon popes (or antipopes depending on who refers to them) fascinating.

[Sue U]

Stalin is said to have asked, "How many divisions does the Pope have?" Yet the Papacy has endured the millennia, preceding and outliving both the Soviet Union and the "Thousand-Year Reich." Like any world leader, whether as a political figure or a public intellectual, the Pope has as much power as his followers and the world at large give him. Breve et irreparabile tempus omnibus est vitae.

[Burning Petard]

But why is the network that calls itself the hot source for what is happening right now around the world, investing the creative energy to provide a perhaps good backgrounder for the development of European states in the last couple of millennia? Don't we have a History Channel?

Again, I believe the agenda of both CBS, CNN, the Weather Channel, the History Channel et al. is to build a bigger audience for the smallest dollar investment and this nearly always brings a race to the lowest common denominator in quality while the original mission is ignored. The niche marketing model for much of the video channels has been abandoned.

snailgate

[Crackpot]

The history channel is spending all its time talking about aliens and the like.

[wesw]

ancient aliens and bigfeet

[Big RR]

Like any world leader, whether as a political figure or a public intellectual, the Pope has as much power as his followers and the world at large give him.

I agree sue, and that is why I question how much power he actually has in this secular world; I'd hardly think he is "the most powerful man in the world".

FWIW, I'd ask the same of monarchs whose lineages span centuries in this day of constitutional monarchies.

The niche marketing model for much of the video channels has been abandoned.

I agree, one only need to look at Bravo to see how a station went from a celebration of the fine arts to a reveling in what's tasteless (except for maybe Top Chef).

However, in this instance CNN does appear to be trying to include some sort of quality and intelligence in this documentary series, although I think the station went down the tubes and to the lowest of the common denominators the day they hired Nancy Grace.

[Scooter]

It was inevitable that the papacy would lose much of its direct political power as powerful centralized states emerged from the chaos of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless I think it could have retained far more diplomatic and moral influence right down to the present day had it not consistently railed against the march of history, siding at almost every turn with the forces of reaction and opposing any progress in scientific, social and political thought seen to undermine its own authority.

In Italy, the development of a well functioning democracy has been impaired for the last 200 years in large part by the influence of the papacy; first, because it opposed unification at the expense of Catholic Austria and its own temporal domain, then by forbidding Catholic participation in the political life of the new state, then by getting into bed with the Fascist regime, then by excommunicating anyone who voted Communist, about a third of the electorate.

In Europe, fascism in its various forms may have been contained and/or overthrown sooner, had the new Vatican state showed any interest in forging alliances with secular or religiously neutral democracies like the U.S., the U.K. and France, where Catholics were free to worship and live their lives as they pleased; instead, it threw in its lot via concordats with fascist Italy, Spain and Germany, in the interest of preserving and strengthening the position of the Catholic Church in those regimes, where it might otherwise have been under threat, while being largely blind and ineffectual to the threat posed by those regimes to others seen as perhaps less worthy of the Church's support.

In Latin America, the development of democratic and socially just societies has been retarded for generations because the inherent bias of the gospel message in favour of the poor and the oppressed has been blunted; anti-communism caused Liberation Theology to be viewed with suspicion and suppressed, and the Church supported a variety of right-wing dictatorships who justified their repression in the name of anti-communism.

In Africa, the Church's good works in addressing hunger, and later AIDS, were rendered largely ineffectual by its opposition to condom use and other contraceptives as a means of birth control and disease prevention, whose expanded use would have gone a long way in addressing both.

And as Big RR said, the reflexive need to circle the wagons led the crisis of child sexual abuse by priests to go on for far too long without effective action.

John XXIII and Paul VI attempted to address and correct some of this through their policies of aggiornamento, attempting to bring the Church into the modern era, but it did not really go far enough. And the one area where the Church vigorously attempted to advance democracy in Eastern Europe came about only because of the confluence with JPII's Polish nationalism and anti-communism.

I see some glimmers of the papacy exerting a generally well received moral authority with Francis's (yes wes, an s after the apostrophe ) emphasis on social justice, but only time will tell.

[RayThom]

Who is most powerful and influential -- the pope or Mark Zuckerberg?

Like poetry this question is loaded with esoteric allusion. Regardless, the wick on both of these flames is burning short. And the masses will find other distractions to occupy themselves.

[Big RR]

Interesting Ray; I would guess anyone of us could have significant power to hijack and fly a plane into a building or explode a truck bomb and push the US to more and more curtail civil liberties, so we'd have at least as much power as either the pope of the facebook salesman. And a bunch of oligarchs can dictate the outcome of a "free and fair" election and show that anyone, no matter how undeserving or unqualified, can be elected to the highest office in the USA. So where does the true power reside--with the illuminati?

[Burning Petard]

Nah. True power lies with the space aliens who built Atlantis and now rule the planet from their secret Hq located in the hollow Earth

Haven't you been paying attention to the History Channel?

snailgate

[Crackpot]

How can the earth be hollow when it’s flat?

[Bicycle Bill]

How can the earth be hollow when it’s flat?

I can visualize heads in both camps — 'flat-earthers' as well as 'ancient astronauts' — exploding as they try to come to terms with a statement like that.

-"BB"-

[Bicycle Bill]

-"BB"-

[MajGenl.Meade]

Ah! The power of the paw pussy!

[Big RR]

BB--that's why evolution is so wonderful, it made cats hate water, and the, as the maps show, we have water at the edges. Think what might have happened if cats evolved to be aquatic. Evolution? Hell, it must be part of an intelligent design.

And on a flat earth, the super secret atlantian/alien culture doesn't have to be in a hollow space, it's just on the other side of the planar earth.