The Papacy in a New Era: From Gregory VII to Leo XIV

The modern papacy is actually a product of centuries of change

By Darrick Taylor, Ph.D.*

Pope Leo XIII (r. 1873 to 1903) addressed the great social questions of his time in a series of encyclicals. Pope Leo XIV chose his papal name as a nod to Leo XIII

The election of Pope Leo XIV begins a new reign for the Catholic Church, and people are naturally interested in how this Pope will deal with the many challenges she faces.

Robert Prevost earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and chose the name Leo as a nod to Leo XIII, who addressed the great social questions of his time in his encyclicals, with Artificial Intelligence in mind. Though he apparently thought about retiring the papal “X” online account, Leo has revived it and even has a Latin alt for it as well.

We are definitely in a new era.

Which is why it is an opportune moment to reflect on the nature of the papacy, how it operates in the contemporary world, and how it has changed over the centuries.

Rome has made claims to primacy over the whole Church since at least the fourth century, if not earlier. But the way it has exercised this authority has changed over time.

With the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the bishop of Rome became the de facto ruler of the Eternal City. With the rise of the Frankish Empire, this authority became de jure with the creation of the papal states.

After the collapse of Charlemagne’s Empire, the Church found itself in dire shape, and to the minds of many, deeply corrupted by lay control. Reformers of the 11th and 12th centuries built up the papacy in order to reform the Church and liberate it from subservience to feudal kings and nobility. It created a legal structure for the papacy, turning it into a sort of super-monarchy to overawe medieval princes.

In the late Middle Ages and into the seventeenth century, the papacy became a Renaissance court and a center of culture.

Theologically speaking, the idea of the Pope as an infallible interpreter of Revelation gained currency in the thirteenth century, adding to his already considerable authority. The Counter-Reformation bolstered the authority of the papacy to respond to attacks on Catholic tradition, but, wisely, the Council of Trent did not make papal authority a subject of its deliberations.

Counter-Reformation writers such as Robert Bellarmine did, however, make popular the notion that the papacy’s infallibility extended not only to its teaching but to its canonical legislation. Though the Church never proclaimed this a dogma and has since abandoned such claims, they were widely believed well into the twentieth century.

But the papacy as we know it in practice dates from the nineteenth century, when the French Revolution, the Risorgimento, and other political upheavals shook the Church to its core, bringing the Papal States to an end and forcing it to adapt to modern society.

The Church responded by centralizing authority in the papacy in unprecedented ways, tightening control over episcopal appointments, codifying a universal code of canon law for the first time, and of course, defining papal infallibility as a dogma at the First Vatican Council.

Perhaps even more importantly, the papacy did something extraordinary: it embraced mass media for the first time, having shunned it since the printing press nearly destroyed the Church during the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Pius IX’s charm made him a natural for the new Catholic press to follow in the mid-nineteenth century, and Popes like Leo XIII took on the role of teacher to the world through their encyclicals. Later popes would make use of radio and television to proclaim the Church’s message to the world, most successfully Pope John Paul II, whom journalists dubbed the “Promo Pope” as a result.

Over a millennium and a half, the papacy has gone from patriarch to feudal monarch to Renaissance prince to postmodern messaging machine, one practically without parallel.

No other religious institution in the world — perhaps no secular one either — can gain the world’s attention quite like the papacy — when it wants to. These institutional adaptations allow the papacy to carry its higher purpose into the world. But this begs the question of what exactly the Pope’s purpose is.

One must admit that though the Gospel of Matthew has Jesus calling Simon Bar Jonah “the rock” on which the Church is built, this does not provide a ready blueprint for specific historical circumstances.

Throughout history, most have seen the Pope’s role as one of guarding Divine Revelation, maintaining the faith and preventing its corruption.

Which is to say, its main purpose is negative: to act, as John Henry Newman wrote of the Church of Rome, as a “remora or break in the development of doctrine.” The successor of St. Peter is a rock, not a river.

The difficulty is that the Church plays distinct roles at different periods in history, and so has the papacy. In order to safeguard that Revelation, it has had recourse to political expedients, such as Gregory VII’s exalting the Church over kings, Bellarmine’s exaltation of the Pope as an infallible legislator, or the highly centralized media figure the modern papacy has become. All these various incarnations of papal authority were defensible in their original historical contexts, but over time have become confused with its necessary role. Only its role as bulwark against corruption is permanent.

Everything else the papacy does must serve that end.

The problem is that these mutable expedients are confused with the permanent deposit of the Faith, and hence, with the papacy — such that people have difficulty separating them.

For someone like Blessed Pius IX, the papacy was unthinkable without the Papal States. For others, the idea that the Pope can err in his governance is simply impossible, despite the obvious historical evidence to the contrary.

