They never tell you about the gaps. Those vast, yawning
spaces between things—between what was and what will be. The kind that swallow
centuries whole.
I’m talking about 1,272 years. That’s how long it took—after
Pope Gregory III drew his final breath in 741—for another non-European to sit
on St. Peter’s throne. Think about that. One thousand two hundred and
seventy-two years. The entire rise and fall of empires. The discovery of
continents. The invention of printing presses and penicillin and nuclear bombs.
All while Rome kept its holy crown firmly fixed on European heads.
There’s a story there, alright. A damn unsettling one.
***
When they carried Pope Gregory II’s body through the narrow
streets of Rome in that bitter February of 731, nobody paid much mind to the
Syrian priest following in the procession. He was just another face in the
crowd, this Gregory from Shaam—a faraway place now buried under the map we call
Syria. His father was named John, or Ioannes if you’re feeling fancy, though I
suspect folks just called him John same as we’d call any John in Harlan or Tupelo.
The thing about crowds, though—they’re fickle beasts with
sudden appetites.
Before anyone knew what was happening, those Roman folks
started chanting Gregory’s name. Not the dead pope’s—the living Syrian’s. You’ve
seen those horror flicks where normal people get caught up in some kind of mass
hysteria? This was the holy version. They chose him right there, with the
previous pope’s corpse still warm, for Christ’s sake. Acclamation, they called
it.
I imagine Gregory standing there, stunned as a deer in
headlights on Highway 61, thinking: What in God’s name have I gotten myself
into?
The Byzantine boys in Ravenna—they had to approve it. Give
their stamp, so to speak. Made Gregory wait over a month before they’d let him
take the job proper. Last pope who ever had to kiss the Byzantine ring that
way. Things were changing. The old empire was rotting from the inside out, like
those houses where you don’t find the dead body until the neighbors complain
about the smell.
***
What most folks don’t tell you about Gregory III is that he
had a mean streak when it came to those who messed with his sacred images. See,
over in Constantinople, Emperor Leo III had gotten this bee in his bonnet about
destroying icons—smashing statues, burning paintings of Jesus and the saints.
Called it “iconoclasm,” which is just a fancy word for “breaking shit that
other people hold dear.”
Gregory wasn’t having any of it.
No sir, he called a synod faster than you can say Jack
Robinson—November ‘31—packed it with church bigwigs, and condemned the whole
business. Then—and this is the part I love—he rebuilt every damn thing the
iconoclasts had broken. Statues. Paintings. Put up this big, ornate iconostasis
right in the middle of St. Peter’s, like a giant middle finger pointed east
toward Constantinople.
You break our stuff? We’ll build it back twice as pretty.
The emperor, predictably, lost his mind. Seized church
properties in Sicily and Calabria. Transferred whole chunks of land to his own
Patriarch’s control. The classic tantrum of a child who doesn’t get his way.
Meanwhile, Gregory kept playing the long game. Sent missions
to Germany. Backed this fella named Boniface who was chopping down pagan oak
trees and building churches in their place. When the Lombards started breathing
down his neck—bloodthirsty bastards with a thing for Rome—Gregory reached out
to the Frankish leader Charles Martel.
Martel didn’t actually send troops, mind you. But that
handshake across the Alps? That connection would save the papacy’s ass for
centuries to come.
***
The truth—and God knows the truth is always stranger than
the fiction I peddle—is that Gregory wasn’t even the first non-European pope.
Not by a long shot.
Take Saint Peter himself. The rock on which the whole damn
church is built? Fisherman from Galilee. Middle Eastern through and through.
Then there was Evaristus from Bethlehem, Anicetus from Syria, Victor and
Miltiades from North Africa. Theodore I came from Jerusalem. John V, Sisinnius,
Constantine—all Syrians.
For the first seven centuries, the papacy looked like the
United Nations. Then—SNAP!—the door slammed shut. From 741 to 2013,
nothing but Europeans. Every. Single. Pope.
That’s not coincidence, friends. That’s design.
***
It started innocent enough. Rome was the center. The big
holy city. The place where Peter supposedly got himself crucified upside-down.
Makes sense the bosses would come from nearby.
But after Rome fell—I’m talking 476, when the barbarians
finally kicked in the door that had been rattling for centuries—something
changed. The pope became the only law in town. The only fella with any kind of
authority in that power vacuum they call the Dark Ages.
Popes like Gregory I (not our Syrian Gregory, mind you, but
an earlier model) stepped into roles that used to belong to emperors. They
collected taxes. Organized armies. Told kings when to jump and how high.
Then the College of Cardinals got formed up. Think of them
as the ultimate old boys’ club. European fellas picking European successors.
The system fed itself.
And that’s just the start of it.
***
You want to know the real horror story? Look at what came
next.
The Age of Exploration, they call it in schoolbooks. The Age
of Colonization would be more honest. Europeans sailed out with crosses in one
hand and swords in the other. The Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans—they
followed Columbus and Da Gama and Magellan like shadows.
They built schools. Hospitals. Churches. Sounds nice, don’t
it?
What they really built was a system. A machine that ground
down local cultures and spit out Catholic Europeans. They took native kids,
taught them Latin and Greek instead of their own languages. Told them their
ancestors’ beliefs were superstitions at best, devil worship at worst.
They had this thing called the Doctrine of Discovery.
Imagine this: you “discover” someone else’s homeland—someone who’s been living
there for thousands of years—plant a cross, say a prayer, and POOF! It’s
yours now. God said so.
The colonizers worked hand-in-glove with the church. The
church worked hand-in-glove with the colonizers. And the pipeline that led to
the papacy? It ran straight through European seminaries, European universities,
European power structures.
For 1,272 years.
***
I think about Gregory III sometimes. Wonder what he’d make
of Jorge Mario Bergoglio—Pope Francis—the Argentinian who finally broke the
European chokehold in 2013.
Would he recognize the church he once led? Would he see how
the simple faith he preached got twisted up with empires and colonies and power
games? Would he wonder why it took so goddamn long?
Or maybe—and this is the thought that keeps me up at
night—maybe he’d just nod. Because he knew, even back in 741, which way the
wind was blowing. Maybe he watched the Europeans circling, sensed the shift in
power, felt the door slowly closing on outsiders like himself.
Maybe he knew the darkness that was coming, and how long it
would last.
Those gaps, man. Those yawning chasms between what was and
what will be. They’re the scariest part of any story.
And this one lasted 1,272 years.
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