When they choose Benedict XVI's successor, the Catholic Church's cardinals will transfer to the new pope the heavy responsibility of presiding over an institution unique in its longevity and the scope of its influence, as is witnessed by the first question put to a new pope: "Do you freely accept your election?"
Despite its scandals and a rising tide of secularism, the papacy remains, for believers, a symbol of the eternal hope that behind all the confusion and contradictions, the sorrows as well as joy, of everyday life, there has to be an essential unity. The traditional white garments, a symbol of purity, speak to a need deeply ingrained in the human psyche.
The pope presides over a church called Catholic, which means "universal." The pope's Latin title, "papa," echoes the affection with which children address their father. And when a pope dies — or retires, as Benedict did last week — his departure is marked by an outpouring of tears, remarkable in this secular age.
The papacy was already old when rival forms of Christianity were born. For centuries it held a monopoly on defining the faith. Popes developed instruments of statecraft when the secular state was an infant. Kings and emperors learned how to levy taxes and dispatch ambassadors by looking over the popes' shoulders.
Other religions are disadvantaged, in a sense, because they allow multiple voices within their ranks. But according to the Catholic catechism, the pontiff has "full, supreme, and universal power over the whole Church, a power which he can always exercise unhindered."
Neither Protestantism, Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism nor Confucianism have a comparable figure — the pope being both an unquestioned spiritual leader and a territorial monarch. His realm may be a postage-stamp remnant of the Papal States, which once stretched across the middle of Italy, and his armed Swiss Guards seem costumed for a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, but the bishop of Rome is Europe's last absolute monarch. Islam once had a caliph, who similarly combined political and religious leadership. That office has been empty for centuries, but the papacy endures.
In the 12th century a church official predicted the papacy's longevity: "It will at last come to this, that the golden age of the empire shall be shaken to dust — that every great monarchy shall be divided into tetrarchies, and then only will the Church stand free and untrammeled beneath the protection of her crowned high priest."
That forecast might have seemed rash to his peers. At the time the papacy was hard-pressed to hold off secular rulers intent on its subjugation.
But consider this: The Roman Empire, which ruled the Western world when the papacy was born, is long gone. So is the Holy Roman Empire, the medieval kingdom that dominated Germany and Italy.
Napoleon's empire vanished and the papacy got back the Papal States that Pius VII had surrendered while a prisoner of the French emperor. Josef Stalin once famously dismissed the pope with a quip — "How many divisions has he got?" — but the Iron Curtain is no more.
Some have scoffed at the idea that any human being could have eternal dominion over others. In the 16th century, Martin Luther called the pope an "ass," and "the Antichrist." Three centuries later, Levi Boone won a Chicago mayoralty by exploiting anti-papal sentiments, then a powerful weapon in American politics.
Yet through centuries of conflict and criticism, the papacy has held steadfast to one basic principle, perhaps best expressed by the much-beloved John XXIII: The pope's power is such that "only if they be united to him can men be saved."
Some chapters of the papacy's 2,000-year history can be inspirational even to nonbelievers; others could be troubling to the most devout Catholics. A few are ironic, like the story of the Sistine Chapel, that masterpiece of Renaissance architecture where the cardinals will soon gather to elect the next pontiff. With frescoes by Michelangelo and Botticelli, it's an awe-inspiring symbol of papal power. Yet it set in motion a chain of events that, like falling dominoes, robbed the popes of a huge portion of their flock.
It cost a fortune. Sixtus IV, the 15th-century pope for whom it is named, and his successors didn't have the money. To pay the bills, they authorized the sale of indulgences — certificates attesting the buyer had done penance for sin. In Germany, a "pardoner," as the sellers were called, implied that an indulgence bought reduced time in purgatory. That offended Luther, then a monk, who satirized the pardoner's sales pitch with a bit of doggerel: "As soon as money in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory's fire springs."
Out of the ensuing conflict the Protestant Reformation was born, and Europe was split in two. The south remained loyal to the papacy, but in the north Lutheran, Calvinist and other non-Catholic churches were established.