A report on the upcoming conclave by NPR’s Sylvia Poggioli raises two riveting issues facing the Catholic Church in this era, both having to do with authority.

First, Poggioli says that the taboo-breaking resignation of Pope Benedict XVI makes for a destabilizing situation:

The papal resignation has put the cardinals in an unprecedented situation in modern history.

“The real mood is of shock and disappointment, this resignation desacralized the figure of the pope,” says Massimo Franco, author of several books about the Vatican. He says a pope cannot be treated like a company CEO.

“If you allow the idea of resignation,” he adds, “It means that in the near future every pope might be victim of a mud campaign to force him out, from inside or from outside the Vatican, and that is very destabilizing.”

Second, the abuse scandal and the way information today is far more transparent and widely available than at any time in history creates an unprecedented potential for disaster:

Robert Mickens, correspondent of the Catholic weekly The Tablet, says public opinion demands that candidates’ be closely scrutinized as never before in history.

“Maybe before people didn’t dig around in pope’s dirt, but they are now, and what’s going to happen when we have a pope we discover had something in his past, had a lover in his past or accused of abuse in his past, that will really shake the foundations,” Mickens says.

What the Vatican needs is an internal agency that vets papabile, to see who is clean, and who is compromised. But the idea is plainly absurd. Popes, and potential popes, aren’t like US presidential candidates. Nevertheless, if it should emerge that a future pope had a lover, or had sexually abused someone in his past, the damage to the credibility of the Catholic institution would be immeasurable. We all know that there were terrible popes in the past, pontiffs whose personal lives were utterly squalid. But those popes reigned in times when knowledge of their sin would likely have been contained to the elite class, and in which faith in institutional authority, as well as in the Christian religion, was far greater than it is today.

What a tremendous burden on the cardinals today. How many Keith O’Briens are among their number? How might their own judgment be compromised by their personal histories, and past experiences dealing with the scandal (Cardinal Mahony says the Vatican told him to be sure to come to the conclave; surely having a man with his demonstrably terrible sense of judgment voting on the next pope cannot be a comfort).

Catholics believe the Holy Spirit guides the cardinals as they elect a new pope. That may be true, and if so, the election of a pope like Alexander VI — widely considered to have been perhaps the worst pope ever — must be considered as a particular judgment of the Holy Spirit. Yet as the Catholic Encyclopedia points out (click the link above), however disgraceful and corrupt Alexander’s papal reign turned out to be, he was initially cheered by grateful Roman citizens for restoring order to the city. Today, it could well be that the cardinal who has the skill and the temperament to restore order to the Curia comes into the conclave with a personally compromising history — one that could be devastating to the Church and the papacy if it were disclosed with him on the Petrine throne. A pope can be personally holy, but ill-suited to governing the Church (I think the last two papacies are good illustrations of this) — and the Church desperately needs a good governor now.

Catholic or not, if you are a Christian, pray for the cardinals. They surely need it. I would hate to have that kind of responsibility on my shoulders, having to choose the Roman pontiff in a cultural and technological era such as never has existed.

UPDATE: I’ve just been thinking about what would happen if one found out that the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the Ecumenical Patriarch, had been compromised by personal sexual sin, or covering up abuse. It would be a bad thing, but I don’t know of any Anglicans or Orthodox who would see that as a crisis for the entire Church. Part of this is that neither the EP nor the Abp of C. plays nearly the central administrative role that the Pope does. More than that, though, the Pope is such a symbolic figure within Catholicism, a bearer of far more mystery than the heads of other Christian churches. Though the declaration of papal infallibility was a 19th-century definition, and knowledgeable people understand that it is used very rarely, and then only within narrowly defined conditions, the declaration that a mortal man has these kinds of powers within his person, as long as he holds the papacy, cannot help but make the pontiff an extraordinarily elevated figure within the popular imagination.

As Bagehot said to the British monarchy, one must not let too much light in upon the magic. We live in a time now in which the light, in this sense, is like a klieg lamp.