March 16 2022
THE TWO POPES
There is an eery similarity between the Calamitous 14th Century and the age we live in. Barbara W. Tuchman in THE DISTANT MIRROR, dealing with that period in intimate detail, begins her near 700 pages book, how, in the late 13th Century, Europe experienced an immense burst of development in art, technology, learning institutions, banking, evident in the invention of the compass, mechanical clock, the spinning wheel, wind- and watermill, expanse of travel, establishment of European universities, just to name a few. We, too, saw much innovation in all fields in the last 50 years.
A sudden climate change.
“Then, in 1315, after rains so incessant that they were compared to the Biblical Flood, crops failed all over Europe, and famine, the dark horseman of the Apocalypse, became familiar to all”, so writes Tuchman. The rise in population, preceding this natural disaster, had already exceeded agricultural production, with the result that general health had declined, leaving people undernourished and vulnerable. Today the same?
And then came the Black Plague, killing almost half the population.
So, what about us?
Compare this to today: Most of the Western world is overfed and undernourished, and the health of our Eight Billion of people is extremely vulnerable, saturated as we all are with plastic particles and organic compounds of unknown long-term danger, even as longevity is now double that of the 14th Century, thanks to better basic hygiene. For how long can we feed our teeming billions, as in the background loom declining oil stocks – we eat OIL – Global Heat, an ongoing Pandemic which, writes the Lancet, may have caused 16 million deaths, while wars and rumors of war persist? That same medical journal estimates that some 80 percent of the world’s people suffer from some sort of ailment.
War.
The 14th Century saw the Hundred Year’s War between France and England. Ukraine is only a skirmish compared to our perpetual war against THE EARTH, evident in increasing environmental disasters, killing millions through foul air, heat, wars, floods, forest fires.
Climate Change then; Climate Change now.
Here’s a quote from THE DISTANT MIRROR, “Acts of man no less than change in the climate marked the 14th Century as born to woe”.
That Climate Change, now duped the “Little Ice Age”, lasted until 1700: 400 years! Curiously, it gave birth to Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Shakespeare, the van Eyck Brothers, Rembrandt, Bach, while America was discovered, and the Reformation took place. A truly Golden Age. I wonder: is cooler weather better for creativity? Will a hotter world do the opposite?
Oh, yes, those Two Popes!
The king of France, Philip the Fair, moved the Papacy to Avignon, Southern France, in 1302, objecting to Pope Boniface’s ruling that: “It is necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff”. Not until 1450 became Rome the religious headquarters again.
Two Popes today?
Today, technically speaking, we too have two popes, one who retired, Benedict, and Francis.
However, Francis’ authority is deeply challenged, typical of today’s confusion which extends to all spheres of life, the result of two vastly opposite views, going far beyond the ecclesiastical scene, often due to what I call ‘the sex thing’.
Take the USA: there Cardinal Raymond Burke lambasts the Pope’s support for civil rights for gay couples. Around a third of Catholic bishops in the USA are hostile to the Pope for various reasons, from anti-vaxxers to those who proclaim that being a Democrat and a Catholic, such as President Biden, is a contradiction in terms. The Alabama-based EWTN is a hotbed of pro-Trump and anti-Francis propaganda, claiming to be the world’s largest religious media network with a global audience of 250 million listeners.
Due to these irreconcilable divisions, Francis could well be “The Last Pope.”
In general, the church, Protestant and Catholic alike, faces impossible choices. Francis, however I admire the man, still seems to be powerless to abolish celibacy, even while Peter, the founder of the Roman church, was obviously married. Then there still is that scandalous teaching of excluding women from clerical functions. No wonder Pope Francis meets opposition from both the rigorous Right and the flexible Left, a malady also afflicting Protestantism.
To me, it suggests the fading importance of organized religion. Personally, it means working out my salvation in awe and probing (Philippians 2: 12): yet, abandoning the church is not the answer for me.
Two Popes are a symbol of our divided world, pointing to another dangerous political division: Russia and China versus the Capitalist West.
All and all, the 21st Century increasingly looks like the Calamitous 14th Century when close to half of its inhabitants died. Will this similarity also extends to our time: a 40 PERCENT mortality rate through a nuclear war, combined with a sudden spike in temperature?
God have mercy.