How can one be comfortable with the treatment of old Popes like Kings?

[dugood70]

The Popes lived in palaces of gold, were carried around on palanquins by servants while wearing expensive silk robes, were treated basically as royalty. But the Pope is supposed to be the Vicar of Christ, the humble carpenter. How do we reconcile these concepts?

Researching Catholicism and this bothers me more than almost anything else. If humble Peter, the first Pope, had been in charge in the Middle Ages, would he have accepted such treatment?

 

[RandomAlias]

Researching Catholicism and this bothers me more than almost anything else.

Welcome to Catholic Answers Forums.

I don’t understand how you could be bothered so much by a relatively minor historic detail. In your research of Catholicism, what else did you discover? Did you find anything good?

 

[redbetta]

The Church has among her saints both royalty and peasants. There is nothing objectively wrong with being treated like royalty so long as there is the understanding that God ultimately comes first.

Honestly, one thing that I really appreciate about Catholicism is that is does not make the mistake a lot of well-meaning Christians and secularists make in assuming that poverty makes one virtuous and that having and enjoying riches makes you morally suspect.

 

[fhansen]

The Church has lived through very different times than our own, and we can’t know that we’d have acted any differently had we’d been around at any particular point in those times. She’s also had to go through her own maturation process; the light that entered the world two millenia ago that she received was incomparably brilliant, way more than a typical human could grasp and conform to all at once. But that light has been changing the Church positively-and the world she lives in and interacts with-even as darkness will always be co-mingled with it to one degree or another for the time being. And, I believe, the Church is now at a place where she comprehends and reflects that light, the light of truth and love, better than ever.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

People in past eras thought of all that pomp and circumstance as appropriate to honor someone as holy as the Pope was supposed to be (individual Popes, being human, varied in holiness). The Pope is the vicar of Christ on earth. If Christ returned to earth as our king, people in past eras would have treated him as they treated their kings. They applied this thinking to Christ’s main representative on earth, the Pope.

For some centuries there was also a prevailing doctrine in many countries that rulers derived their powers directly from God, so treating the ruler or king with huge amounts of deference and luxury was seen as a way of honoring God, and disobeying the ruler was seen as disobeying God. The Pope, being God’s direct representative on earth according to Catholics, was considered to be the equal of, or even superior to, secular kings. Therefore he was treated in the same way as a secular king. To do otherwise may well have been seen during that era as saying the Catholic Church, or even God himself, wasn’t as important or powerful as the King of Country X who lived and was presented in a very rich manner.

Starting around the time of the American and French revolutions, people eventually began to question the unjust (to them) manner in which some rulers acted, which over time led to the entire concept of a king or absolute ruler falling out of favor. Nowadays, when we see royalty with a lot of fancy trappings, we don’t think of those as giving honor to God through honoring the King; we think instead that all the money spent on those luxuries could have been better spent to help the King’s subjects, particularly those who are economically deprived. And, as shown by the original post, people began to think in the same way about the Pope. Fancy trappings are no longer seen as giving proper honor to God; they’re seen as unnecessary, wasteful, and possibly even immoral in a world where poor people are starving.

The Popes and the Magisterium themselves have adopted this same thinking over time, and have evolved to present themselves in a more simple manner that is more in tune with the current culture that frowns on the trappings of royalty.

 

[Kei]

Christ is the King of kings, so while I see what you are saying, we as believers in Him after His Resurrection, as He now sits at the Right Hand of the Father, I see very much why people would want to treat the vicar of Christ well.

 

[dugood70]

I’ve discovered an incredible amount of good. A lot of it has been challenging though. The focus on tradition is the very antithesis of what I was always raised to believe, and I have found that the idea of Sola Scriptura is indefensible. It’s formed on shaky ground. So I’ve become far more interested in the Church Fathers and early Christians, which has enriched my understanding of God and Gospel.

It’s actually quite surprising to me that I am so taken aback at the treatment of Popes, because intellectually I knew that Popes were subject to much grandeur, historically, but my life experience is Mormonism and Southern Baptism, both of which are very plain and reject almost all adornment. To treat the Vicar of Christ as a king is alien to me, and despite all the Truth I’ve discovered in Catholicism my gut reaction to a video like the one I will link below was revulsion and disgust (no offense, my view has grown, that was just my first reaction). The same disgust I feel when I look at Joel Osteen, in all honesty. It looked like a man using Christ’s name to become rich and influential. It still bothers me, but reading the answers on this site in the last day or so has provided me some more perspectives that I can consider.

Short answer, yes, I’ve discovered a lot of good. It was just a shock.

