A Personalist Approach to the Pope

Gerhard Cardinal Müller’s The Pope: His Mission and His Task is based on the principle of emphasizing “the precedence of the person before the institution.” The “papacy is not,” he writes, “an objective and impersonal institution” but rather a relational reality pertaining between believers and Christ’s vicar on earth. It is primarily founded on the relationship between Christ and St. Peter and only then maintained by each successor who appears “before us in his specific individuality.” Therefore, the “person is antecedent to the institution and makes the abiding task and mission of Peter visible and alive.” 

This fundamental basis of Müller’s book is distinctive and original. It bears traces of the ecclesiological reflection that was heralded by a comment by Romano Guardini in the 1920s, that “the Church is awakening in people’s souls.” Guardini foresaw that the Church could be a dynamic and existential reality, rather than an impersonal institution. As put by Joseph Ratzinger, she could appear “as something living, which abides in peoples’ souls.” Personalist ecclesiology needs a personalist theology of the papacy, and this is precisely what Müller achieves. 

The book is therefore structured in a way that avoids the standard deadlocks over collegiality, infallibility, and ecumenism. It begins with a lengthy autobiographical reflection on the author’s own personal experience of the popes in office during his life, from Pius XII to Pope Francis (the original German edition of the book was published in 2017, predating the difficulties between Müller and Pope Francis). This autobiographical section is well worth reading on its own. Reminiscent of Ratzinger’s Milestones, it offers a fascinating and moving account of an apparently smooth journey from pious Catholic childhood to senior clerical office—rich in prayerful insight and testimony. 

The overall effect of this discussion is to make something clear about the personal character of the pope’s ministry that is often missed by ecclesiologists. In 1887, Lord Acton coined the phrase “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The phrase has since been so often repeated as to have the status of a truism, something assumed self-evident. On analysis, it is a phrase that asserts that human beings are too morally weak to bear power without that power having detrimental consequences upon themselves and those over whom they rule. The greater the degree of power apportioned to them, the more detrimental the consequences. 

Ratzinger showed how the papacy is therefore an institutional analogue to the human conscience, a truth which Newman described with the phrase “the aboriginal vicar of Christ,” the conscience being native to human subjectivity.

Acton’s phrase presupposes that authority is, at best, a sort of necessary evil. Authority is assumed to be a regrettably unavoidable aspect of social life that is required, as put classically by J.S. Mill, to protect people against the detrimental consequences of human weakness: “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community . . . is to prevent harm to others.” By such reckoning, freedom is the opposite of authority and its most obvious corollary, obedience: we only obey because it is necessary to do so to safeguard freedom, and those in positions of authority are granted compliance because otherwise society would descend into chaos and anarchy. 

These assumptions are so deeply rooted in the Western mind that it is almost impossible to escape them. Regardless of whether this is a good thing in the political realm or not, the fact remains that, for Christian theology, an entirely different relationship of obedience to freedom pertains. Though it may seem counter-intuitive, even to believers, but from a Christian perspective, obedience is not the opposite of freedom. Freedom and obedience are profoundly interdependent. 

Thus, the command ‘You shall not murder’ is not primarily a guardrail to stop people killing each other. It is a command that mandates and grounds the fullness and flourishing of human life in freedom. The prohibition of murder is not primarily a freedom from being killed, but a freedom for life—for the depth of encounter and the relational transformation that follows from honoring others as infinitely precious images of the unseen God. Obedience and freedom are not opposites existing in some difficult but unavoidable tension. Rather, they are in a relationship of direct proportion. The more obedient the Christian is, the freer he or she is, and vice versa. It is on this basis that Sohrab Ahmari describes the martyrdom of St. Maximilian Kolbe not as a restraint on that Polish friar’s self-expression, but as “a strange and perfect form of freedom.” 

Counter-intuitive though this may seem, there is a living remnant of this idea in a distinctive usage of the English word “authoritative.” If someone speaks authoritatively, this does not mean they are speaking coercively. It means rather that their words bear an inherent power because they are spoken in truth. To speak authoritatively means to speak in such a way that one’s words require no coercive enforcement. As Hannah Arendt noted, the word authority is “commonly mistaken for some form of power or violence,” when the truth of the matter is that “where force is used, authority itself has failed.” 

When people speak authoritatively, their person is intrinsically caught up in the assertion. Anonymous or impersonal diktats are never truly authoritative. Authoritativeness is, then, fundamentally relational, which the Christian understanding of obedience and freedom always entails. As Müller presents it, the pope can speak authoritatively because he is a living and dynamic reality in people’s lives, leading a Church that is “something living, which abides in peoples’ souls.” 

From this basis, Müller goes on to undertake the work of exegesis, analysis of the Apostolic Tradition, and then discussing the key magisterial nodes of Pastor Aeternus, collegiality, and so on. The personalist lens enables these nodes to be tackled in distinctive ways, which advance significantly on the standard deadlocks one encounters in teaching ecclesiology. To give just one example, Müller dedicates a chapter to the notion that the pope is “Christ’s witness to the dignity of every human being.” This section can be seen as a particular outworking of the personalist lens, interpreting the role of the pope in a startlingly new and compelling way. 

Ratzinger argued that papal authority exhibits a fundamentally “martyrological” character. The pope bears a unique proximity to the truth, even to the degree of inhabiting an office that can proclaim infallible truth when speaking ex cathedra on matters of faith or morals. This does not by any means entail some transcendent freedom from the limitations bearing on all human beings per se. It means just the opposite; it means to speak from that place where freedom is the quintessence of order, to speak with that “strange but perfect form of freedom” that means those things that all too often restrain human endeavors—corruption, self-will, ambition, etc.—can hold no sway without undermining the office itself. Ratzinger showed how the papacy is therefore an institutional analogue to the human conscience, a truth which Newman described with the phrase “the aboriginal vicar of Christ,” the conscience being native to human subjectivity.

The pope’s role is thus, like conscience, intrinsically related to human dignity and freedom. This is a theological articulation of what the Book of Acts describes as “the boldness of Peter” (4:13). Again, as Müller points out, Peter is the Rock on whom Christ promises to build the Church, the person precedes the office. That is, the person is granted a specific mission in office, adopting from that moment a new name. This book is, without a doubt, a milestone work in ecclesiology, and a uniquely capacious interpretation of the papacy in its full theological and anthropological breadth.