Letters from Rome 2025, No. 3—The Papal Interregnum

Along the Tiber: Lessons from the Past for the Present

by Francis X. Maier

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“It’s a perfect time to be here in Rome,” said a bishop friend this week, “because it’s a great experience of the Church—in all her murkiness and all her splendor.” True words, those. Rome is heavy with history, and history is an unsentimental record of human behavior. It’s also the teacher of lessons. Thus a walk along the Tiber, in these days between the death of one pope and the election of another, can lead to some curious thoughts about the past. On a sunny Roman morning earlier this week, I found myself wondering where exactly, in the river, they dumped the corpse of Pope Formosus.

Some background: Most popes have been good men. Dozens have been saints. The genuinely bad ones have been few. But even among the worst, each offers his own peculiar lesson on the nature of the Christian Church. I’ll explain.

Formosus reigned as pope in the late ninth century. He was an ambitious, complicated man. Made a cardinal in his late forties, he served in various sensitive diplomatic roles for the Holy See. His appetite for influence entangled him in the bitter European power struggles of the day; led to accusations of immorality and violations of Church law; triggered his excommunication; and created a long list of enemies with even longer memories. But he would not be stymied. He had miraculous survival skills. Later reinstated, Formosus returned to Church duties and was elected unanimously to the papacy in 891. He died in 896.

Alas, indignities followed. Remember that list of enemies? In January 897, Pope Stephen VI exhumed the corpse of Formosus, dressed it in papal vestments, and held a trial—the so-called “Cadaver Synod”—accusing the dead pope of perjury, illegally gaining the papacy, and other crimes. Formosus was convicted. His papacy was declared null and void. The fingers he had used for blessing were chopped off, his papal vestments stripped, and the corpse was tossed into the Tiber. Eventually it was retrieved and reburied in St. Peter’s Basilica. But a model of sanctity, Formosus was not.

Here’s the lesson: The current papal interregnum comes at the end of an unbroken line—more than a century—of good men; men who served in very difficult times as adequate-to-great popes. That’s a remarkable blessing. We should pray earnestly that the next pope, whoever he might be, will serve with similar purity of heart and the skills the Church needs. But sin is a universal human condition. The grace of the papal office can guide and strengthen the occupant, but it does not erase his personality or his human flaws. Even in the best of times, the Church survives her leaders and her people—all of us broken and imperfect—because she doesn’t finally belong to us. We don’t own her. The Church is “ours” only in the sense of a mother and teacher. She belongs to Jesus Christ; the Church is his. And he protects and renews her through the ages despite our genius for fouling things up.

Here’s another lesson: The Church survives even in the worst of times, and for the same reason. Rome is built on the blood of Christian martyrs. In a sense, the city is a museum commemorating that fact and witnessing to the truth of Tertullian’s remark that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church. As it turns out, the modern world is no less hostile to the Church and her mission than the ancient world was. And the author Robert Royal stressed exactly that reality in his public comments at the Angelicum here in Rome this week.  

The blood of Christian martyrs still flows freely, Royal argues, and he offers powerful, detailed proof with his latest book, The Martyrs of the New Millennium (Sophia Press). As of 2024, he writes, “an estimated 340 million Christians [were] potential targets for persecution,” and thousands died that year for their faith. Among nations, North Korea was the leading persecutor, but nearly all of the top fifty offenders were Muslim-majority states.  

Radical Islam is especially active and vicious in Africa, where Christianity has seen explosive growth. In the first quarter of the current century alone, the number of African Christians has doubled from around 100 million to more than 200 million. Young African Christians now outnumber young African Muslims four to one. The response from Islamic extremists has been savage. As Royal notes, 

The world doesn’t pay much attention to Christian martyrdom and persecution despite the fact that Christians are attacked and repressed in more countries and to a greater degree than any other religious group. But even people who do not much care about or pay little attention to these matters must almost intentionally avert their gaze [from] the steady stream of Christian casualties in the central African nation of Nigeria. The situation in Nigeria is clearly the most openly bloody instance of religious persecution and martyrdom of Christians in the twenty-first century.

Hard evidence bears this out. In the period 2009–2021, a Nigerian watchdog group “documented 43,000 Christians killed, 18,500 Christians ‘disappeared,’ 17,500 churches attacked, 2,000 Christian elementary schools destroyed,” and other Islamist anti-Christian crimes. And the killing continues. A Nigerian bishop describes the situation as “creeping genocide.”

But the problem of anti-Christian violence is much wider than Africa. Royal presents compelling evidence of Christian persecution globally with sections on Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, China, and the developed Western nations. The effect is devastating. Mexico now “ranks as the most dangerous country in the world for Catholic priests . . . between 2007 and 2022, a mere fifteen-year span, somewhere between forty-five and fifty Catholic priests were assassinated in what reports have characterized as ‘narco-related violence.’ If nuns, seminarians and lay pastoral workers are added, the count is even higher.”  

And in Europe too, the trends are unsettling. In 2022 alone, thirty European nations experienced 749 anti-Christian hate crimes. And in 2023, according to watchdog groups, “there were 2,111 anti-Christian hate crimes” tracked in Austria, Finland, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Again, the most conspicuous attacks on Christians in Europe “come from radicalized Islamists.” 

Everyone has an opinion about what we need in a new bishop of Rome. And these days, along the Tiber, so do I. I think we need a man of clarity, strong intellect, courage, and vigorous evangelical witness; a man convicted in the unique, salvific content of the Christian faith; a man who can encourage, support, defend, and inspire the many millions of Christians who daily put their lives on the line for their faith. But that’s just my opinion. The Church belongs to Jesus Christ, not me. And history suggests that he knows what he’s doing—despite me, and despite us.

