{"id":7299,"date":"2005-04-04T15:44:20","date_gmt":"2005-04-04T22:44:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/2005\/04\/04\/why-the-fascination-with-the-pope.html"},"modified":"2005-04-04T15:44:20","modified_gmt":"2005-04-04T22:44:20","slug":"why_the_fascina","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/04\/04\/why_the_fascina.html","title":{"rendered":"Why the fascination with the Pope?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Why are we paying this much attention to Pope John Paul II&#8217;s death, funeral, and succession?  I mean, if any other world politician were to kick off, short of the President, it would warrant a headline, maybe some coverage of the funeral if it were a particularly flashy one, and that&#8217;s it.  But with the Pope&#8217;s death, we have prolonged news coverage, of the sort not seen outside huge international disasters, war, and similar events.  Why the fascination (in the US, at least), with this passage?<\/p>\n<p>Thoughts off the top of my head:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Pomp and circumstance.  Folks love seeing those big ceremonial shindigs.  Here in the US we&#8217;re particularly low-key (and short-historied) about such things.  Sort of like the Di+Charles wedding, it&#8217;s a big deal because it&#8217;s a Big Deal, complete with funny costumes, big ceremonies, choirs, and arcane rules of the sorts that news analysts and specialist love to be able to (you&#8217;ll pardon the expression) pontificate about.\n<li>Related to that is the idea that the Pope is the last of the big-time royalty.  Monarchs of &#8220;real&#8221; nations any more either live like really wealthy businessfolk, or run &#8220;kingdoms&#8221; that are greatly diminished in stature and influence, or else they&#8217;re really just autocrats no different from any other petty dictator.  <\/p>\n<p>But the Pope runs a medieval kingdom that stretches, in influence, around the world, with hundreds of millions of &#8220;subjects.&#8221;  Not quite Rome in the old sense, but a lot more royal (and thus fascinating, esp. in ostensibly egalitarian America) than a lot of others.<\/p>\n<li>And related to <i>that <\/i>is that he is the biggest religious figure on the planet.   <\/p>\n<p>Think of it.  Most world religions are split into factions of various power-sharing sorts.  They&#8217;re national churches at most.  The Roman Catholic Church is huge, it&#8217;s transnational, and there&#8217;s One Guy up at the top (regardless of how the hierarchy of the church <i>actually <\/i>runs).  There&#8217;s nobody like it in Islam, or Buddhism.  There&#8217;s nobody like it in Buddhism (the Dalai Lama, while running second, is not only an exile, he&#8217;s only &#8220;in charge&#8221; of one branch of Buddhism, and it&#8217;s not nearly the same thing anyway), and there&#8217;s nobody like it in the rest of Christianity (the Archbishop of Canterbury, splitting duties with the Monarch of England, is a pale copy, and isn&#8217;t meant to be nearly the same thing either).<\/p>\n<p>In the US (to continue the American-centric view), most mainline Protestant churches, if national in nature, have some sort of governing board or council.  There may be a &#8220;president&#8221; or a &#8220;presiding bishop&#8221; or a &#8220;head presbyter&#8221; or something like that, but there&#8217;s no individual who seems to have the authoritative power that the Pope does (let alone the historic stature).  Individual religious leaders may come and go, and may wield great influence in their day, but they do it as individuals, not as rulers of a particular institution (again, let alone one that&#8217;s been around for some hundreds of years), and when they fade, they fade (think of televangelists and leaders of the Religious Right over the past thirty years).  Popes draw authority from, and invest it back into, an organization, a kingdom of Heaven on Earth, that carries such steeped weight and authority that nobody in a polyester suit and bad hairpiece can compare.<\/p>\n<p>Even if many Americans are ambivalent about Catholicism, and even if it doesn&#8217;t slot neatly into the Left\/Right religious divide in this country, the Church and her leaders, the Pope as their embodiment, still have a <i>gravitas<\/i> that beats most preachers and politicians hands-down.<\/p>\n<li>There are a lot of Catholics in the US.  And even if they&#8217;ve been on the &#8220;outs&#8221; for prolonged periods of time in US history, and even if today much of their weight of numbers is among the Hispanic population here, they remain a cultural force to be reckoned with, and will automatically draw the nation&#8217;s attention with their focus is on an issue.  The media responds to that sort of thing.<\/p>\n<li>The Pope was, even among folks not of the Catholic faith, and even among many people who disagreed with him on various issues, a popular and engaging figure &#8212; and one who went to great efforts to engage the whole world.<\/ul>\n<p>Just some thoughts, provoked the CNN TV showing at lunch.  Nothing deep or profound here.  Move along.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Why are we paying this much attention to Pope John Paul II&#8217;s death, funeral, and succession? I mean, if any other world politician were to kick off, short of the&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7654,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/01\/21\/other_lives.html","url_meta":{"origin":7299,"position":0},"title":"Other lives","author":"***Dave","date":"Fri 21-Jan-05 9:28am","format":false,"excerpt":"Who hasn't wondered how their life might not have changed had events, or decisions we made, been different? Craig Robinson has actually gone to the trouble of speculating out several...","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Personal&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Personal","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/personal"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2606,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2002\/05\/29\/102_minutes.html","url_meta":{"origin":7299,"position":1},"title":"102 Minutes","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 29-May-02 10:25am","format":false,"excerpt":"I have a fascination with reading transcripts of ordinary dialog. And when it's associated with a disaster, there's something particularly haunting about it. Which is why this compilation of phone...","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Fourth Estate&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Fourth Estate","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/media\/fourth-estate"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":128143,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2015\/09\/23\/pope-francis-is-a-catholic-pope-which-is-why-he-makes-american-pols-uncomfortable.html","url_meta":{"origin":7299,"position":2},"title":"Pope Francis is a Catholic Pope. Which is why he makes American pols uncomfortable","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 23-Sep-15 4:09am","format":false,"excerpt":"Americans tend to see our politics as some sort of Universal Spectrum of Ideological Reality. Right vs Left. Republicans vs Democrats. Conservatives vs. Liberals. Each position on each political and social question in the world can be neatly pinned to that spectrum, and people are expected to treat it as\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;~PlusPosts&quot;","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":51167,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2015\/05\/16\/were-shocked-shocked-to-find-church-stuff-mingled-with-political-stuff.html","url_meta":{"origin":7299,"position":3},"title":"We&#039;re shocked, SHOCKED, to find church stuff mingled with political stuff!","author":"***Dave","date":"Sat 16-May-15 10:39am","format":false,"excerpt":"Quote of the Day, from Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC): \"It\u2019s interesting how the Vatican has gotten so political when ultimately the Vatican ought to be working to lead people to Jesus Christ and salvation, and that\u2019s what the Church is supposed to do.\"See, when the Pope says something people like,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;~PlusPosts&quot;","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6721,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/01\/12\/if_you_cant_say.html","url_meta":{"origin":7299,"position":4},"title":"If you can&#8217;t say something nice &#8230;","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 12-Jan-05 3:38pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Okay, this is probably going to be the biggest display of my ego in a single post for some time, but I have to admit to a fascination with how...","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Personal Q&amp;A&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Personal Q&amp;A","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/personal\/personal-qa"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8393,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/11\/29\/limbo_in_limbo.html","url_meta":{"origin":7299,"position":5},"title":"Limbo in limbo?","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 29-Nov-05 2:43pm","format":false,"excerpt":"The Catholic Church may change its teaching (or at least its nomenclature) on the concept of Limbo -- a place where unbaptized souls go, particularly those of children. According to...","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Religion&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Religion","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7299\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}