In class once, I made a disrespectful comment about the pope at the time, John Paul II. I was the only Jewish boy in a Catholic school, and I was sure I’d be given an exemplary punishment.
I was wrong. We were in Rome, the most tolerant place in the world for irreverence toward popes.
Catholics in New York, waiting for Benedict XVI to arrive today in their city, may find this attitude puzzling. But there’s a sonnet by Gioacchino Belli, on the death of Pope Leo XII, that nicely illustrates the Roman’s ambiguous feelings toward His Holiness:
You see the pope’s funeral carriage, he says, weighed down by the magnificence of papal pomp, pass through the city’s narrow streets for the last time. You look at it with a mixture of affection and hostility. You make fun of that grandiose way of dressing, even in death, but at the same time you feel a surge of emotion for that part of you that is vanishing. You then console yourself with the most Roman of sayings: “One pope dies, another is made” — sanctioning the eternity of an institution despite the transience of a single individual, the immortality of a city despite the impermanence of its citizens.
Today the elections and deaths of popes continue to mark our inner calendars. It’s unlikely that a Roman of my generation doesn’t recall exactly where he was when Paul VI died or when John Paul II was shot. And yet we’re aware of the pope’s existence only around Easter, when traffic is brought to a halt by convoys of buses filled with foreign pilgrims going to Vatican City, that tiny state embedded in the heart of an ancient metropolis. And then we wonder, not without irritation, who, between us and the pope, is held hostage by the other.
But apart from such logistical inconveniences it’s unlikely that a Roman thinks about the pope’s presence in the city. In a certain sense, he’s always there; in another, he never is.
Once I happened to be in Rio when John Paul II was visiting. (It was in 1980, the time he appeared like a soccer hero in the Maracana Stadium before a crowd of jubilant Brazilians.) I was bewildered by the mixture of anxiety and emotion, tinged with idolatry, that had infected the population, not to mention by the impressive security measures. An entire army, I thought with amusement, to protect this man who lives a few blocks from my house.
Then I realized that for a Roman the pope is a figure who is above all familiar, a kind of eccentric and capricious parent. Say one night you happen to be driving along Via della Conciliazione, and you see that the lights are still on in the windows of the papal apartments. You say to yourself: “How about that? The Old Man is up late tonight.”
Yet Rome is also deeply conservative, which explains the distrust with which the election of a Polish pope was received here. Rome’s most aristocratic families — the Farnese, the Borghese, the Barberini — have fought over the papal throne forever. Imagine, then, a Polish pope! I recall the dismay, not unmixed with disapproval, with which certain (very reactionary) friends of my Catholic mother judged John Paul II’s constant travels to the ends of the earth. Yes, his work of international proselytizing offended those ladies. A pope stays home; a pope is in Rome. It’s not proper for a pope to board a plane too often or speak to crowds that sing and sway like so many little devils.
Nor was John Paul II forgiven for his athletic appearance, so undignified, and his love of sports. How can a pope wear a ski outfit? Climb mountains? Cavort in Olympic pools? So they began calling him “the Pole” — in the same tone of good-humored derision with which Benedict is called “the German shepherd.”
But it was the first step in learning to accept the man who became one of the most beloved popes in history. When he died, the Romans bestowed on him the majestic farewell that is due a saint. I watched the images of his funeral on TV uneasily, sometimes with irritation, until I said to myself: What’s so surprising? This is Rome.
When you think back to the tribal majesty of that funeral ceremony you can understand how hard it is for Benedict XVI to hold his own against his predecessor. Then you see what impelled him to invent for himself a completely different image: if John Paul was energy, spontaneity, impulsiveness, charisma, his successor would claim the icy elegance of tradition.
So Benedict, having been adored in Washington and New York, will return home, to Rome.
Will the Romans someday take to him, as we did John Paul? Ah, well, the pope is the pope. The pope is Roman even if he’s Polish, German, Australian — that is to say, in Rome, one pope is like another.
Alessandro Piperno, the author of The Worst Intentions, a novel. This essay was translated by Ann Goldstein from the Italian.