Pope Donald? Trump would hate it

Donald Trump’s papal trolling campaign reached new heights, or hit new lows, depending on your point of view, when he posted on social media an A.I.-generated image of himself as pope, complete with white mitre. “Catholic outrage grows over ‘Pope Trump’ image on official White House media,” ran the headline in the National Catholic Reporter. The story went viral in media around the world and tossed yet another social media firecracker into a pre-conclave atmosphere in Rome that was already on edge with feverish speculation about the possible impacts of any report or rumor.

The Pope Donald image was not Trump’s first effort: a few days earlier when asked about his favorite candidate for the cardinals who will enter the conclave on Wednesday to elect a successor to Pope Francis the president told reporters: “I’d like to be pope. That would be my number one choice.”

Bad taste? Good humor? Trump’s Catholic veep, JD Vance, dismissed the criticism: “As a general rule, I’m fine with people telling jokes,” as Vance said on X. Even before the latest dust-up Vance had been workshopping his conclave one-liner material by suggesting that Trumps’ Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, was a good candidate for pope.

Ah, the drollery.

So what gives? It’s a fool’s errand trying to figure out what goes on in Trump’s mind, or how it is that Catholics who would have digitally excommunicated Joe Biden (or any Democrat) for doing such a thing were basically fine with the president promoting a Trump-as-Pope image. (What really puzzles me is that Trad Catholics who can be relied upon to anathematize any cleric who doesn’t correctly vest in the most old-fashioned Latin Rite liturgical robes would be okay with Trump posed in a pope’s white house cassock while wearing a mitre — definitely a no-no.)

But I suspect that Trump’s quips reveal a certain desire — barely disguised in his case — to enjoy the vaunted supreme powers of a Roman Pontiff. To be sure, the pope is chief judge, legislator and executive rolled into one, and canon law states that the pope “is judged by no one.” There are no term limits (except death), and you get to live in nice digs in Rome. Sounds great. Little wonder that Richard Nixon also mused, apparently while tipsy, that “I would have made a good pope.”

Yet both Trump and Nixon betray a misunderstanding about the papacy that is all too common. Perhaps we have all been reading, and believing, too many of the florid criticisms of Francis as a “dictator pope” or we think that papal infallibility means that whatever a pope says has to be right. (That’s not how infallibility works, at all, but that’s another discussion.)

In reality, popes don’t act like dictators the way Trump might like because they can’t. The Vatican has no army, unless you count the colorful Swiss Guards, and history shows that kings and emperors and even Roman mobs have regularly run popes out of town or kidnapped them or sent them into exile. In a temporal sense popes have been at the mercy of most any princeling with a mid-sized militia.

Popes have no authority to tax (or levy tariffs) and the Holy See relies on donations to stay afloat. (The Vatican’s precarious fiscal state is in fact a major issue at the pre-conclave discussions here in Rome.) A pope’s leverage is all moral and spiritual, and that only goes so far in the best of times, and it doesn’t work at all in our more secular era if you act like an authoritarian jerk. Catholicism is a voluntary organization; you can’t compel anyone to go to Mass or heed your dictates. Just ask Paul VI, whose encyclical against birth control is almost universally ignored. “I cannot command,” Paul once said, “I can only convince.” If a pope tries to compel everyone to do his wishes he will soon end up in a church of one.

Even in the tiny Vatican City State the pontiff only has direct executive authority over the lives of a couple of thousand workers, and it’s in his best interest to keep his civil servants happy since they are the only work force that helps him keep tabs on a 1.4 billion member global church.

By far a pope’s most powerful tool is his unimpeded right to appoint bishops and create the cardinals who will elect his successor. But even that has limits since the pope generally has to wait for bishops to die or retire before he replaces them.

Bishops are also jealous of their own status as essentially popes of their own dioceses, and see themselves as collaborators with the pope — the Bishop of Rome — rather than his personal altar servers. Bishops sometimes tell the pope no, or more often just ignore him. “My authority ends at that door,” a frustrated Benedict XVI reportedly told a visitor to his apartments who demanded that the pope fix the various crises in the church. A few years later Benedict became the first pope in 600 years to resign, largely because he didn’t have the strength to run the place.

Even the new pope who emerges from the current conclave will have his hands tied by custom and the imperative to preserve — or at least project — unity and continuity.

All the cardinals who head Vatican departments in the Roman Curia automatically lose their jobs when a pope dies or resigns, though they stay in place throughout the interregnum. But the new pope does not immediately replace them the way an incoming president would replace the previous administration’s cabinet and top officials. A new pope comes into office with no staff and no vice-president, no council of advisers or cabinet picks all set to go. As a matter of course, and of necessity, he reappoints the curial department heads from the previous pontificate, and may take years to replace them with his own choices.

It’s as if Donald Trump had to be president during his first term working only with Barack Obama’s cabinet and vice-president. Or during his current term with Joe Biden’s cabinet and vice-president.

If Donald Trump ever were elected pope — that’s one of the few conclave scenarios not being mooted around the Vatican — there’s a good chance he would quickly be pining for the comfort of the Oval office and rule by executive order.

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