Even in the high-tech twenty-first century, putting out magazines like this is a complicated affair, still involving a lot of low-tech stuff like editing and proofreading and printing and binding and stapling and shipping, and so I have to write these columns many months in advance. For you, down there in 2006, the story of the death of Pope John Paul II and the election of his successor is old news, and the world’s attention is focused somewhere else. But for me, back here in the previous year like a stranded time traveler, the fascinating story out of the Vatican is still making the big headlines. In my time-line, the new pope—Benedict XVI, the former Cardinal Ratzinger—was elected just a few days ago.
Why, you may wonder, does this matter to me, and why should I think that it does to you? Does the election of a pope have anything to do with science fiction? Well, no, not usually. But I did actually write a science fiction story about just such an event (“Good News from the Vatican”) back in 1971. That story is definitely science fiction, since the new pope turns out to be a robot, and I won a Nebula for it. So I myself provide a link of sorts between the papacy and science fiction. And not just for that story, as you’ll discover in a moment.
Am I, then, a devout Roman Catholic? Nope. I’m not a devout Catholic nor a lapsed one nor even a Christian at all. Like Isaac Asimov, who wrote these columns before me, I was born into the Jewish faith. As it was with Isaac also, my Judaism has always been entirely a matter of cultural background rather than religious observance, but Jewish is what I call myself whenever I’m asked about my religious affiliations.
It will, then, seem quite odd to you—and it certainly ought to—that I have often been heard to say, over the past four decades or so, that it’s my ambition to become pope. I’ve even picked out a papal name for myself: Sixtus the Sixth. (The first pope of that name attained the post in 115 AD, and was, by a curious coincidence, the sixth pope to follow St. Peter, who was the first holder of the title. Fourteen centuries later, Sixtus the Fourth was responsible for the construction of the Sistine Chapel, which is named for him. But no pope has called himself Sixtus since Sixtus the Fifth chose the name in 1585, and there is something about being called Sixtus the Sixth that I find irresistible.)
What gave me the notion of becoming pope in the first place was, in fact, a remarkable if obscure fantasy novel—ah, the relevance to this magazine’s readership surfaces!—by the eccentric English novelist Frederick Rolfe: Hadrian the Seventh, first published in 1904, still in print, and well worth the attention of the curious.
Rolfe (1860-1913), who liked to call himself “Baron Corvo” without any genealogical justification, was a prickly, difficult, brilliant man, surely afflicted with a touch of paranoia, who, as a twenty-six-year-old schoolmaster, converted to Catholicism, sought to enter the priesthood, was rejected, and spent the rest of his life as an impoverished, embittered recluse. He was, however, a gifted novelist, and his masterpiece, Hadrian the Seventh, is perhaps the ultimate in wish-fulfillment fantasies, for it concerns one George Arthur Rose, a convert to Catholicism who is thwarted in his attempt to become a priest, lives for years as an impoverished, embittered recluse, and then gains the sympathetic ear of an English member of the College of Cardinals, who agrees that a great injustice has been done to him. Just then the pope dies, and Rose accompanies his new friend, the cardinal, to Rome for the election of a successor. The electoral conclave is deadlocked for days—and then, abruptly, an astounding compromise is reached in which George Arthur Rose, the rejected priest, is chosen as the new pope at the English cardinal’s suggestion.
It is a surprising moment, though Rolfe manages somehow to make it seem almost plausible. Rose himself is flabbergasted. But he rises quickly to the occasion, for he is, of course, not only deeply religious but a man of almost superhuman genius. His first papal act is to choose his regnal name: because the last pope of English birth was Hadrian the Fourth, he will call himself Hadrian as well, Hadrian the Seventh, as he grandly announces: “It pleases Us, and so, by Our Own impulse, We command.”
He commands a great deal after that. Frederick Rolfe plainly had been pondering the imperfections of the world for many years, and Pope Hadrian briskly goes about remedying those imperfections according to his creator’s wishes.
He begins by appointing half a dozen old friends to the College of Cardinals; then he lets it be known that the Church will henceforth hew more closely to the teachings of Jesus, and to that end he sells off the vast art treasures of the Vatican and has the money used for charitable purposes; he redesigns the crucifix; and, finally, declaring that the pope is in fact the absolute ruler of the whole world, he resurrects the Roman Empire, appoints Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany as Emperor of the North and King Victor Emanuel of Italy as Emperor of the South, merges all of northern Europe from France to Russia into the northern empire, and awards the other European nations, apart from England, to the southern one. By a similar process he bestows all of Latin America on the United States and gives England control of Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, and all of Asia except Siberia, which goes to Japan. “Thus,” Rolfe writes, “the Supreme Arbitrator provided the human race with scope and opportunity for energy.” An international treaty is drawn up confirming these papal decrees and the nations of the world, obligingly falling in line, sign it in St. Peter’s Square. And so it goes, until a Socialist crackpot assassinates Hadrian and he is wafted off to heaven in an aura of sanctity.
