Please enjoy an excerpt from the first chapter of my new book The Jesuit Disruptor: “The Popes and Me: a Personal Obsession.”
When I was an undergraduate at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia in the 1960s, I had a column in the university newspaper, the Xaverian Weekly, in which I would indulge my penchant for pontificating. One of the English professors, who had decamped to Colorado but read the paper religiously from that safe distance, was especially irritated by my oracular pontifications and dubbed me “the church basement pope.” I was an instant celebrity, if a quickly fading one.
I have always loved popes, whether pontificating or otherwise—ever since I developed prereflexive consciousness. It is not piety that drove me into their elaborate court, their special spheres in Christian history, but something more constitutive of my nature: the allure of drama.
And drama and the popes, theatre and the papacy, are the pre-eminent reason why the world—Catholic and non-Catholic alike—is mystified by the goings-on in that rarefied sovereignty on the Tiber. It is not just me.
It is high drama with the trappings of sacrality.
But I had the papal bug early. I was bitten and smitten. And the bond lasts to this day. Having said that, and connecting this abiding interest with both scholarly and journalistic forays into the papal orbit, I can still align with the wise and balanced judgement of my coreligionist and contemporary the historian Eamon Duffy, who remarks in the preface to his Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes. “For Roman Catholics, of course (of whom I am one), the story of the popes is a crucial dimension of the story of the providential care of God for humankind in history, the necessary and (on the whole) proper development of powers and responsibilities implicit in the nature of the Church itself.”
Personal faith, theological conviction, affective attachment, and an intellectual predilection for the historical combine to sustain my enduring attraction to the institution of the papacy but most particularly to the colourful characters who have exercised the ministry of the Bishop of Rome from its inception—especially during that comparatively short duration when I accompany in time whoever sits on the Chair of Peter. Not that there is any casual or consequential connection.
Michael’s new book The Jesuit Disruptor: A Personal Portrait of Pope Francis (House of Anansi, Sept. 2024) can be purchased through Amazon Australia.
Dr. Michael W. Higgins has been involved with investigating and expanding the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, particularly in Canada, for over forty years. Dr. Higgins is the Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at the University of St. Michael’s College in Toronto.
With thanks to Pontifex Minimus.
Pontifex Minimus is written on the ancestral territories of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinabewaki, Attiwonderonk and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation peoples, who have stewarded these lands since time immemorial.
