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Quickly describing things...anyway...How Picking a Pope Has Changed

Hosted by:

- Jesse Fries

https://serve.podhome.fm/anyway_mini_podcast

[00:00:01] Jesse Fries:

This is the AnyWay podcast with your host, Jesse Fries.   I'm in the process of, creating a nice road trip for me and the kids this summer. Looks like we'll be headed up towards   New England and everything like that, so that should be a lot of fun.   Anyway,   how picking a pope has changed?   When a pope dies or more rarely resigns, the Catholic church needs to pick a new pope.   This process is pretty straightforward.   The Catholic the or the College of Cardinals lock themselves into a room,   which is the Sistine Chapel. So it's a pretty nice room. They vote. And if no one gets two thirds of the vote, they burn the ballots and send up black smoke.   When a person gets two thirds of the vote and they accept the position, they have been elected pope.  

Once there is a pope, they release white smoke, ring some bells, and announce that there is a new pope.   While it seems simple, it really isn't that simple.   Only cardinals under 80 can vote.   And then within that group of cardinals, there are factions,   like traditionalists,   conservatives,   liberals, and Franciscans,   and Jesuits,   just to name some.   With all these different viewpoints, politics are played out in a secrecy   behind closed doors.   There's a movie about this called Conclave. It's more of a modern movie   if you wanted a more entertaining view of what's going on starting tomorrow.  

But then let's get to the history of it all.   At first, the pope was just considered the bishop of Rome and nothing more than an equal to other bishops.   At the most, a first amongst equals to the other bishops.   With that in mind, after Peter, the first bishop of Rome,   aka the first pope,   popes were selected by the clergy in the immediate vicinity.   It later changed to include the church congregation,   the laity.   This changed, though, once emperor Constantine ended the persecution on the church.   I guess no more throwing Christians to the lions.   For centuries after the end of the persecution   and into the church's   ascendancy into the sole religion,   the secular powers of the Roman Empire and the kings of Italy heavily influenced selection of the pope   to the point that the Roman emperor and later the holy Roman emperor   had to confirm the pope.  

A few popes were even installed as pope by direct imperial installation.   Oh, just a footnote.   But the first guy to call himself pope was Gregory the first during the late sixth and early seventh centuries.   For about four centuries, nothing really changed in the pope picking process.   But then we jump to October   when pope Nicholas the second made a papal decree stating that cardinal bishops would pick the most worthy of the office,   And then they would summon the cardinals who would then cast votes for their choice.   And they removed   the laity, the congregation,   from choosing the pope.  

The next huge change   came in December   when the second council of Lyons   set up the conclave.   In Latin, conclave means with a key,   which was designed to speed up the process and to limit outside influence.   But the first conclave was actually before the first conclave   in December.   Pope Clement the fourth died in December,   and there are two groups, the French and the Italians.   And they both wanted the new pope   to be from their region. Now neither France nor Italy existed at this time, but they were still French and there are still Italians, and they wanted the pope to be from their areas.   To this end, they couldn't come to an agreement. For over two and a half years,   there was no decision. It got so bad that   the locals literally locked the cardinals into a room and fed them only bread and water.  

And when that didn't work, they removed the roof to help the holy spirit in reaching and picking the new pope.   But that didn't even work. So a council was formed as a way to compromise, and they finally agreed on Gregory the tenth,   who'd liked the conclave,   the conclave idea so much that he made it part of church law.   The next change, just a couple years later, was when Gregory the tenth mandated that a super majority of two thirds was required to win election.   And then from the fourteen hundreds to the eighteen hundreds, the monarchs of Europe interfered in the process   by forming alliances with cardinals in the area   and   telling the cardinals who they should vote for and who they should veto and everything like that. It was a madhouse.  

This all changed after the church lost the Papal States, though. The Papal States were a territory in Central Italy that the church owned and controlled,   but that ended in the mid to late nineteenth century   when a national movement swept through Italy.   And since the church lost its secular land, and with that lost its secular power,   it turned to be a more religiously   centered group.   With that in mind, pope Pius the tenth, at the turn of the twentieth century,   revoked the veto right of secular leaders,   which places the sole decision then within the church itself.   Now there have been tweaks to the process and everything like that, but it has roughly been that way without change   for the last a hundred and twenty one years.