The New Yorker:

A new account of the papacy’s recent history reveals the transformation of the office in the mass-media age.

By Paul Elie

“Gandhi’s Scant Garb Bars Audience with Pope.” So read the headline of a New York Times report, from December 13, 1931, that the Vatican had cancelled a meeting between Pius XI and “the Indian nationalist leader” because the Pope thought he might be criticized “if he received the visitor in his usual scanty clothing.” Last December, ninety-three years later, the Times published an excerpt from Pope Francis’s autobiography titled “There Is Faith in Humor,” which related jokes told by and about the clergy, and was meant to show that they are not merely “bitter, sad priests.”

That the papacy has changed over the past century almost goes without saying. John XXIII, who was elected Pope in 1958, called an ecumenical council, only the twenty-first in the nearly two-thousand-year history of the Church. Paul VI left the Vatican for trips to Bombay, Jerusalem, New York City, and Bogotá. John Paul II stood shoulder to shoulder with the Dalai Lama and the chief rabbi of Rome during an interfaith prayer for peace held in Assisi. Benedict XVI resigned, the first Pope to do so in six hundred years.

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