For the Catholic faithful, there are always opportunities to offer up suffering, and that includes listening to BBC commentators talking about the new pope. In the dead space between billowing white smoke and the announcement of Pope Leo XIV yesterday evening, viewers were forced to endure pundits trying to shoehorn the Catholic faith into their mental repertoire of progressive cliches.
Did you realise this was the most “diverse” conclave in history? Did you know that various enthusiastic people (for which read: childlike peasant types) have waited “all day in the sun” to hear the news? “They certainly know how to do drama, don’t they?” said one supercilious git, apparently unaware that British people might be Roman Catholic too. He banged on: “This place — Rome, Europe! — needs to be challenged by the realities of the developing world; it needs to be shaken out of its complacency.” Only belatedly did he remember to ascribe the sentiment to the late Pope Francis — also described as “a bit of a rockstar” — and not himself.
I tried to ignore the obvious political bias; for it was the satanists who first taught me to drown out irritating worldly intrusions into strictly sacred matters. As a child, my family and I attended a Catholic church on an RAF base leased to the US Navy, set in the foothills of the Grampian mountains. The only available building was a Utilitarian-looking prefab which had to be shared with every other kind of religion there. Shelves at the back of the room contained a dizzying selection of reading material, from pamphlets about lives of the saints, to scientology books by L. Ron Hubbard. Once a month, the devil-worshippers apparently got their turn at the altar. “They are very friendly and polite”, a gently ironical priest from New York once told my father.
Still, our congregation managed to suppress any troubling thoughts of previous occupants for an hour or two every Sunday, as the space was remade into a holy one by the unfolding of the familiar rites. As I remember it, Catholicism is quite at home with the delicate dance between the sacred and the profane. And indeed, as the papal conclave made its way towards its dramatic decision yesterday, a similar sense of focus was probably required.
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From one perspective, conclaves are so obviously worldly: full of human flaws, compromise, and opportunism. According to a story circulating this week, newbies to the role watched the new Hollywood film in order to know what to expect. Factions form, votes get switched, and gradually the main contenders start to emerge. In between, there are huddles over dinner, corridor conversations, and whispers in the breakfast queue.
Though it sounds glamorous, in reality I imagine it’s more like some tortuously long academic conference; exhausted introverts continually forced to be sociable, overstimulated by too much caffeine, and unable to hide behind their confiscated smartphones. Apparently they even wear name badges. With all that distraction and pressure, the rhythms of rituals inherited from centuries of conclaves must feel like solid ground.
Back in the Eighties, as I crossed the threshold of my occasional church, the sense of mysterious transformation was compounded by the fact I was also entering a little piece of America, appearing like a crazy hallucination: cursive script on the noticeboards, friendly soccer-mom Sunday School teachers, root beer in the vending machines. It was all very unlike the Scottish world that lay just beyond the gates. And here, too, there was negotiation between the relatively permanent and the ephemeral. Along with the exotic frosted donuts after Mass, the words and gestures of the liturgy were the only real constant.
The base’s mission was to keep track of long-range nuclear missiles. Rotating tours of duty meant some family in the congregation was always arriving, or leaving with a celebratory cake. Every now and again a new naval chaplain with an Irish or an Italian name would pitch up in the tiny rural location, fresh off a gunship or out of a warzone. His subsequent inevitable collapse into bored alcoholism would be studiously ignored by his flock. This church also gave me my first glimpse of that fascinating indeterminate object, a priest in a cassock puffing furiously on a fag.
My early religiosity didn’t last. Relative outsider to the faith as I now am, trying to guess who might become pope was like trying to pick a Grand National winner, based only on horses’ names and the colours of jockey silks. Would it be the powerbroker Parolin; the keffiyeh-sporting Pizzaballa; the austere conservative Erdő, or jolly-looking progressive Tagle? In the end, it was 69-year-old moderate Robert Prevost, an American with a French name who has spent most of his ecclesiastical mission in Peru, and who once argued on X about ordo amoris with J.D. Vance. Symbolically straddling various global currents, this too looked like a canny move. Or as the BBC woman put it: “Let’s be honest; he ticks a lot of boxes.”
But despite the self-interest and unpredictability of group dynamics, for believers, a conclave is directed by God not man. According to Cardinal Vincent Nichols, divine will is revealed by a “resonance”: “[I]t can come from a phrase or prayer… a conversation over a meal, a sense that something’s going on here, and it’s those things that count as much as predetermined positions or perspectives.” The sequestration is supposed to enhance openness to God’s will, without any distraction; as is the elaborate formality of solemnly counting, then burning the ballots. In essence, observant Catholics must treat the high drama as directed by a single auteur, while still acknowledging that the actors have a lot of room for improv.
And the same apparently goes for canonisation. A fascinating piece in The Economist details the ongoing campaign to make deceased Italian teenager Carlos Acuti the first millennial saint, by fitting him into the requisite mould of “heroic virtue”. Wishing to connect with younger worshippers, the Vatican is apparently in the market for a relatable saint who wore trainers and looked like he was in a boy band. And so awkward recollections of schoolmates are downplayed; stories of his great piety pushed to the fore; posthumous miracles conveniently found and authenticated.
As Kenneth Woodward writes in his book Making Saints: “Each time a new saint is officially recognised by the Church of Rome, it does so in the wider interest of enquiring into the nature of holiness itself.” The same is presumably true of choosing a pope. But still, those in charge believe theirs is a genuine inquiry. They are discovering the right answer as dictated by God, rather than finessing history to fit the desired narrative. Whether aspects of Leo XIV’s back story require some finessing remains to be seen.
A few decades ago, pointing out the apparently earthbound, arbitrary element of religious procedures would be offered by triumphant rationalists as proof of hollowness. I’m sure I once took it that way too. Seeing what tawdry motivations lay behind the curtain seemed like an effective antidote to faith. In a defensive response to all the scrutiny and mockery, many Christian institutions dialled down the mysticism and got rid of tradition and formality, selling off the family pews and bringing us the cringe of the acoustic guitar, the Alpha course, and the rave in the nave instead. But now, Catholic churches are filling up again, and particularly with young people — even in the absence of relatable millennial saints. They don’t appear to be put off by the Tridentine Mass, women wearing mantillas, or the burning of palms for Ash Wednesday. In fact, they seem to rather like these things.
Of course, this might too be a passing fashion: a pendulum swing away from decades of mirthless, flat-voiced rationalism. It is perhaps compounded by being buffeted about aimlessly in the vortex of hyper-liberal values, eventually giving rise to a desire for firmer footing. But from the perspective of the believer, even fads for Christianity don’t happen on their own. The universe’s most successful influencer is also involved in their co-production. Between nature, God, and man, the background causal metaphysics may be murky, but no weirder than thinking that Mother Earth is hurting, or that sexed bodies get changed with words.
Life is coming at us fast these days, and we need all the help we can get. I’m glad that the words of the liturgy create a space to appreciate the sacred, even when uttered by inebriated naval chaplains in competition for space with satanists. And it is beautiful that the papal conclave still unfolds with meditative, ritualised solemnity, even as backroom deals get made, BBC commentators sneer, and shy clerics long for their smartphones.