That extraordinary novel, much less nutty than my synopsis makes it sound, set me to thinking. If someone who isn’t even a priest can find himself pope one afternoon, I asked myself, why not someone who isn’t even Christian? Why not, for example, me?
A little research indicated that although no one who was not already a member of the College of Cardinals has become pope since the twelfth century or thereabouts, there is ample precedent for choosing a layman. In the year 236, for example, a farmer from the pro-vinces, one Fabian, was visiting Rome when the election of a new pope became necessary. Popes were not chosen by secret ballot then, as they are now, and Fabian was a spectator at the deliberations when a dove suddenly fluttered down and settled on his head. The assembled brethren were reminded of the scene in the Gospels of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Jesus, and saw this as a divine instruction to make Fabian pope. He reigned for fourteen years. Eight centuries later, when Pope Benedict VIII died in 1024, his brother Romano seized the papal throne, had himself ordained as a priest and then as a bishop the same day, and took the name of John XIX. He was pope for the next eight years.
I conceived a similar bold ambition. This was about 1957; Pius XII was pope, and he was not in good health. I told some of my friends that I would offer myself as a candidate when a successor was needed. The writer Randall Garrett, with whom I had collaborated on many SF stories back then, fastened enthusiastically on the idea. (Randall was an Anglican, not a Roman Catholic, but he took religious matters seriously.) He envisaged an all-day ceremony that would begin early in the morning with my baptism, proceed a little later to my entry into the priesthood, and so on up the ladder until by nightfall I had attained the papal throne itself.
“You will then announce the name under which you will reign,” said Garrett, “and then you’ll appear on the balcony of St. Peter’s, and utter your first blessing to the city and the world. —By the way, have you given any thought to what name you’ll choose?”
In fact I had. The last pope who had been born as a Jew was the first one, St. Peter. No pope had been called Peter since. I would be Peter II, I told him. But in the discussion that followed, I came to see that that might be going too far, verging on hybris, that useful Greek term for overweening pride that merits divine vengeance. (There’s a somewhat similar term in Yiddish—chutzpah.) I didn’t want to be guilty of either sin, and so I studied the list of previous popes for a while and discovered eventually, to my great delight, that the name of Sixtus the Sixth was waiting to be chosen.
I speak above of how, when Frederick Rolfe’s Hadrian became pope, he proceeded to transform the Church and the world in the most extensive way. I had certain reforms of my own in mind, too, once I was in charge. I was, as it happened, married—so something had to be done about priestly celibacy. I wanted to reward Randall Garrett for his assistance and advice by making him Archbishop of Canterbury, since he was an Anglican, but that would require my bringing the Church of England back into the Roman Catholic fold. Therefore I was willing to back off a little way on the issue of papal supremacy, which had caused the rift in the first place, and issue a retroactive divorce to King Henry VIII. And so forth.
As it happened, a vacancy in the papacy developed in 1958, but the cardinals ignored my application and chose John XXIII as pope. In the following years I tried for the job again and again, but was rebuffed in favor of, successively, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, and now Benedict XVI. But I am still young, as potential popes go. I continue to live in hope. The world may yet see the reign of Sixtus the Sixth. (My robot pope from “Good News from the Vatican,” incidentally, proclaims himself to be Sixtus the Seventh—a little inside joke by the author.)
The custom by which the incoming pope picks his own regnal name, by the way, got started in 532, when one Mercurius was elected. It seemed like a bad idea for the pope to bear the name of a pagan god, so he chose to rule as John II. Gradually it came to be the custom for every new pope to take a special name, often that of some great earlier predecessor. The last who kept his given name was a certain Marcellus, elected in 1555. There had already been a pope Marcellus, in the fourth century, so he simply named himself Marcellus II. Since then most new popes have used recycled names—primarily Clement, Innocent, Gregory, Leo, Pius, or Benedict.
But the newest Pope Benedict has one distinction that sets him apart from the fifteen previous popes of that name: an e-mail address. If you want to write to him in English, you can reach him at benedictxvi@vatican.va. He can be addressed also as benedetto (Italian), benedicto (Spanish), benoit (French), bento (Portuguese), or benedikt (German). O brave new century, where the pope has an e-mail address!
