Pope chronicles

The recent death and funeral of Pope John Paul II and the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI gave the world something it hasn’t seen in 26 1/2 years: a glimpse into an ecclesiastical kingdom of sorts and a process of succession of power that existed long before the Enlightenment or the concept of democracy as we understand it today.

At a time when “hanging chads” and voting-machine malfunctions are familiar to most Americans, the practices of the Vatican conclave and those quaint aspects that have so impressed the public -- the secrecy, the dropping of ballots into a chalice, the white smoke -- have dramatized the Roman Catholic Church’s ability to endure through centuries of crises and upheaval. Many have written not only about this arcane electoral process but also about the man who kept us waiting so long to see another one, John Paul II.

The best parts of John-Peter Pham’s “Heirs of the Fisherman,” in fact, concern the stories about papal elections found in the chapter “The Conclaves of the Twentieth Century,” which is filled with engaging gossip. Pham draws from contemporary diaries and off-the-record interviews with cardinal-electors -- most of it familiar but some of it not -- on each of the elections, from Pius X’s in 1903 through both conclaves of 1978, when John Paul I died after a 33-day reign and John Paul II was then elected. At the conclave of 1963, for example, some of the conservative cardinals were holding out and refusing to throw their votes to the favorite, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini of Milan (who would become Paul VI). A longtime friend of John XXIII, Cardinal Gustavo Testa, stood up after one of the deadlocked votes and, in violation of the rules against speaking out during the voting sessions, chastised his fellow cardinals for not moving forward in support of Montini.

In response, the leader of the conservatives, Cardinal Giuseppe Siri, rose to protest the violation of the rule. Montini became so distraught that he was about to withdraw from the race, until the cardinal sitting next to him pulled him back to his seat and told him to keep quiet. Montini was elected on the sixth ballot. That chapter is, as the cliche goes, worth the price of Pham’s book. One hopes the author will publish a New Yorker-type article somewhere giving similar insider details regarding this latest conclave.

Pham has written a book whose tone and objectivity are a bit unexpected considering that he was a priest in the conservative diocese of Peoria, Ill., he is a contributor to Crisis (one of U.S. Catholicism’s most conservative magazines) and he is an adjunct fellow of the equally conservative, corporate-funded Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty.

None of this, however, seems to have compromised the even-handedness of the book. For example, while giving John Paul II his due as a strong moral voice and major player on the world scene throughout his lengthy pontificate, Pham nevertheless asserts that the late pope’s legacy is mixed and that “we need the time and dispassion to truly assess” his record. For that reason, he does not join the chorus on the Catholic right urging that John Paul II be called “the Great” or declared a saint as soon as possible. At his funeral, signs were lifted in St. Peter’s Square that said, “Santo Subito” (loosely translated, “Make him a saint now”).

Pham also provides a complete, straightforward list of issues that will confront Benedict XVI, including the sexual abuse scandals in the priesthood, the precipitous decline in religious vocations, the role of women in the church and the challenge of Islam. He is honest enough to acknowledge that in various parts of the church, including Africa, clerical celibacy is more honored in the breach than in practice, even by some bishops.

The problem with “Heirs of the Fisherman” is its length and general lack of coherence. The book doesn’t serve its stated purpose of being a quick, clear and concise guide to dealing with papal death and election, even though it appeared in time for the run-up to last month’s conclave.

Pham’s first chapter, “The Pope Is Dead!,” should have set the table, as it were, more attractively than it does. The reader would have benefited from something on the nature and history of the papacy that summarized the official teaching of the church on the Petrine Ministry and how it fits into the Roman Catholic Church’s overall governing structure. Chapter 3, “The Cardinals Under Lock and Key,” also would have been more effective if it had been placed earlier in the book. As it stands, the present Chapter 2, “Before There Were Conclaves,” which offers a compressed history of the papal selection processes in the church’s first 1,000 years, assumes that a mono-episcopate -- a single bishop governing a diocese -- existed in Rome from the beginning, that Peter was the first pope in the modern sense of the word, and that he explicitly designated his first three successors. Although this is what Pham calls the “traditional account” of the papacy’s origins, it is without any historical basis.

