Pope Down! Pope Down!
A short essay on living in Rome and the death of Pope Francis…
Hi, I’m George Westcott. As most of you will know by now, I have been living in Rome for the last couple of months. It’s been a pleasant experience overall and I honestly love the city. However, inescapable in the last couple of weeks has been the passing of Pope Francis. It seems that the city has all huddled around the Vatican in the post-Easter passing of the pope. I have passed by a couple of times only to see mass swarms of news people from all over the world, reporting on anything coming out of the Vatican. Currently, Vatican City is almost impossible to go through due to heightened security around the area. If you are passing by you will most likely be stopped by police and armed guards. Going by a couple of times and as much as it seems like a monumental occasion, I haven’t enjoyed walking through. It might be my distaste for reporters and guards but there’s something that just hits the wrong way.
I keep repeating myself in these last couple of essays (kinship blah blah blah), but I was alive for the appointment of Pope Francis; a vast majority of us were (hello, ten-year-old audience). Yet, the death of a Latin American Pope feels grander. I have gotten a lot of messages from my family asking about what Rome is like in these times and if anything is happening. A Latin American family, of course, is fascinated by the goings-on in the city, so I totally understand. Yet, I still feel eyes on the city directly from my direct and extended family.
I honestly feel that every year it seems to spiral larger and larger, closer to chaos incrementally. First COVID-19, the invasion of Ukraine, the Gaza genocide, and now the rise of Trump and a global collapse. I am not religious by any metric. I was baptized at an Anglican Church but according to my parents, in possibly the most pragmatic Dutch turn of phrase I have ever heard, “It might be useful if you ever get married to a religious person”. Yet, I find the death of the pope to be a seeming death knell towards some upcoming apocalypse. I think we are consistently told by the mass media that we are on the brink of collapse. Every op-ed attempts to predict that this next conflict is a sign of the end times. I am sure that this goes back to the cavemen when every eclipse was the end times.
Yet the pope’s death seems like a nail in the coffin in some sense. I don't want to go too far in defending the Catholic Church, it doesn’t take too much research into what they’ve been up to in the last couple of centuries to realize that it’s not warranted. Yet, Francis, by church standards, seemed like a genuine force for good. The pope was opposed to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and was in heavy contact with Palestinian civilians throughout the war. In addition, he has been relatively positive on queer issues. I am not sure who’s going to come out of this new conclave going on in the Vatican but whoever comes as the next appointed pope will have some large shoes to fill.
And it seems that every year that goes by, everyone’s shoes get bigger. There are more issues that we worry about. Ai, the climate crisis, the genocide in Gaza, the Ukraine war, the upcoming (and possibly already here) economic crisis, the worldwide rise in fascists, and the war between India and Pakistan. It seems that every time that something happens we are terrified of calling it a crisis. The boat is underwater and we refuse to accept that we are sinking. Will the death of Pope Francis, a spiritual leader for the world, knock some sense into us and allow us to accept that we are in crisis? Probably not. However, I think we are unconsciously aware that this is not okay. There is an instinct deep in our bones that is telling us that what is going on is not normal and is not okay.
This instinct is to be listened. This is not a gut feeling from the media, a whirlpool of news stories made for us to panic over. Instead, there’s something intrinsically wrong with the world, and that informs a gut feeling. I am not religious, as mentioned earlier, but this is as close as I will get to a spiritual experience.
If you do decide to come to Rome, the Vatican is a hellhole at the moment. It is filled with guards and annoying news teams. It is an uncomfortable experience. However, I think this experience is the closest distillation to what the world feels like in some sense. A church where the core has died and everything around it feels in equal measures monumental and uncomfortable. And that is an experience that cannot be missed.