Vol. 119: Heard any good Pope jokes?

Francis and his 265 predecessors

At the pearly gates, St. Peter labors at an onerous task: finding suitable lodging for the multitude of souls who arrive in Heaven each day.

First in line today is the Pope. Peter reviews his celestial housing chart and assigns the pontiff to a room in a Holiday Inn, furnished with a king-sized bed, a color TV (with access to all the premium streaming services), and a coffee machine.

Next in line is a Philadelphia lawyer. St. Peter places him in the Taj Mahal, with 40 personal servants and another 30 gardeners to maintain the magnificent grounds.

Third in line is a perplexed soul who has witnessed these transactions. “Wait a minute,” he tells St. Peter. “I think you’ve made a mistake. You just put the Pope in a Holiday Inn and some second-rate lawyer in the Taj Mahal.”

“You don’t understand,” St. Peter explains. “Up here, we have 300 Popes. We’ve never had a lawyer.”

Who am I to judge?

That hoary joke was originally meant to poke fun at lawyers, but the death of Pope Francis last week got me thinking about those 300 Popes, most of whom were widely revered in their lifetimes but are remembered today only the way we recall, say, past mayors of New York City or managers of the Chicago Cubs. To put it mildly, those 300 Popes (actually 266, including Francis) held divergent ideas about their job description, and some of them were more interested in selling indulgences than asking themselves, “What would Jesus do?” in any given situation.

Francis, for example, was perceived throughout his 12-year papacy as an agent of change, a Pope who sought to open up the Church by reaching out to migrants, the poor and the destitute, victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, and alienated gay Catholics. Yet for many of his predecessors, not to mention many current Vatican officials, the first Papal priority was perpetuating a powerful institution capable of impressing and intimidating followers and foes alike. This was the authoritarian Church that for centuries flexed its doctrinal muscles by championing male chauvinism, papal infallibility, antisemitism, homophobia, and such public entertainments as burning heretics at the stake and dispatching armies to recapture Jerusalem from the Turks.

By contrast, when Francis was asked, months into his papacy, about ordaining gay priests, he replied, “Who am I to judge?” Dumfounded conservatives probably thought to themselves (although they didn’t dare say so out loud), “For God’s sake, you’re infallible!” These traditional bishops were caught between a rock and a hard place: devoted to the principle of papal infallibility, but bitterly disagreeing with this particular Pope’s vision. Sort of like American liberals today, committed to majority rule in theory but flabbergasted by the majority’s choice of Donald Trump as president.

Tucker Carlson and Fox News

Suppose Francis had chosen to forsake the papacy, with all its pageantry and fine raiments, and instead, pursued the gospel of Jesus by working for the American Friends Service Committee or Doctors Without Borders. Actually, you don’t have to suppose – consider how Tucker Carlson’s influence shrunk after he left Fox News. (Yes, I know – Fox News isn’t a church. On second thought, for many of its viewers, it is.)

Say what you will about those mostly-faceless 265 predecessor Popes, they sustained the Church with enough diversity of thought and enough glory and magnificence to make a rebel like Francis think twice about taking his services elsewhere. He reminds me of some journalists I know who chafe under the bureaucratic sluggishness of the New York Times but haven’t left because, hey, it’s the New York Times.

Rejecting the One True Faith

How diverse, doctrine-wise, is today’s Church? Let me answer with (what else?) two jokes.

The first I overheard when it was told among my Catholic teammates on the Penn football team, circa 1962:

A Protestant dies and, being a Protestant, naturally goes straight to Hell. The Devil escorts him to the River Styx, where all the other departed Protestants stand waist-deep in sewage, mud, and excrement. After finding a vacant spot in the river for the new arrival, the Devil instructs him: “OK, now you stand here until the end of time and think about the terrible sin you committed when you rejected the One True Faith.”

The Devil leaves and the new arrival looks around. “You know,” he remarks to another Protestant standing nearby, “all things considered, this isn’t really so bad.”

“That’s what you think,” the other Protestant replies. “Wait ’til the Catholics come by in their motorboats!”

What’s the underlying message here? First, Catholicism is the One True Faith. Second, the Catholic Church is so fragile that it can’t withstand rejection, even by a single individual. Third, good Catholics take pleasure in tormenting and punishing nonbelievers who question Catholic dogma.

Good news and bad

Now consider a very different Catholic joke conveying a very different message, this one told by the Rev. Terrence Toland, president of St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, at the opening of his school’s commencement exercises in 1975:

The Pope summons the College of Cardinals and tells them, “I have good news and bad news.

“First, the good news: Our gracious heavenly father, Jesus Christ, has sent word that he is returning to Earth for the Second Coming, at which time he will preside over a meeting of all the world’s Christian denominations, with the purpose of uniting them into a single Christian church.

“Now for the bad news: He wants to hold the meeting in Salt Lake City.”

This joke gently teased the age-old Catholic belief that Roman Catholicism was the only path to God, or even to Jesus. More remarkable still, it was told in public by the head of a Catholic institution.

Father Toland’s use of humor is worth noting, too: The ability to laugh at oneself, not to mention one’s religion, is a sign of strength, not weakness.

A bull session in 1959

You ask: What was I— a Jew whose ancestors spent centuries fleeing in terror from devout Catholics— doing in the audience at St. Joe’s on that occasion? Well, that was the day my mother-in-law, Ann Rubin, received her bachelor’s degree after taking night school courses there for nine and a half years. Ann had lived across the street from St. Joe’s for 20 years, but as a Jew and a woman she had never dreamed of enrolling there. But all that changed when, during his tenure, Father Toland opened St. Joseph’s doors to women after 145 years as an all-male institution. Today, St. Joseph’s student body is 55% female.

Yes, even large and seemingly entrenched institutions— even the Roman Catholic Church— inevitably change, sometimes in spite of themselves.

In the summer of 1959, when I was 17, a half-dozen of my fellow counselors at Camp Sussex in New Jersey engaged one day in an informal bull session that seguéd into religion. At some point, the only Catholic kid in our group argued earnestly, “If you strip away all the pomp and ceremony from Catholicism, you will still find a philosophy of life that makes a lot of sense.”

“Yes,” another kid agreed. “You will also have a religion with about eight followers.”

Rest in peace, Father Francis. And good luck with your heavenly housing assignment.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com