To be sure, there are some useful appendices, including a list of popes and a glossary. But I wonder whether it was necessary to publish the entire text of “Universi Dominici Gregis” (John Paul II’s revised rules for the conducting of a conclave), a list of eligible cardinal-electors (which was already somewhat out of date by the time the book was published) or a 58-page series of biographical notes on present and historical figures, many of whom are mentioned only in passing in the book or not at all. (In the academic world, it is called “padding.”)

Garry O’Connor’s “Universal Father,” about the life of John Paul II, is a different sort of book. At first, the reader might be taken with the biography’s engaging style. The author shows himself at ease with this literary genre, having written similar biographies of Sean O’Casey, Peggy Ashcroft, Paul Scofield, Alec Guinness and even William Shakespeare.

The late pope is certainly a different kind of subject for O’Connor, but for those who know little or nothing about John Paul II’s life the book is an instructive read that requires little mental effort -- that is, if you can immunize yourself against the all-too-frequent allusions to plays, novels and poetry having little or no direct connection with John Paul II.

There is much here that contextualizes the future pope’s role in history: his early life in Poland before, during and after World War II; his life under the Nazis and then the Communists; his interest and involvement in acting, poetry and playwriting; and his significant, entirely innocent, friendships with various women along the way.

As one gets further into the book, the author’s point of view emerges more clearly. It is a completely sympathetic biography -- so sympathetic to its subject, in fact, that the author (by no means a Catholicism expert) takes occasional swipes at Catholics who have adopted a different approach to some issues than the pope did. This is especially the case with the author’s treatment of Sister Theresa Kane who, as the elected leader of thousands of women in religious orders, suggested in the pope’s presence during his first visit to the U.S. in 1979 that ordination to the priesthood might someday be open to women. O’Connor also dismisses such eminent theologians as Edward Schillebeeckx and the late Bernard Haring as modernists or dissidents, which places their considerable contributions to an understanding of the faith in an unfavorable light.

What of John Paul II’s relationship to his successor, Benedict XVI? O’Connor tries to make it appear as if John Paul’s inclinations were always in the direction of permissiveness, while the former Cardinal Ratzinger’s were always in the direction of repression. It is erroneous to assume that any repressive measures taken against theologians and others during John Paul II’s pontificate were the work of mean old Cardinal Ratzinger. On the contrary, the pope was himself a doctrinal hard-liner and set the tone of his pontificate even before Ratzinger began his job. In 1979, the pope famously revoked Swiss theologian Hans Kung’s license to teach Catholic theology.

O’Connor also implies that John Paul II reluctantly decreed the excommunication of the schismatic Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who had led a revolt against Vatican II. But in ordaining four bishops without Vatican authorization, Lefebvre was automatically excommunicated under the church’s Code of Canon Law. Such incidents remind us that there are church mechanisms beyond even the pope’s authority -- not an absolute monarch, he is constrained by canon law and, more important, by Scripture and the creeds.

Other errors are smaller but just as troubling: George Hunston Williams was not a “New York philosopher” but a church historian at Harvard Divinity School. “Gaudium et Spes” and the “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World” are not two separate documents of Vatican II, but one and the same. The encyclical Evangelium Vitae is referred to as Evangelicum Vitae, while another encyclical is called Ut Unium Sint rather than Ut Unum Sint. There are several other such errors.

For an unrelentingly positive account of the life and papacy of John Paul II, one that is more careful about the details, why not invest the time in George Weigel’s “Witness to Hope,” which comes as close to being an official biography as we could have, given his unprecedented access to sources, to past and present associates of the pope and to the pope himself.

Our eyes now, of course, are on the future. We await new biographies of Benedict XVI and updated guides to the papacy and to the next conclave. We may not have to wait many years for another one. The new pope, after all, is at 78 the oldest man to assume the office since 1730. He is not likely to have a reign as long as John Paul II’s.