Who Wants the Pope to Die?

National Catholic Register, 5 November 2021

Thankfully there have been few public expressions of this morbid sentiment during the current papacy, in contrast to the situation during the papacies of St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

November is the month to pray for the dead, and the Holy Father leads by example. Pope Francis offered Mass Nov. 4 in St. Peter’s for all the cardinals and bishops who died this past year.

Earlier in the week were the All Souls Day prayers at the papal tombs beneath St. Peter’s Basilica. It’s one of the more poignant appointments on the papal calendar, the quiet visits, the silent prayers, the solitary pope. As he makes his way from tomb to tomb, the thought must inevitably occur to the reigning pontiff that he is passing now in life where he will lie in death. 

This year the visit to pontifical graves invited another, more disturbing, question: Who wants Pope Francis to die?

The Holy Father suggested that there are at least some. Meeting with Jesuits in Slovakia last September, he responded to a question about his health after colon surgery earlier in the summer.

“Still alive, even though some people wanted me to die,” Pope Francis said. 

Which is an odd and dark thing to say. Are there people who wish him to die? And how would Pope Francis know that? 

It’s not the sort of thing anyone would say to his face, God forbid. Perhaps nuncios overhear such things and file it in their reports. Perhaps someone lurks in the shadier corners of the internet and lets the Holy Father know what is being said.

Yet it is not something that one readily encounters in the light of the broader media. Damian Thompson, who does not attempt to hide his hostility to the person and program of Pope Francis, reported in The Spectator that an unnamed priest at a dinner where “drink had been taken” blurted out that “I hope he drops dead tonight.”

So there is that unnamed drunk priest. But as far as prominent voices publicly yearning for an early demise, there are none such. 

Unlike in the past. 

It may have been, given the Jesuit context of the Holy Father’s remark, that he was thinking about how some Jesuits used to talk about St. John Paul II. 

Recall that on the day of the assassination attempt in 1981, Jesuit Father Cyril Barrett, “in a bellow that filled a London restaurant” said of the would-be assassin Mehmet Ali Agca: “The only thing wrong with that bloody Turk was that he couldn’t shoot straight.”

Far from a drunken priest anonymously quoted, Father Barrett was sober, voluble and vicious. Were the Jesuits mortified by this call for mortal injury? To the contrary, a Jesuit publication included that anecdote when Father Barrett died in 2004, as the sort of apparently adorable, if rascally, detail that spices up an obituary. 

The late Jesuit Father Paul Mankowski wrote in 2005 that “before ordination I’d heard my Jesuit professors pray that Wojtyła come to an early death — and go unrebuked, or rebuked in that jocular vein that signals sympathy.”

So it may be that Pope Francis does not really know that some people want him to die, but assumes from his Jesuit experience that if some in the Society wanted John Paul to die and were relatively open about it, there must also be some people who wish the same ill for him.

Perhaps, but it may not be accurate to generalize from one religious order to the entire Church — or the world. In the world, there were certainly those who wanted John Paul to die. And not just crackpots and malcontents, but the most fashionable of the fashionable. 

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