Catholicism before Europe

Much has been made, in the US at least, of the fact that the new pope – Robert Prevost, now Leo XIV –comes from the USA. The papacy is one of the few institutions in the world where Americans have been under-represented. In recent decades, the reason for that was the US’s disproportionate global influence – a pope from outside the US was seen as a counterbalance. Yet until the previous pope – an Argentinian – it would have been ludicrous to argue that the selection of popes was in any way balanced, since for over 1200 years every single pope had come exclusively from the continent of Europe.

It’s crucial to remember, though, that that wasn’t always the case! For the Catholic Church as an institution predates the rise of European influence in the world. Christianity, with its combination of Greek and Hebrew influences, is closely tied to the development of the “Western civilization” with those same influences. And a look at the Church’s history can help remind us, in a new way, that the West is neither white nor European – for neither, fundamentally, is the Church.

Today, of course, Europe represents only a small slice of the Catholic population. There are more Catholics in Latin America alone than in the entirety of Europe. There are more Catholics in the Democratic Republic of the Congo than there are in Italy, more Catholics in the Philippines than in France or Spain. And while the prevalence of Catholics in these regions – Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia – is a product of colonialism and modern population growth, what’s not modern is the reach of the Catholic Church outside of Europe.

Before Francis, the last pope from outside of Europe was Gregory III, from what is now Syria – who left office in 741, over a millennium back. But before that, popes from outside of Europe were commonplace – as one should expect. After all, Jesus himself never set foot in Europe. The Catholic Church considers the first pope to be the apostle Peter, who was born in what is now the Golan Heights, and the founding of the church to have taken place in Jerusalem.

In the previous few weeks there had been some speculation that the new pope might be selected from Ghana or the Congo – and if that had happened, it would not have been the first African pope! Victor I (d. 199) was born in Roman Africa, probably Leptis Magna (now Libya). There was also Gelasius I, pope from 492 to 496 – who was probably from Roman Africa though there’s been some ambiguity. Pope Miltiades was also from North Africa, and had the distinction of being pope in 313 – possibly the most important date in Christian history, when Emperor Constantine made the Roman Empire Christian, and thereby created the long link between Christianity and the West. (Thus, while Leo XIV would count as “Black” according to the weird segregationist logic of “progressive” Americans, he is far from the first pope to fit their criterion!) Those popes share their African Christianity with Augustine: that great philosopher who did more than anyone to shape the Christian mind throughout the centuries, and who was a Berber from what is now Algeria.

With all of that background in mind, how did the Church then manage to run a streak of exclusively European popes for 1200 years? In the past couple of centuries, no doubt some amount of colonialism and racism are to blame. But it’s important to remember that in an institution with a history as long as the Church’s, even those are relatively recent phenomenon. Colonialism and racism probably explain why the popes were exclusively European in the 19th and 20th centuries. They don’t explain that in the 14th century, when the concept of race didn’t exist.

There, the explanation has more to do with the Church having involuntarily narrowed its historic scope. Most obviously, of course, Islam spread rapidly through Augustine’s North Africa and Gregory III’s Syria after they were conquered by the Umayyad Caliphate; the east and south coasts of the Mediterranean were no longer primarily Christian.

But it’s also worth remembering that there remained Christians in those places; not everyone there became a Muslim, just as not everyone in Rome became a Christian under Constantine. By the time of Gregory III, the city of Rome had fallen to barbarians; the capital of the Roman Empire in the 8th century was Constantinople, now Istanbul – from which a strong swimmer could reach Asia. The Church in those days had been divided into five official “patriarchates” – of which a majority (the Asian Antioch and Jerusalem, and the African Alexandria) were not in Europe. It was the East-West Schism – halfway through the church’s history – that split off those churches, now called “Eastern Orthodox”, and left Roman Catholicism (itself a much later term) as an almost exclusively European phenomenon.

But even that lasted only for a few short centuries – before colonial-era missionaries would, for better or for worse, begin spreading Catholicism in great numbers to the world outside Europe. In the era 1054-1492, Catholicism qua Catholicism – as opposed to Orthodoxy – was almost entirely a European phenomenon. But even centuries are a short time when put against the whole span of church history. Modern church members today, of whom the vast majority are non-European, inherit the long pre-1054 history of a church that began and spread outside of Europe. It’s about time that they had some non-European popes again.