Francis X. Maier, a senior fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is the author of True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church (Ignatius).

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Larry Chapp’s Roman Diary—April 30

I ended my last letter from Rome by criticizing the view, shared by many, that “conservative” critics of Pope Francis simply do not understand that his pastoral project was not about changing the Church’s moral teachings. It was instead, so the argument goes, a simple program of pastoral gradualism that tries to take into account the “messiness” of life and the “complex concrete circumstances” that mitigate moral guilt. 

There is also in this “criticism of the critics” of Pope Francis a claim that the Church’s moral doctrine, though true, has not taken the “messiness” of life seriously enough as a major factor in how we approach sinners, which is to say, all of us. And that last point is important since the full implications of this allegedly more “pastoral” awareness of how “complex” the conditions of life are bleeds over from the truly hard cases into all of us. It is simply human nature to rationalize our actions and to view our own lives as marked by a unique set of mitigating circumstances.  

Pastors of souls do indeed need to be endlessly compassionate and forgiving, slow to judge in un-nuanced ways, and to tread softly lest we crush the already bruised reed. Every good pastor I know, including my own, understands this and I can count on one hand the number of priests I have confessed to who were overly harsh and strictly “legalistic” in their application of the Church’s moral norms.

Therefore, as the theologian David Deane has noted, there was an anachronistic quality to much of the rhetoric from Pope Francis about the need for a less judgmental Church. Pope Francis often spoke in a manner that seemed to be fighting the pastoral battles of a long bygone era where penitents were racked with “Catholic guilt,” usually over sexual sins, and in an overall atmosphere of moralistic finger-wagging.  

The pastoral reality of today, with exceptions of course since scrupulosity is still with us in some, is that of a widespread moral laxity. All too typical are near-empty lines for confession and Sunday Masses where the eucharistic reception rate approaches 100 percent. Most Western Catholics, if opinion polls are to be believed, differ only slightly from their non-Catholic contemporaries in moral matters, which has caused many pastors to steer clear of moral issues in their homilies entirely and to rarely move beyond the “it’s nice to be nice to the nice” moral etiquette that most of us already learned from our first-grade teachers about lunch line decorum. 

A far more astute awareness concerning our current pastoral situation can be found in the teaching of Pope St. John Paul II. John Paul recognized that a distinction needed to be made between the thoroughly legitimate pastoral “law of gradualism” where penitents are gently and patiently guided to the truth over time, and an illegitimate “gradualism of the law” that views moral norms themselves as changing, depending on the “complex circumstances” of our lives. In Familiaris Consortio (34) he states:

They cannot however look on the law as merely an ideal to be achieved in the future: they must consider it as a command of Christ the Lord to overcome difficulties with constancy. “And so what is known as ‘the law of gradualness’ or step-by-step advance cannot be identified with ‘gradualness of the law,’ as if there were different degrees or forms of precept in God’s law for different individuals and situations.”

Along these same lines, Pope John Paul, in Veritatis Splendor, criticizes the view that the moral law is simply too difficult to live out for many people and therefore that the moral law is merely an “ideal” for them and not anything truly binding. He states (VS 102):

Even in the most difficult situations man must respect the norm of morality so that he can be obedient to God’s holy commandment and consistent with his own dignity as a person. Certainly, maintaining a harmony between freedom and truth occasionally demands uncommon sacrifices, and must be won at a high price: it can even involve martyrdom. But, as universal and daily experience demonstrates, man is tempted to break that harmony: “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate . . . I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want” (Rom. 7:15, 19).

Contrast this with the following from Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia (303):

Yet conscience can do more than recognize that a given situation does not correspond objectively to the overall demands of the Gospel. It can also recognize with sincerity and honesty what for now is the most generous response which can be given to God, and come to see with a certain moral security that it is what God himself is asking amid the concrete complexity of one’s limits, while yet not fully the objective ideal. 

Much ink has been spilled in an attempt to view this statement as a perfectly standard application of pastoral gradualism. I disagree with these efforts since the clear import here is that for many individuals the “concrete complexity” of their lives imposes upon them “limits” to what they can do morally speaking. It is hard not to see in this statement a marked tendency toward proportionalist moral theories that view circumstances as the primary criterion for adjudicating moral agency.  

There is also a subtle anthropology at play here that rightly acknowledges that sin diminishes our freedom and clouds our moral judgment. But there is also an implied claim that this diminished freedom is for many so mitigating of moral guilt as to render the moral life entrapped in a closed cycle of slavery to sin. Ironically, this represents a very forensic understanding of the moral law since the focus is entirely upon mitigated guilt in the face of a “norm” rather than on the moral law as the very thing—indeed the only thing—that can liberate us from our slavery and enhance our freedom. In other words, the goal of the moral life is liberation from the ruling archons of the age and the deepest restoration of our freedom.  

We must avoid the mentality of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor that sees the Church’s main function as correcting the overly burdensome demands on our freedom placed upon us by Christ. We must avoid the desecration of our freedom via the path of a thousand paper cuts of “complex circumstances” as the ruling archons of our lives.  

Finally, given the rampant moral relativism of our times, the question arises whether this emphasis upon mitigated guilt due to our complex circumstances is the wisest pastoral strategy for the Church to adopt. As we approach the coming conclave one hopes that the assembled cardinals will make a sober assessment of “the signs of the times” and elect a pope who will call us all to holiness of life rather than an acquiescence to human fallibility and frailty.  

Larry Chapp, a retired professor of theology at De Sales University in Allentown, Pennsylvania, is the host of the Gaudium et Spes 22 podcast and the co-founder, with his wife Carmina, of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania.