Humility, Service and Simplicity
President Droupadi Murmu represented India at the funeral of Pope Francis who died on April 21. His funeral mass was held on April 26. President Murmu attended it. A day earlier she laid a wreath at the Basilica of Saint Peter at Vatican City. Dignitaries from all corners of the world attended the funeral of Pope Francis. They included US President Donald Trump and many crowned heads of Europe. Muslim leaders from Arab countries and some other states were also present at the Vatican to pay homage, along with the other international personalities, to a Pope who embodied the values of humility, service and simplicity. He was also the first non-European to head the Catholic church after Gregory III, of Syrian birth, who was Pope from 731 to 741. Pope Francis’s home country was Argentina though his family was of Italian origin.
Christianity has the largest number of adherents in the world. It is estimated that about 2.4 billion people are Christians. Of these, around 1.4 billion are Catholics, making Catholicism, the most significant Christian denomination by population. The Pope, who is technically the Bishop of Rome, and is considered as a successor to Saint Peter, one of Christ’s Apostles, is head of the Catholics. He has been the most important spiritual leader among the Christians.
The Papacy has undergone numerous phases over the past almost two thousand years, as has the Christian faith itself. It can be roughly considered that Christianity, since the fall of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, became divided into Western and the Eastern Churches. Constantinople was renamed Istanbul by its conqueror Sultan Mehmet and it become the capital of the Ottoman who established one of the greatest empires of the Islamic world.
The collapse of the Byzantine empire led to the loss of influence of Eastern Christianity and the rise of the Western Church under the Papacy. In time, the Western Church itself split and many European Christians, especially in Germany and northern Europe, moved away from the Catholic Church. They established other Christian denominations which can be covered under the name of Protestants. England, under Henry VIII, broke away from the Pope. Henry and his successors became Heads of the English Church. That position British sovereigns retain till this day. Amidst all this Italy, Spain and Portugal remained steadfastly Catholic. In the 15th and 16th centuries Spain and Portugal established colonies in South America and parts of Asia and Africa. They actively undertook conversions to Christianity of the conquered peoples. Hence, Catholicism has large followings in South America but that is not the case in the United States where of the current estimate of 224 million Christians about 53 million are Catholics. The country has had only two Catholic Presidents: John F Kennedy and Joe Biden.
In the medieval period Catholic monarchs needed to be recognized by Popes; only then were they considered as legitimate by their own peoples and their peers. This gave the Papacy immense influence. It also acquired an enormous bureaucracy of its own to assist the ‘flock’. However, with the rise of the concept of sovereign states and of secularism the powers of the Papacy diminished in international affairs and in the internal governance of states. Secularism in its original meaning was the separation of church and state. That connoted that the church could not intervene in matters of governance or in international relations. Strangely though the remnants of the old continues in as much as the Papacy still has accredited envoys who have the privileges and immunities of envoys of states. They are however expected to restrict themselves to matters spiritual of Catholics and not intervene in other aspects of international relations.
Some Popes though, and Francis was one of them, acquire influence among international leaders because they espouse the paths which humanity is required to follow to combat the existential crises it faces. They also are respected because they signal an acceptance of the validity of other spiritual quests even while holding firm to the essential beliefs of their own which they feel offers the right path to salvation. The Catholic church has faced grave charges in recent times, including those relating to the exploitation of children by priests. Some Popes have courageously accepted that such charges need to be investigated and the guilty punished.
The eyes of the world’s Catholics will now turn to the ‘election’ of a new Pope by the college of cardinals. Like any ‘election’ this too has ‘political’ aspects. What will be interesting to observe if the European cardinals who have traditionally dominated the Papacy assert themselves to ensure that a new Pope is European or is from outside the continent.
The record shows that five Indian Prime Ministers, including Narendra Modi, met different Popes. They were Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Inder Kumar Gujral, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and, of course, Modi himself. Modi’s meeting with Pope Francis was warm. After the Pope’s death Modi paid a moving homage to him in which he recognized his service to the poor and downtrodden of the world. Many Indians, especially the Catholics among them, will echo Modi’s words.
As country whose constitution is based on secularism—which in the Indian context means equal respect for all religions---Indians must imbibe the spirit of recognising the validity of different spiritual quests. Indeed, that has been India’s basic tradition too since the earliest times.
