Since his first public remarks on
the night of his election March 13, Pope Francis has impressed many
observers with a marked preference for describing himself not as the
pope but as the bishop of Rome -- a role he was scheduled to assume in a
special way April 7 by celebrating his first Mass in the city's
cathedral, the Basilica of St. John Lateran.
While emphasizing his diocesan identity -- which is essentially
symbolic, since most of his ordinary episcopal responsibilities are
fulfilled by papal vicar for Rome, Cardinal Agostino Vallini -- Pope
Francis has not sought to downplay his role as pastor of the universal
church.
In various talks over his first weeks in office, the pope has
repeatedly focused on what he deems some of the most urgent global
challenges for the church and humanity today, including poverty, war,
environmental pollution and moral relativism.
Yet Pope Francis could have several other reasons for highlighting his
role as a diocesan bishop. He may wish to signal that his pontificate
will be marked by a highly pastoral agenda -- which, far from keeping
him occupied with local affairs, might well lead him to travel widely as
an evangelical missionary in the mold of Blessed John Paul II.
By reminding his fellow bishops that he is one of them, the pope may
also be underscoring his commitment to the principle of collegiality,
i.e., shared governance of the church by all the world's bishops in
communion with the pope.
Whatever he may be intending, Pope Francis' prominent references to Rome
are reminders that the papacy is historically linked to a specific
place, people and civilization (or series of civilizations). In
Christian teaching, after all, while the church is ultimately not of
this world, it is called in the meantime to be very much of it.
Fittingly, the cathedral of Rome is as a kind of monument to the
church's tumultuous coexistence with secular power through the
millennia.
Around the time of his legalization of Christianity in 313, the Emperor
Constantine gave the land on which St. John Lateran now stands (he is
honored by a statue in the basilica's portico today). The church was
built not on the site of a miracle or a martyr's burial, as with the
city's other major basilicas, but on ground formerly dedicated to
profane uses: a military barracks and the palace of a prominent pagan
family, the Laterani.
In a surviving portion of the ancient papal palace, two mosaics
illustrate a medieval ideal of ecclesiastical and temporal rulers, both
wielding God-given power: Christ gives St. Peter the keys of heaven and
earth, and Constantine a banner symbolizing his authority as emperor;
St. Peter gives a stole to the early ninth-century Pope Leo III and a
banner to his contemporary Emperor Charlemagne.
This vision of harmony did not always describe reality, to say the
least, and the Lateran's thousand-year run as the residence of the popes
ended with the "Babylonian captivity" of the Avignon papacy, from 1309
to 1376, when the popes lived in France under the influence of French
kings -- and the Lateran palace fell into decay. After the papacy
returned to Rome, the city's bishops never moved back to the Lateran.
Ironically, French heads of state today enjoy a singular privilege at
the Lateran, as honorary canons of the basilica, a tradition that began
with King Henry IV (1553-1610), whose conversion from Protestantism made
possible his ascent to the throne. In 2007, then-President Nicolas
Sarkozy gave a widely noted speech at the Lateran, arguing that his
strongly secular nation should not deny its Christian roots.
The Lateran gave its name to the 1929 pacts between the Holy See and the
Italian state guaranteeing the sovereignty of Vatican City State. Since
then, the term "Vatican" has been practically a synonym for the papacy.
But as the vicissitudes of the Lateran make clear, such associations
are not among the church's eternal truths, merely part of its rich and
illuminating history.