Even though it would be a faux pas to offer my own favourites among the papabile who could be elected pope, there is no harm in pondering my personal favourites from among those who have served as popes in the past.
In the wake of the passing of Pope Francis, it is not for any of us to join the cacophonous chorus of those who are intent on telling us who the next pope should be. Although we might have personal favourites whom we’d like to see elected as the next pope, it is really irrelevant because we have not been selected to make the selection. The cardinal rule which must be remembered is that the next pope’s election will be the ruling of the cardinals, in conformity, we might hope and pray, with the will of God for which the cardinals themselves will be praying during the election process.
Even though it would be a faux pas to offer my own favourites among the papabile who could be elected pope, there is no harm in pondering my personal favourites from among those who have served as popes in the past.
Before I begin to list my favourite popes, it would be well to commence with the necessary clarification that anyone’s “favourite” popes are not necessarily the “greatest” popes. The former selection is based on a merely subjective judgment connected to personal preferences, whereas latter selection requires the disciplined following of objective criteria to arrive at an objective conclusion. Were I to try to list the “greatest” popes, it would be necessary to judge them, first and foremost, on the degree to which they attained sanctity. Those popes who have been canonized are ipso facto greater than those who have not. We might also judge greatness on the basis of the importance and influence of their doctrinal teaching. If this objective criterion is employed then the two popes who have been declared Doctors of the Church, St. Gregory the Great and the Leo the Great, would also qualify as being the greatest, especially as they have been declared to be both saints and doctors of the Church.
Moving to the naming of my favourites, I would start by including the two aforementioned popes, St. Gregory the Great and St. Leo the Great, but my criteria for doing so is personal. St. Gregory is a great favourite of mine because it was he who sent St. Augustine of Canterbury to England to convert the pagans of my native land to Christianity. St. Leo is a favourite because he was the saint after whom we chose to name our son. Our own “Leo the great” is a permanent reminder of the great pope after whom he is named.
The next pope among those few, those happy few, personal favourites would be St. Pius V. Elected pope in January 1566, he led by his own ascetic example, eating only two meagre meals a day, vegetable soup and a couple of eggs at lunchtime, and a small serving of fish, salad and fruit in the evening. He rose at dawn to say Mass and then spent long hours in work and prayer. He sought to tackle the widespread vice, so prevalent in Rome, by ministering to the poor in general and to the city’s prostitutes in particular. It is not, however, for these laudable achievements that he has become a personal favourite but for his proactive measures to support the persecuted and terrorized Catholics of England. Pope Pius locked horns with Elizabeth I, “the cold queen of England”, as Chesterton dubbed her, whom Pius called “the pretended queen of England and the servant of crime”, excommunicating her for her relentless war of attrition against the Catholics of her realm.
The crowning achievement of Pius V’s papacy was, however, his role in the defeat of the Muslim armada at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, which would not have been possible without his tireless efforts to form a Holy League to counter the Islamic threat. The Christian victory was a devastating blow for the Ottoman Empire, which lost all but thirty of its ships. In gratitude for this triumph and the devastating blow that it had dealt to the power of Islamic militarism and imperialism, Pius V instituted the Feast of Our Lady of Victory to celebrate the anniversary of the battle of Lepanto. He also added to the Litany of Loreto the supplication “Help of Christians” (Auxilium Christianorum), in honour of the role that he believed the intercession of the Blessed Virgin had played in bringing victory to the Christian forces.
St. Pius V is the first of four popes who took the name “Pius” to make my list of favourites. Blessed Pius IX retains a place in my affections as an icon of resistance to the rise of secularist political ideology. After the soldiers of Victor Emmanuel had entered Rome in 1870, the pope became a “prisoner of the Vatican”, besieged by his political enemies but utterly unyielding. In 1875, the young Oscar Wilde, a student at Oxford University, had a photograph of Pius IX on the wall of his rooms and had written plaintively in a poem of how “far away at Rome in evil bonds a second Peter lay”, declaring in another poem that the pope was “the prisoned shepherd of the Church of God”. Another literary convert to Catholicism who admired Pius IX was Evelyn Waugh who invoked Pius IX’s example to justify his own bitter opposition to the worldly incursions into the Church’s liturgy of those who were imposing iconoclastic vandalism in the name of the so-called “spirit of Vatican II”.
St. Pius X remains a firm favourite for his resolute defence of the Church from the heresy of modernism or what we might now call “progressivism”. In essence, he stood firm against those within the Church’s hierarchy who wanted the Church to adopt some of the philosophical ideas of the Enlightenment. His stance gained the enthusiastic endorsement of the young G.K. Chesterton, who denounced the ideas of modernism within the Catholic Church, even though he was not himself yet a Catholic. A popular aphorism ascribed to Chesterton is that “we don’t want a church that will move with the world, we want a church that will move the world”.
My fourth favourite pope named Pius is Pius XI, who presided over the Church in the politically and culturally volatile years between the two World Wars. His encyclical, Divini Illius Magistri, published in 1929, defended the rights of parents and the Church against the encroachments of secularist governments with respect to the schooling of children. In the following year, in Casti Connubii, he issued a robust defence of the Church’s timeless teaching on marriage, family and human life. Ironically it was published in the very year in which the Anglican Church surrendered to the culture of contraception at its notorious Lambeth Conference, a moral capitulation which marked the beginning of the inexorable disintegration of the Anglican communion. In choosing to move with the world, the Church of England had condemned itself to the worldliness which precedes irrelevance and ultimate self-destruction. As with Pius IX half a century earlier, Pius XI found himself besieged in the Vatican by secularist political enemies, in this case the fascists. In 1931, Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, boasted that “the Church is not sovereign nor is it even free”. In defiance, this courageous pope insisted on the independence and sovereignty of the Church from state control and criticized Mussolini’s regime for its persecution of Catholics.
Having defied the Italian Fascists, Pius XI then turned his attention to the evils of both the Nazis and the communists. In two encyclicals, issued a week apart in 1937, he condemned the Nazi government in Germany for its persecution of Catholics, its racism and anti-Semitism, and for its tribal neo-paganism. In the encyclical against communism, he attacked the evils of Marxism in general and Soviet communism in particular. “Society is for man and not vice versa,” he insisted, condemning communism for reversing this right order.
The final selection of this favourite few is the recently deceased Benedict XVI. Prior to his election to the papacy, while serving as the right-hand man and trusted confidant of his predecessor, St. John Paul II, he had published his seminal work, The Spirit of the Liturgy, presumably with St. John Paul II’s blessing, in which he elucidates the definitive principles governing the celebration of the Mass with the brilliance of one of the twentieth century’s finest minds and one of its greatest theologians. In a recently published essay, I called the publication of The Spirit of the Liturgy twenty-five years ago to be the planting of a beneficent bomb which is also a time-bomb. It’s ticking as time is ticking. All that is needed is for a future pope to mandate that it be taught in every seminary in the world and the liturgy will be renewed globally within a generation. It might not be the next pope. It doesn’t really matter. Benedict’s explosive blessing is primed. It’s ready whenever a future pope chooses to let its explosive power loose. The consequence will be a great liturgical revival and the renewal of the Church. It remains to be seen whether the next pope will have the vision needed to be the servant of this revival and renewal. If he does prove to be such a servant, he will certainly be added to my own personal list of favourite popes. But this is a mere trifle. Much more important will be his addition to the list of truly great popes. May we pray that the Church will be blessed with such greatness.
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