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One traditional way to understand what the Pope does would be to list his titles: His Holiness; Bishop of Rome; Vicar of Jesus Christ; Successor of St. Peter; Prince of the Apostles; Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church; Patriarch of the West; Servant of the Servants of God; Primate of Italy; Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province; Sovereign of the Vatican City State. Such language, however, doesn't mean a great deal to modern ears. A more illuminating way to proceed is to consider the papacy's various real-world functions, which will be discussed here in terms of concentric circles representing different zones of responsibility.

The first and tightest circle is constituted by Rome, because the Pope is the Bishop of Rome and hence responsible for the affairs of his local diocese. Historically, the Pope came to govern the universal Church largely because Rome was its most important point of reference. Rome today has 2.5 million Catholics, according to 2003 figures from the Annuario Pontifico, with 334 parishes and 5,331 priests. Rome is a complex urban archdiocese, with all the spiritual, pastoral, financial, and administrative challenges that entails. In fact, the Pope doesn't take the government of the diocese personally into his own hands. He appoints a vicar, currently the powerful Cardinal Camillo Ruini, to handle its daily business. At the same time, however, the Pope remains an unsurpassed moral authority in urban affairs. In the summer of 2000, for example, the Roman city council rescinded a $200,000 contribution and official backing for an international gay rights festival because the Pope disapproved. (The march went ahead, however, thus illustrating at the same time the limits of the Pope's influence.)

Moving to the next circle, the Pope is also the supreme governor and legislator of the Catholic Church. He is responsible for setting policy, such as what theological ideas are acceptable, what liturgical practices pass muster, which saints to canonize, which bishops to appoint, and how to use the Church's charitable resources. He makes decisions about finance and personnel, scholarship and service, morality and metaphysics. Further, just as in the ancient Roman empire every citizen had a right of appeal to the emperor, every Catholic has the right to take his or her case to the Pope. This does not mean that Mrs. Smith's complaint about her son's third-grade religion teacher is necessarily going to end up on the Pope's desk. Most appeals are handled much further down the chain of command. But a few of these matters do reach the Pope, because they raise questions of doctrine or discipline that his subordinates believe the Pope himself should resolve or because the Pope takes a personal interest.

Inside the next ring, the Pope is the most important leader within the broader Christian world, and thus the most important force, for good or ill, in ecumenism—the effort to reunify the badly fractured Christian family. (The World Christian Encyclopedia identifies over 34,000 separate Christian groups, not counting the myriad storefront Christian churches all over the world that have no institutional affiliation.) John Paul II made the thrust for unity one of the cornerstones of his pontificate, beginning with his outreach to the 250-million strong Eastern Orthodox churches. The Roman Catholic Church carries on a formal dialogue with almost every organized Christian denomination, and there are desk officers in the Vatican whose job is to liaison with these other Christian groups. (The Vatican hesitates to call all these bodies "churches" for theological reasons. A "church" has to have valid ministers and sacraments, which, in the Catholic view, many Western Protestant bodies do not.)

In the next circle lies the Pope's function as the chief spokesperson for Christianity in dialogue with other religions. Roman Catholicism is the largest and most visible branch of Christianity and that makes the Pope the superstar par excellence of the Christian world. To put the matter crassly: If the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the president of the Lutheran World Federation, visits Madras or Jakarta, he has to catch cabs like everyone else. If the Pope visits, he's a celebrity. By virtue of his high profile, the Pope has overwhelming influence on Christianity's relationship with the other religions of the world. John Paul has made this aspect of his job a priority, especially with both Judaism and Islam, the other major Western faiths. He became the first Pope to visit a Jewish synagogue in Rome in 1986, and the first Pope to enter an Islamic mosque in Damascus in May 2001. Three times he has called the religious leaders of humanity to Assisi together to pray on behalf of peace, a choice that was not popular inside his own circle of advisors. Some worried that the image of the Pope standing in a circle with shamans and Native Americans, Jewish rabbis and Buddhist monks promoted relativism (the idea that one religion is as good as another) and syncretism (a blending of elements of different religions into a kind of New Age pastiche). Obviously, however, John Paul was not deterred.

Inside the next circle one finds the Pope as the most important voice for religious belief in a secularized, skeptical world. Contemporary Western culture is often allergic to authority and hostile to tradition, and finds religion, especially religious institutions, hard to accept. The Pope is the most visible representative of institutional religion on earth and the most important dialogue partner with this largely areligious culture. A Pope seen as compassionate and humble, with a relevant moral and spiritual message, can reawaken religious sensibility in people for whom it may have been long dormant. A Pope perceived as arrogant and hypocritical can deaden spiritual receptivity.

Finally, the outermost circle represents the Pope's role as a moral teacher, a voice of conscience for humanity on social and political questions. As such, there is almost nothing under the sun about which a Pope is not expected to pronounce, whether it's global warming or land mines or whether the United States should send in peacekeeping troops to restore order in Liberia. This makes the Pope an important player in world politics, a role that has never been more clear than during the U.S.-led war in Iraq. In the weeks leading up to the war, diplomatic heavyweights shuttled in and out of the Vatican like clients at a popular deli: Tony Blair, Joschka Fischer, Silvio Berlusconi, Jose Maria Aznar, Mohammad Reza Khatami (speaker of the Iranian parliament and brother of the country's president), Kofi Annan, and even Tarik Aziz. John Paul dispatched emissaries to both Saddam Hussein and George Bush to try to pull them back from the brink. The initiative failed in terms of preventing the conflict, but it succeeded in convincing many Muslims that the war was not part of a broader Christian offensive against Islam.

The roles a Pope plays are various and complex: Fortune 500 CEO, media superstar, diplomat, politician, theologian, philosopher, pastor, and voice of conscience. It is an impossible job, and no human being can perfectly do every task a Pope is called upon to perform. Every Pope will emphasize some aspects of the job at the expense of others. Pius XII, who governed the Church during the tumultuous days of World War II, was a superb diplomat, but did not project the pastoral face of John XXIII. John Paul II is a deep thinker, a media phenomenon, and maybe the greatest apostolic traveler since St. Paul (129 countries visited so far in his twenty-six-year papacy, the equivalent of two years on the road), but there has been a price to pay. He has had to leave many aspects of the governance of the Church in the hands of his aides. Yet every Pope exercises all of these roles at some stage, and the men and women of the Vatican assist him in doing so. One will never understand the psychology of the Vatican without grasping their sense of the gravitas and the importance of the papal office. For them, this is not the Queen of England at Buckingham Palace, a largely symbolic relic of a bygone era without real-world clout or significance. This is, from the Vatican's point of view, the living presence of Peter in the Catholic Church and the most important voice of conscience in human affairs.

Copyright © 2004 by John L. Allen, Jr.. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Tags: Catholicism

About the Author

John L. Allen is the Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter and a Vatican analyst for CNN and National Public Radio. He is the author of The Rise of Benedict XVI and All the Pope's Men: The Inside Story of How the Vatican Really Thinks. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Miami Herald, The Nation, and many other publications. His Internet column, "The Word from Rome," is considered by knowledgeable observers to be the best single source of insights on Vatican affairs in the English language.