An office of great cultural significance

The death of Pope Francis has captured the imagination of the wider world and perhaps inevitably raised the question of how Protestants should think about the papacy and the pending election of his successor.

In a sense, the pope has no direct significance for Protestant churches. Our churches have no analogous leadership position. Even in the world of Anglicanism, an archbishop is not a pope. He may be one who holds an historically significant post, such as the archbishopric of Canterbury, but he occupies a much more modest office in his denomination than the bishop of Rome in the Roman Catholic Church. The bishop of Rome understands himself as the successor of Peter and regards Christ’s statement to Peter—that he was the rock on which He would build His church—as the basis for seeing the pope as foundational to the unity and the authority of the Catholic Church. Famously, the pope claims infallibility.

This is often misunderstood by non-Roman Catholics as meaning that everything he says has to be taken as true, that he can never make a mistake. In fact, his infallibility is restricted to what are called matters of faith and morals, and this only applies when he speaks publicly as the head of the Roman Catholic Church and with full and final authority. Thus, the many tweets, off-the-cuff press conferences, and even official speeches by Francis would not count as infallible statements. Protestantism assigns no such a role to any human leader. We share some creeds with Rome—for example, the Nicene Creed. But we do not consider them authoritative because the pope or a church has endorsed them. We consider them authoritative because they summarize in a clear and accurate form the revelation of God as found in scripture.

But the papacy should still be of interest to Protestants and the outcome of this election will have repercussions even for non-Catholics.

Protestantism benefits in several ways from strong and clear papal leadership. First, a vigorously Catholic pope, such as John Paul II or Benedict XVI, makes it easier to see where the points of alignment and the points of disagreement between Catholics and Protestants lie. On things such as the doctrine of God and, given our current sexual and gender chaos, the moral significance of the human body, Protestants have much to learn from Rome. And yet we must not lose sight of the serious differences on things such as the sacraments and the nature of justification that cannot be swept aside as trivia. A pope with a knowledge of, and commitment to, his own church’s theology, will make Protestants think more clearly about the importance of these similarities and differences.

Second, we must remember that the non-Christian world, whether that of the international stage or of our non-Christian neighbor, does not see the importance of doctrinal and ecclesiastical differences as we do. And that means that when they see the head of the largest church body in the world, they see a microcosm of what they consider Christians to be. A pope who is at least clear on basic issues such as gender and human sexuality—indeed, on what it means to be a creature made in God’s image—will benefit us all. Francis spoke with clarity on gender, but his mixed signals on sexuality and equivocal actions on child abuse served to weaken Christian witness across the spectrum.

That leads to a third reason for hoping that the next pope is a man of clear convictions. If the Roman Catholic Church squanders its legacy on questions of ethics, of what it means to be human, and of religious freedom, all churches, including Protestant ones, will suffer. Rome with its public profile and its power, intellectual and financial, provides cover for us all in wider society.

None of this is to minimize the important differences that exist between Rome and Protestantism, differences that have the office of the papacy at their heart. Ecclesiastically, we have nothing at stake in the papal election. But culturally we Protestants do have an interest in who the next pope will be. Let’s hope he’s less ambiguous than the last.