Papal States

Anthony Burgess considers the importance of the papacy

Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash

Anthony Burgess was born and raised a Catholic. He was educated by the Xaverian Brothers and attended Mass every week at the Church of the Holy Name in Manchester. After the age of 16, he no longer described himself as a practising Catholic, but he remained immersed in the culture of the church and maintained a respect for the papacy. This interest in Catholic matters was often foregrounded in his novels and journalism. Having made a name for himself by reviewing novels with a Catholic theme by writers such as Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark, and living in Rome in the 1970s, he was often asked by editors to comment on news coming out of the Vatican. If he were alive today, he would surely have been called on to assess the legacy of Pope Francis.

Burgess’s non-fiction writing about the papacy became more frequent after the publication in 1980 of Earthly Powers, a novel which follows the rise of an unconventional priest to the office of pope. Much of this writing concerned John Paul II, who became pope in 1978, known as ‘the year of three Popes’. John Paul II was elected after John Paul I died — just 33 days into his papacy. Reviewing Peter Hebblethwaite’s book, The Year of Three Popes, Burgess takes time to characterise John Paul II’s predecessors. Paul VI was, according to Burgess, ‘a tormented bungler, the unfortunate inheritor of innovations which he, unlike his ebullient predecessor, was temperamentally unfitted to develop.’ As for ‘the September Pope’,

John Paul I is remembered for his Cheshire Cat grin and a papalina worn like a Just William schoolcap. I told readers of Il Giornale Nuovo that he would live forever and then at breakfast in a London hotel, found myself called on to speed 1500 words of shocked and empty eulogy over the Telex. What was there, after all, to eulogise?

The Polish pope John Paul II fared much better in Burgess’s writing of the 1980s. He had the advantage of being a literary man. Under his original name, Karol Wojtyła, John Paul II had written plays and poetry in Polish, and acted in underground plays during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Writing an approving review of his collected plays, Burgess compared the pope to one of his own literary heroes: ‘Before ordination an actor-dramaturge like Shakespeare, he was, as late as 1974, at least writing about the theatre. He still has something of the declamatory quality of the actor, but now has the literal globe for his stage.’

During the Second World War, when the future pope’s Rhapsodic Theatre was giving underground performances in Kraków, he began writing plays, many of which had a biblical theme, such as David (1939), Job, and Jeremiah (both 1940). Burgess, too, had written biblical scripts for television, including Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth, but there was another shared interest: Burgess and the pope had both translated Oedipus Rex from the Greek of Sophocles. Of the importance of the papal dramatic works, Burgess writes:

The British reader, used to the stichomythia and verbal economy, as well as the action, of our native tradition, may well deny that these are plays at all. In a sense, Wojtyła would agree and point to the circumstances of their wartime production. Though performed mostly in private houses, they would defy the Nazi ban if they were too theatrical. Moreover, limitations of production forbade orthodox staging, décor, lights. But they had a wider literary function than mere dramatic entertainment: they had to preserve a verbal tradition, an assertion of Polish Christian values through the word.

Ultimately, Burgess admits that these plays might not have been published if Wojtyła had not become pope, but he says that the writings are ‘remarkable’ because they are a ‘manifestation of the seamlessness of his faith, from studenthood to his present exaltation.’

In 1982 Burgess was called on to write about the first papal visit to Britain, a task he approached with his usual good humour: ‘He lives in a world of jet planes and helicopters. There are Catholics in Britain, and he may as well see how they are getting on. Diehard protestants, who fear that he may be coming to annex the Church of England and restore it to the Roman communion, need have no worries. What happened in 1534 is not likely to be reversed.’

John Paul II was in Britain for six days and visited nine cities including London, Glasgow and Manchester, where he performed an open-air Mass in Heaton Park. It was a pastoral visit, rather than an official state visit, though he did have meetings with Queen Elizabeth II and Robert Runcie, then Archbishop of Canterbury. Burgess used this visit to consider the role of the pope in a society with a diversity of religions. In a statement which recalls the themes of A Clockwork Orange, Burgess identifies John Paul II as an advocate for individual freedom, in particular because of his resistance to the Nazis:

John Paul made the issue clear at the very beginning of his pontificate. He told the faithful not to be afraid because, if God made us free, we’ve nothing to fear from those secular rulers who deny our freedom. I can be put in jail or a concentration camp or a lethal chamber by the State, but I am still free. God’s covenant comes before that of the State, which is always ready to break its covenants. The pope, whether speaking from Rome or in York or London, has a function which may be called secular or even political. This is to remind us of the importance of individual choice, the duty of political disobedience when political leaders deny human freedom.

Burgess goes on to say that the Pope’s visit is important to everyone in Britain, ‘whether we call ourselves atheists, agnostics, free-thinkers, Baptists, Plymouth Brethren or Mormons. Or, of course, plain lukewarm nominal members of the C of E. The charisma of John Paul has nothing to do with his Polishness, his musculature, or escape from martyrdom. It has everything to do with our right to live, and to live freely.’

Although John Paul II was a theological conservative who upheld the Church’s traditional teachings on contraception, homosexuality, and abortion, this did not deter Burgess from praising him as a beacon of freedom. What he would have made of the more liberal Pope Francis is hard to guess, and no doubt it would be complicated by the fact that Francis was the first Jesuit pope. Burgess’s comments on the Jesuits seem to be at variance with Francis’s public image:

If the Catholic Church ever seems dangerous to the children of reform, it is invariably because the Jesuits are grimly at work. Jesuitry, in the English lexis, carries no amiable connotations. It means militancy, fanaticism, equivocation, unscrupulousness, apologetic brilliance, terrible erudition. No jolly fat friars there: lean men rather with blue jaws who curiously reconcile the ascetic and the worldly, men who will stop at nothing.

As Earthly Powers demonstrates, Burgess was fascinated by the idea that a pope could be a complex, conflicted man. The fictional Pope Gregory XVII is brilliant, erudite and seems destined for sainthood — but he is also shown to be gluttonous, ruthless and given to physical violence. In Burgess’s view, the papacy was an institution in which the eternal conflict between good and evil might also be at work.

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Find out more

Buy Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess’s novel about the papacy (affiliate link)

Buy A Dead Man in Deptford, Burgess’s novel about espionage and priest-hunting in Elizabethan England (affiliate link)

Read Anthony Burgess’s commentary on Earthly Powers:

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