A millennium of growth in papal power has left many Catholics with a tendency to view everything the Pope does as part of sacred Tradition, something that is neither intellectually defensible nor psychologically sustainable.

The theologians who paved the way for the Second Vatican Council recognized this. They wanted to move the Church from older, more hierarchical models of its authority, and for understandable reasons.

However, they also wanted the Church to present a more “welcoming” face to the world. For example, Pope Benedict emphasized the “the ‘yes’ of Christ,” rather than the “no” most people associate with Christianity and Catholicism, during his pontificate. However, this sometimes leads Catholics to overthink their defenses of papal authority.

Making papal authority amenable to modern people

Pope Leo XIV, elected May 8, addresses the crowd at St. Peter’s during his first Angelus appearance at St. Peter’s on May 11

I am thinking of Hans von Balthasar’s division of the Church into Petrine, Johanine, Jacobite, Pauline and Marian dimensions, in his book The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church. Balthasar wrote this work in 1974, during the upheavals following Vatican II, when many called papal authority into question, and he wanted to show how the papacy worked in harmony with other elements of the Church, rather than in a top-down, authoritarian way.

His concern to make papal authority more amenable to modern people who do not trust authority, and to emphasize that the papacy is not the center or the whole of the Church’s life, were laudable.

But I cannot help thinking that those who attacked the Pope actually possessed a more accurate conception of what the Pope does — which is to say “no” to many things people in the Church might want. After all, you cannot act as a break on doctrinal development if you are saying “yes” all the time.

But it is “yes” that many Catholics, and most non-Catholics, want to hear, all the time. And this predicament is not new. Despite the challenges that AI and social media pose, we are still living through the era of the “media papacy,” albeit now in hyper-drive mode.

It is sometimes claimed that most Catholics in the Middle Ages did not think about the Pope at all, which is not true. What is different today is the continuous attention that is paid to every gesture, speech, and movement a Pope makes.

This is the genius of the papacy at work, for after the loss of the Papal States, the Church needed to be able to attract the attention of the public, in order to spread her Gospel message. By the time of the First World War, this process was complete, with Benedict XV acting a peacemaker during that horrible conflict, albeit an unsuccessful one.

Popes have managed ever since to insist on a role in international affairs out of all proportion to the papacy’s institutional strength.

This transformation into a “media papacy”  is even more significant in an age where attention has become a commodity and every entity in the world is fighting for every person’s share of it.

But the power of this “media papacy” is a double-edged sword. The reason is that most people’s knowledge of the Church comes largely from its media pronouncements, unless they are especially devout and commit themselves to weekly mass attendance, spiritual devotions and pious works.

That the curious can find knowledge about Church teachings easily on the internet is a good thing. This Easter saw widely reported an uptick of new converts coming into the Church, and it is possible many based their decisions upon what they encountered of Catholicism on social media. My worry is this will become the normal way they experience the Faith, if it hasn’t already.

Inevitably, much of what they find there will focus on the occupant of Peter’s throne. Such a continuous focus on his person makes the sovereign pontiff appear as if he alone is the center of the faith, monopolizing the average Catholic’s attention on his every utterance as if he were an oracle, making papal authority the most visible and important aspect of the Catholic Faith.

I understand wanting to take papal encyclicals seriously, but I am always puzzled when people share the Pope’s Angelus speeches on social media, recommending them as a subject for spiritual devotions. The Church possesses a two-thousand year old treasury of spirituality, and it seems askew to act as if every single occupant of the throne of Peter is a saint or spiritual master. Historically speaking, most have not been either, because their office mostly concerns governing and policing doctrine.

The invention of the internet has turned the papacy into a meme, which can be a powerful thing in our current era, but it also distorts our understanding of its role even further than it has been already.

That the Church needs to avoid this sort of “hyper-papalism” is readily apparent. What Catholics need is a papacy that can make the world pay attention to the Church but that the faithful do not need to pay attention to every waking moment. This cannot be sustained in an age of AI and “deepfakes.”

The Church must draw upon the fullness of its Tradition, and not merely insist upon its authority to ground the faithful in Christ. Its customs, its rites and ceremonies, prayers, sacraments, all those embodied connections with Christ in heaven and on earth, have the power to take us out of the simulacrum our technology creates and ground us in true reality.

It is these that bring us closer to God, rather than nonstop attention to St. Peter’s successor.

In that respect, Leo XIV’s words from his inaugural sermon are a good start.

There, he said, all those in authority in the Church must “move aside so that Christ may remain, to make oneself small so that he may be known and glorified.”

*Darrick Taylor, Ph.D., teaches at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida and produces a podcast, Controversies in Church History.