Papal Fascination

I find myself oddly fascinated by the Papal succession and I'm not entirely sure why that is. In general, I like the ability to touch history: to be close to it and almost intimate with something ancient or older than this rather young nation. The Apostolic Succession of Popes from Peter, all 265 of them, is an unbroken line of history. That to be has a certain fascination.

The Holy See's website only goes back about 10 popes to Leo XIII. I found myself looking up popes and reading a bit of thier history. I was especially fascinated by the ones that served less than a year, in some cases only a month: Damasus II (July - August 1048), dead from Malaria contracted at a retreat. He was an unwilling Pontiff to begin with, nominated and forced to serve by Henry III. I guess back in those days the preeminant rules, whoever was succesor to the Holy Roman Emperor, or heald the reigns of power, would nominate the Pope, or help the conclave make up its mind. Some great stories about Popes can be had here.

What I find of endless interest is this notion of Peter's See, or The Holy See and how that idea of divinity, or in this specific case, a divine institution, exists in the fluid construct of a Sea. There is a saying about Talmud that it is a Sea and one has to learn to swim in the waters of the Talmud. The concept that religion is vast and oceanic is both true and untrue. Literally, the Holy See is a noun for the samllest sovereign state in the world: The Vatican. Yet the concept of Holy explodes the notion of See into Sea there by giving it a mythical proportion of at once small and vast.

Barbara Bradley Haggerdy made the comment today that the modern battle is no longer sectarian, in the Christian world, but orthodox vs. progressive. Evangelical Christians have banded together with Orthodox Catholics, two groups that in the past seldom if ever saw eye to eye, to combat what they see is the threat of progressive movements and thinkins in religion, as in the nomination of the openly gay Bishop in the Episcopal church, the ordination of women, pro-life movements etc. etc. When you think of this struggle for the morality of the country, if not the world, it seems a little medieval, have we suddenly fallen back a few steps and are once again nailing a set of complaints to the church door in Wittenberg? The fractured sects that argued over worship practices, ritual and slight skews in terms of moral outlook have abandoned those petty squables in favor of a unified front. The middle has dissipated a bit. The landscape is terribly polarized and those with moderat perspectives had been forced to choose a side. You're either with us or against us pilgrim.