I still remember the day that I learned that I was eligible to become pope. It was not too long after I was taught that I might grow up to be President of the United States one day and shortly before I accepted that I was never going to be a professional basketball player or a professional baseball player. I hadn’t even picked up a clarinet at that point in time, so it would be at least another decade before I acknowledged that a career in music was not in the cards either. But pope…
Turns out the requirements to be pope were minimal and fairly trivial:
- Male
- Baptized in the Catholic church
- Able to use reason
So, only two more than the effective (not nominal) requirement to be President of the United States; and I would not have even had to wait until I was 35.
Now, back in the day becoming president involved convincing a party to select you to represent them as their nominee in the general election and then convincing millions of people to vote for you. Today, we’ve conflated those two tasks into essentially repeating the latter twice. Plus, we used to think that becoming president first required a career in politics or at least winning a World War. Daunting. In the 2000s we learned that you could go from community organizer or reality TV host to president in two shakes of a lamb’s tale. All in all, however, still seems like a lot to go through simply for the opportunity to be president for a few years.
Becoming pope, in contrast, requires none of that. No career in politics or even the clergy is necessary. No sucking up to millions of people, not even a hundred or so cardinals. Contrary to what you might have learned from the film Conclave or will hear and read over the next week or so, we (i.e., Roman Catholics) don’t believe that the cardinals select or elect the pope in the same way that we elect the president. Not even the same we that decide what the definition and standards for Validity will be in the next edition of the Standards. No, we believe that after periods of prayerful reflection and discernment the appropriate choice for pope among all those eligible (see above) is revealed to the cardinals in the conclave. Personally, in my humble opinion the papal selection scene in Eurotrip comes closer to depicting the divine inspiration involved and is no more absurd than Conclave.
And Pope is a lifetime job.
Watched and Waited
This will be the sixth time in my lifetime that there has been a new pope. There was a long stretch between 1963 (when I was four years old) and August 1978 when we were shocked to learn that the pope had died. Much like FDR as president when my parents were growing up, Pope Paul VI was the only pope I had ever known.
When Pope Paul VI died in 1978, I was finishing up my summer job, preparing to start my sophomore year at Harvard. The Red Sox held an 8.5 game lead over the fourth place Yankees, I had recently attended my first Barry Manilow concert; and little did I know that I was mere weeks away from the beginning of a chain of events that would lead to meeting the love of my life.
One tumultuous month later, it was the final weekend of the baseball season, the Red Sox were a game behind the eventual World Series Champion Yankees; and Pope John Paul I had passed away suddenly and unexpectedly.
A year later my father and I stood all afternoon in Boston Common to be in attendance as Pope John Paull II celebrated a Mass in a downpour – America the beautiful, even in the rain. Although the church was in turmoil, the papacy stabilized for the next quarter century. Then came Pope Benedict XVI, the first pope in the modern era to resign in office, followed by Pope Francis. And here we are.
A New Dawn, A New Day, A New Era
In the coming weeks there will be a new pope. Why not me?
Arguably, I am more qualified to be pope than I was to be a psychometrician when they handed me BILOG, a copy of Hambleton & Swaminathan, and tasked me with equating state tests. Agewise, having turned 66 last week I am right in the sweet spot. The mean and median age of the 16 popes installed since 1800 being about 65.75.
I also have relevant experience. It doesn’t take a theologian to see the comparability between trying to understand the articles of the Catholic faith and those of educational measurement; to unlock the mystery of The Holy Trinity and the trinitarian, but unified view of Validity. Latent traits and constructs that cannot be seen nor adequately defined. Equal-interval scales where nobody can explain what the intervals are or why they are important. The blind faith needed to accept pre-equated test results as truth. You cannot convince me that John’s Book of Revelation is any more difficult to interpret than Messick’s Validity; and John didn’t include a confounded and confounding 2×2 table.
I’ve watched Hambleton and Wright debate Rasch v. IRT, Cizek and Sireci go at it on validity, and Neal Kingston wander from coast to coast only to find that there’s no place like Kansas. I’ve gazed into the murkiness of a DIF statistic and seen what’s on the other side. I’ve faced the devil down in Georgia – and a few other states as well.
I’ve witnessed a handful of misguided students and disgruntled former state department of education employees with barely two thin dimes to rub together dismantle ten years of education reform, and an administration with nearly $5 billion at their disposal do the same. I’ve seen bull proclaimed and the theses nailed to the wall. In the belly of the testing beast, I’ve seen enough to know I have seen too much, including some things that a person ain’t supposed to see. I’m ready.
Sure, it’s a longshot. That college of cardinals has had a tendency to select one of their own, and for a long time there, all the popes were from Italy. Their reach expanded to the rest of Europe with John Paul II (Poland) and Benedict XVI (Germany), and then to South America (Argentina) with Francis. Southern Maine could be next. My wife still has family in Italy. I’m sure she’s up for the move.
Reality Check
I’m not going to be Pope Francis II.
But I am going to continue to wear the St. Francis medal that my wife gave me so many years ago. I’m going to continue to carry the prayer of St. Francis with me as I have done since I first heard it sung during my Confirmation; and I’m going to attempt to live it better tomorrow than I did today. That’s what is asked of all of us and the least any of us can do. And if we do, we’ll all be better for it and the world will be a better place.
Prayer of St Francis
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.
O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Image by Juan Fernández from Pixabay
Embrace the Absurd 