Advice on the Upcoming Papacy

The email below was sent on April 5, 2025 to His Eminence Cardinal Pierre, Papal Nuncio to the United States. I've sent His Eminence many messages in recent years and never received a reply, but I'm happy to share my views without any guarantee they'll be considered.

Your Eminence,

Greetings. This servant of Your Eminence offers condolences on the passing of His Holiness Pope Francis. As this servant of Your Eminence wrote His Holiness in the letter that became the introduction to Reunion (www.godispoor.org/reunion), His Holiness proved to be a truly skilled and dedicated pontifex, constructing a bridge even to the remote and sparsely populated island of this servant of His Holiness and of Your Eminence. This servant of Your Eminence shall miss His Holiness.

As Your Eminence prepares to enter the conclave, this servant of Your Eminence will endeavor to be uncharacteristically brief, quickly covering five points: Human systems will shortly undergo fundamental change, either in a controlled process or in catastrophic collapse. The foremost leader of the change will be the organization that first confesses its own need to change. Neither guilt nor embarrassment need attach to the conversion, for the danger we now face may be characterized as necessary, or as part of a divine plan. The necessary conversion is simply accepting into our hearts the fact that too much of a good thing is bad. To carry out the institutional sequel to this conversion, with a steady hand that provides effective leadership, the new pope may find it prudent to make a simple change in Church governance.

I trust that Your Eminence can see the first point. His Holiness spoke eloquently on it. Any of the colleagues of Your Eminence who do not see catastrophe approaching via the ongoing ecocide are apt to see it in galloping materialism, declining faithfulness, or any of the other polycrisis tentacles with which the planetary civilization is shot through.

The desire to overthrow the current anomie is all around us and in our hearts. The gentlest nudge, applied at the correct point, will set off a virtuous cascade. That point lies in each potential leader's self. Let those who would lead criticize and reform themselves publicly, to give others both cover and permission to do the same. In this way, change will radiate from a central catalyst. Your Eminence will note that the flaws in the catalyst will be given retroactive meaning and purpose, since it is the flaws that make the catalysis possible. This feature of the plan should appeal to well-wishers of any organization beleaguered due to its past excesses.

Value exists in human flaws that do not cross the pale of our species into the realms of monstrous acts. The folly our species has pursued will either destroy the power over Nature that is technological civilization or teach us to transcend our animal natures to become responsible stewards of that power. Would that we had learned this lesson before we knit together all civilizations into a single structure on which almost every person depends, but if we had possessed only slightly more self-control, we might have sustainably escaped Earth before learning our lesson. Then many living planets across our galaxy would very likely have been laid waste by metastatic humanity. No, the extreme degree of our foolishness, when it comes to survival, is wise, natural, perhaps pious, when it comes to ensuring that we limit the range of the destruction we cause until we have grown sufficiently in self-control and, hence, control of our vast and growing power, to limit the degree of the burden we place on natural systems, which is the source of the destruction.

The lesson we must learn is simply that too much of a good thing is bad, whether that thing is longevity, as in Genesis 6:1-3; rain, as in Genesis 7; alcohol, as Genesis 9:20-27; religion or morality arguably represented as bathing in John 13:9-10; religious power, as in John 13:1-17; religion or morality, as in Mark 7:1-23; zeal, as in John 18:10-11 and John 8:3-11; economic activity, as in Genesis 11:1-9; besides, I am confident, many other passages, for I have never read the entire Bible, and apart from Genesis, the Gospels, and a few passages elsewhere, it is more than four decades since I have read The Bible at all.

Economic activity is a key good thing of which we have disastrously too much at the moment, but so is unity, as in the single planetary technological civilization, the unification of all, or nearly all, nations in pursuit of money, and the ostensible concentration of ultimate Catholic authority in the hands of the Holy Father on the throne of Peter. Things that are one from a distance can be seen as many when inspected more closely, and pretending otherwise impedes good governance, as can be seen from the inability of His Holiness Pope Francis to enlist Church leaders in wealthy nations in the cause of justice for the poor and for Nature. Rich folk and their friends don't listen to people from outside their group, and zealots can't hear moderates. As we say in the United States, only Nixon could go to China.

Therefore, I suggest that the next pontiff look back in time, past the Council of Nicaea, implicitly swayed by Constantine's will and convenience following his unification of all power through the protracted civil wars that ended the power sharing of the tetrarchy, and follow Trinitarian principles by appointing two colleagues. For example, the throne of Peter might be joined by a throne of Mary Magdalene, who, as I understand matters, was a respected disciple and financier of the Jesus movement, and a throne of Thomas, the honoring of whose example might engage the interest of scientists and technologists, who threaten to subordinate humanity to their values via artificial intelligence and further endanger humanity and creation in general by digging ever deeper in a mountain that is expected to disgorge balrogs and genies all the way down. The throne of Thomas could be occupied by a person of any gender. The pope's colleagues would serve at the pleasure of the pope, but the combination would be much more powerful than the pope alone, so long as the pope chose colleagues who disagreed fundamentally with the pope and who represented major constituencies unlikely to listen to the pope. The three would issue some statements with a single voice, even if disagreement arose in private discussions. Other statements would reflect majority and dissenting views, explicitly stated or not. In still other statements, the pope would stand against the publicly stated advice of the colleagues, but these statements would likely be the least persuasive. There would be incentive to form consensus, subject to the knowledge of the urgency of action in the polycrisis that threatens civilization's existence as an organizing principle of our species.

Again, there should be no fear in admitting the need to change at so late a date, because the delay in changing has served the good purpose of making conditions bad enough to make the change adequate in degree and lasting in nature. Furthermore, wise leaders, among them His Holiness Pope Francis, have already established the precedent of publicly acknowledging personal limitations. Religious leaders will ultimately have ample company in proclaiming their flaws and inadequacies, from theoretical physicists confessing the scientism of their faith in this or that controversial model of reality, to university administrators admitting their well-known toxic behavior and abject worship of money, to politicians asking us all what else we expected of politicians, to wizards of finance molting their bespoke suits and slithering into the undergrowth. I have long beseeched physicists and university administrators, along with Church leaders in the United States, to become catalysts for fundamental change in values and, hence, systems that express these values. The lethargy in academia will prove valuable cover for the Church as it valiantly catalyzes the necessary transformation of humanity.

I invite Your Eminence to imagine how long this message would have been had this servant of Your Eminence not resolved to make it brief! This servant of Your Eminence depends on the good humor of Your Eminence in the face of the frailties of this servant of Your Eminence and hopes that Your Eminence will accept the warm good wishes of this servant of Your Eminence and, at some early, convenient moment, briefly apprise this servant of Your Eminence of the efforts Your Eminence will have taken by then to induce the native land of Your Eminence to repay the money it stole at gunpoint from Haiti. 

Yours in God, regardless of models of God,
James