 

[Genesis315]

The Bible says to “give honor to whom honor is due.” And in this case, the honor is not due to the personal merits of the man (many Popes have been honorable, some have not been honorable), but rather to his office in Christ’s Church as delegate of Christ the King of the Universe. It was a reminder to other monarchs that theirs was not the only power in the world–Christ also reigns. More and more of these trappings have been dropped in recent centuries as they have lost their significance and symbolism as the world changed.

In any event, it’s good for both the people doing the honoring and the man in the office to remember it’s not about the man.

And the Pope should be influential in the world on behalf of Christ. Some have abused their position (this was a temptation to the Apostles too), but usually all these trappings are owned by the Church, not the Pope and his power is used to give Christ a prominent voice among the nations.

I actually think they should bring back the sedia gestoria (the carried chair) rather than use the “Popemobile.” It’s much more eco-friendly, uses no fossil fuels, and even has manual fans instead of air conditioning! Pope Francis should love it!

 

[angel12]

Researching Catholicism and this bothers me more than almost anything else.

Times and customs were much different then; and the Pope was considered a temporal leader as well as spiritual. We can’t expect past centuries to see things through our eyes.

 

[Loud-living-dogma]

Okay, so that clip was pretty weird. Real pope making an appearance in a Hollywood movie? That did look super hokey. Was the pope normally carried while inside St. Peter’s Basilica? I thought that was just for outdoor processions. Does actual historical footage (not Hollywood movie footage) of popes seem less weird to you?

 

[commenter]

The Popes lived in palaces of gold, were carried around on palanquins by servants while wearing expensive silk robes, were treated basically as royalty. But the Pope is supposed to be the Vicar of Christ, the humble carpenter. How do we reconcile these concepts?

Researching Catholicism and this bothers me more than almost anything else. If humble Peter, the first Pope, had been in charge in the Middle Ages, would he have accepted such treatment?

Palaces of gold? Sounds like pretty expensive architecture but couldn’t hold up a second story.

I am American. Our whole culture was founded on the ideal of equality. Being carried around in a sedan chair, or having any kind of “titles”, even including calling priests “Father” and many other things, goes against our secular national tradition.

But so what? The gospel doesn’t have to be American. Much of the non essentials about Catholicism is, or was, European. I have read that some Protestant denominations got rid of the title “bishop” when they came over to America, to get away from that European Protestant bishop culture.

Popes since 1960 have de emphasized the European cultural element.

You will never see the US president in a sedan chair, but you can be sure he, and other wealthy Democrats and Republicans, is conveyed in lots more expensive ways.

 

[midori]

You do realize, for about a thousand years, Popes really were kings? They had temporal power in addition to spiritual power. It’s only been in the last 150 years, with the creation of the State of Italy, that the Papal States have disappeared from the map. Vatican City, as a nation, is less than 100 years old. The Pope is the ruler of both the Holy See and Vatican City, although Bertello is president. But if you look at the last, say, fifty years, you’ll see that the Pope has continued to shed those trappings of temporal power-- for example, the papal tiara hasn’t been worn at a papal coronation since Paul VI in 1963. John Paul I, in August of 1978, was the first pope in memory to turn down a coronation, in favor of an inauguration. But even Paul VI had donated his own papal tiara to the Basilica in Washington, DC; abolished the Palatine Guard; abolished the Noble Guard; and discontinued the stuff with the Roman Nobility at the Papal Court.

So, for a millennium, the Pope were both civil and religious leaders. The momentum for disassembling that has been solidly in place during my lifetime… there’s not a whole lot of people nowadays who have living memory of a time when the Pope had an active court.

But before the Papal states came about— what about then? How many popes during the first five or six or seven hundred years of Christianity died as martyrs? It was a lot. They certainly weren’t being carried around and honored. They didn’t stop dying for their faith, even after Christianity ceased to be illegal. So making the jump from being persecuted for love of Christ, to being the ruler of a territory—

I don’t disagree that with time, though, the tangibles became more important to some men than the spiritual. But I also recognize that not everyone lives in my time of history, in my geographic location, and in my culture. However, I also recognize that concepts like egalitarianism-- the idea that all people are created equal-- upon which so much else hinges were impossible in the pagan world. So, my culture as it currently stands could never have come about without the context of Christianity.

 

[whyeyeman]

The name “Pontiff” means “builder of bridges”. The Pope is so called because he is the bridge between heaven and earth.
I think it is a good thing that this bridge between heaven and earth is adorned with heavenly, King like attire.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

That Pope Pius XII footage is actually from one of his last real audiences (and it’s a German movie, not Hollywood, he’s in). It’s not staged.

I can see a very practical reason for carrying the Pope around in that chair: to hold him up so that people can see him as he’s giving the blessing. It is supposed to be an audience, and look at the size of the crowd. If he just walked in, nobody behind the first couple rows of people would be able to see a thing. The Popemobile used today likewise raises him up so that people can see the Pope blessing them as he goes by.