Published April 30, 2025
From “Letters from Rome 2025—The Papal Interregnum No. 3.”
“It’s a perfect time to be here in Rome,” said a bishop friend this week, “because it’s a great experience of the Church—in all her murkiness and all her splendor.” True words, those. Rome is heavy with history, and history is an unsentimental record of human behavior. It’s also the teacher of lessons. Thus a walk along the Tiber, in these days between the death of one pope and the election of another, can lead to some curious thoughts about the past. On a sunny Roman morning earlier this week, I found myself wondering where exactly, in the river, they dumped the corpse of Pope Formosus.
Some background: Most popes have been good men. Dozens have been saints. The genuinely bad ones have been few. But even among the worst, each offers his own peculiar lesson on the nature of the Christian Church. I’ll explain.
Formosus reigned as pope in the late ninth century. He was an ambitious, complicated man. Made a cardinal in his late forties, he served in various sensitive diplomatic roles for the Holy See. His appetite for influence entangled him in the bitter European power struggles of the day; led to accusations of immorality and violations of Church law; triggered his excommunication; and created a long list of enemies with even longer memories. But he would not be stymied. He had miraculous survival skills. Later reinstated, Formosus returned to Church duties and was elected unanimously to the papacy in 891. He died in 896.
Alas, indignities followed. Remember that list of enemies? In January 897, Pope Stephen VI exhumed the corpse of Formosus, dressed it in papal vestments, and held a trial—the so-called “Cadaver Synod”—accusing the dead pope of perjury, illegally gaining the papacy, and other crimes. Formosus was convicted. His papacy was declared null and void. The fingers he had used for blessing were chopped off, his papal vestments stripped, and the corpse was tossed into the Tiber. Eventually it was retrieved and reburied in St. Peter’s Basilica. But a model of sanctity, Formosus was not.
Here’s the lesson: The current papal interregnum comes at the end of an unbroken line—more than a century—of good men; men who served in very difficult times as adequate-to-great popes. That’s a remarkable blessing. We should pray earnestly that the next pope, whoever he might be, will serve with similar purity of heart and the skills the Church needs. But sin is a universal human condition. The grace of the papal office can guide and strengthen the occupant, but it does not erase his personality or his human flaws. Even in the best of times, the Church survives her leaders and her people—all of us broken and imperfect—because she doesn’t finally belong to us. We don’t own her. The Church is “ours” only in the sense of a mother and teacher. She belongs to Jesus Christ; the Church is his. And he protects and renews her through the ages despite our genius for fouling things up.
Here’s another lesson: The Church survives even in the worst of times, and for the same reason. Rome is built on the blood of Christian martyrs. In a sense, the city is a museum commemorating that fact and witnessing to the truth of Tertullian’s remark that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church. As it turns out, the modern world is no less hostile to the Church and her mission than the ancient world was. And the author Robert Royal stressed exactly that reality in his public comments at the Angelicum here in Rome this week.
The blood of Christian martyrs still flows freely, Royal argues, and he offers powerful, detailed proof with his latest book, The Martyrs of the New Millennium (Sophia Press). As of 2024, he writes, “an estimated 340 million Christians [were] potential targets for persecution,” and thousands died that year for their faith. Among nations, North Korea was the leading persecutor, but nearly all of the top fifty offenders were Muslim-majority states.
Radical Islam is especially active and vicious in Africa, where Christianity has seen explosive growth. In the first quarter of the current century alone, the number of African Christians has doubled from around 100 million to more than 200 million. Young African Christians now outnumber young African Muslims four to one. The response from Islamic extremists has been savage. As Royal notes,
The world doesn’t pay much attention to Christian martyrdom and persecution despite the fact that Christians are attacked and repressed in more countries and to a greater degree than any other religious group. But even people who do not much care about or pay little attention to these matters must almost intentionally avert their gaze [from] the steady stream of Christian casualties in the central African nation of Nigeria. The situation in Nigeria is clearly the most openly bloody instance of religious persecution and martyrdom of Christians in the twenty-first century.
Hard evidence bears this out. In the period 2009–2021, a Nigerian watchdog group “documented 43,000 Christians killed, 18,500 Christians ‘disappeared,’ 17,500 churches attacked, 2,000 Christian elementary schools destroyed,” and other Islamist anti-Christian crimes. And the killing continues. A Nigerian bishop describes the situation as “creeping genocide.”
But the problem of anti-Christian violence is much wider than Africa. Royal presents compelling evidence of Christian persecution globally with sections on Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, China, and the developed Western nations. The effect is devastating. Mexico now “ranks as the most dangerous country in the world for Catholic priests . . . between 2007 and 2022, a mere fifteen-year span, somewhere between forty-five and fifty Catholic priests were assassinated in what reports have characterized as ‘narco-related violence.’ If nuns, seminarians and lay pastoral workers are added, the count is even higher.”
And in Europe too, the trends are unsettling. In 2022 alone, thirty European nations experienced 749 anti-Christian hate crimes. And in 2023, according to watchdog groups, “there were 2,111 anti-Christian hate crimes” tracked in Austria, Finland, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Again, the most conspicuous attacks on Christians in Europe “come from radicalized Islamists.”
Everyone has an opinion about what we need in a new bishop of Rome. And these days, along the Tiber, so do I. I think we need a man of clarity, strong intellect, courage, and vigorous evangelical witness; a man convicted in the unique, salvific content of the Christian faith; a man who can encourage, support, defend, and inspire the many millions of Christians who daily put their lives on the line for their faith. But that’s just my opinion. The Church belongs to Jesus Christ, not me. And history suggests that he knows what he’s doing—despite me, and despite us.
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Francis X. Maier is a Senior Fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. Maier’s work focuses on the intersection of Christian faith, culture, and public life, with special attention to lay formation and action.
