These questions were prompted during a recent visit to Rome when, in mid-week, I watched the thousands of people of all ages and races being marshalled into queues, with handbags being cleared through security checkpoints on the periphery of St Peter’s Square.

They had gathered for the weekly general audience, waiting for the appearance in their midst of Pope Francis, the 265th successor to St Peter.

In the midst of the swirling and noisy crowds, the first impression one has is akin to being at a rock concert. Waiting for the “star” performer to appear, the sense of anticipation grows, especially for those who are visiting Rome for the first time.

It is an impressive spectacle, with the white-clad, diminutive figure of Francis, the first Pope from Argentina, now confined to a wheelchair, at the centre of it all. And the buzz of excitement is contagious.

It’s all cleverly stage-managed, like an elaborate open-air theatre production, just like the papal conclaves, with the “Habemas papem” pronouncement from the central balcony of St Peter’s after the white smoke from the Sistine Chapel. And then the first appearance in public of the new pope on the balcony.

I can still vividly remember the excitement that swept over me at the first of the two conclaves in 1978 I covered for the Irish Press. What I was witnessing was pure theatre.

When I made my first call from the Vatican press office to the late Vincent Jennings, the editor of the Sunday Press (Albino Luciani had been elected on a Saturday afternoon) to tell him that the white smoke had been officially confirmed but that we would have to wait to learn the identity of the successor to Paul VI, the tremor in my voice must have been palpable, because he told me to calm down and concentrate on writing my story.

He was gently reminding me that I wasn’t in Rome as a star-struck tourist — I was there as journalist with a job to do. But I wasn’t able to disguise my feelings. After all, I had been brought up to believe that the pope was a person apart, the Vicar of Christ of earth, somehow touched by the divine.

Getting to “see the Pope” anytime is a big experience for a lot of Catholics, one of the “must do” things on a visit to the Eternal City. These appearances in the square, the basilica or the synod hall are now mandatory for popes. They’re expected; you could say there are now an essential part of the Vatican PR apparatus.

That said, I’m not sure that Francis is a “crowd person” in the manner, say, of John Paul II. And he has deliberately shed some of the trappings of a monarchical papacy. The Polish Pope relished his “rock star” status, attracting enormous crowds and, as a former actor, became very good at playing to the crowds. During his long pontificate, he became the most travelled Pope in history, becoming in effect the first celebrity-Pope.

His successor, Benedict XVI — a shy, bookish man, a man really of the study — was visibly uncomfortable with a lot of the papal razzamatazz that had flourished under Karol Wojtyla, though his fondness for medieval forms of papal attire was puzzling.

What all of this has to do with the essence of the papacy is altogether another matter. And that essence is trapped in what writer Morris West called the “paradox of the papacy” — the Pope is the servant of all the servants of God, a role of service, but also a head of state (his state being the 108-acre territory of Vatican City). And an absolute one at that, according to the Code of Canon Law (Canons 331-333).

One might be inclined to ask — Well, which one is it, which role really defines the papacy — is it the spiritual one or the monarchical one, the sovereign ruler?

Yet the paradox endures, and that paradox may account in part for our fascination with the papacy. Are we drawn to the idea of an all-powerful figure who wields absolute power, and a power moreover that binds not just on earth but in heaven also?

Does one side of us desire (if not need) the strong, authoritative, unerring ruler who wields absolute power (in a secular sense) within his own temporal kingdom (the Vatican), and sacred power as God’s vicegerent on earth?

Is this why the papacy as we have come to know it holds an almost magical attraction and fascination or Catholics, in particular, and appeals to a longing within us for an avatar of the divine? An avatar who serves as the gateway and source of a form of certainty in an uncertain world?

And is this also one reason, perhaps an over-riding one, why the papacy will remain an office that retains all the majesty, jurisdictional powers and accoutrements of an absolute monarchy?

If this helps to explain why the Catholic Church has become so Pope-centric, what then of the doctrine of collegiality bequeathed to us by Vatican II? And what then of Francis’s promotion of a synodal path, a path that foreshadows a synodal church and a more collegial form of church governance?

In one sense we have been here before insofar as collegiality may be seen as an offshoot of conciliarism.

This has been defined by the Australian author and church historian Paul Collins as “an opinion enunciated by a group of medieval canonists who argued that a general council is the highest authority in the church and is ultimately superior to a pope. At the heart of conciliarism is the attempt to limit papal power and demand greater accountability from the pope”.

This was given formal expression at the Council of Constance (1414-1418) which issued its famous decree Haec sancta (also known as Sacrosancta) on the superiority of the council over the pope.

The church historian Norman P Tanner SJ has pointed out that the papacy never rejected the decrees of Constance in an explicit and authoritative manner. “In my opinion the Council of Constance should be considered a general Council of the western church and its three major decrees be taken as authentic. There remains the problem of how to reconcile them with other statements of the church’s magisterium, especially the decrees of Vatican I on the papal office.” 

The professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University, Diarmaid MacCulloch, in a reference to Haec sancta in his international bestseller, says this: “There could be no clearer statement that papal primacy was to be put firmly in its place in favour of a general council”. But then adds that the years after the council “saw increasing tension between those wishing to develop this conciliar mechanism and successive popes seeking to build on the papacy’s newly restored integrity”.

This, of course, was in the aftermath of a very damaging schism which Constance ended when it elected Pope Martin V who, in the words of Tanner, showed “no enthusiasm” for the conciliar movement “with the result that little was accomplished”.

Which brings us to Vatican I (1869-70) which, in its decree Pastor aeternus, defined papal primacy and papal infallibility and thereby brought the curtain down on any hope of a revival of conciliarism. Or did it?

MacCulloch is clear that the main effect of Vatican I “was a thoroughgoing denial of the principles of conciliarism”.

Before that council came to a premature end following the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, the bishops “with varying degrees of enthusiasm, backed a decree, Pastor aeternus (‘The Eternal Shepherd’). This decisively exalted papal power at their expense, just at the moment when the pope’s temporal power was about disappear for ever,” wrote MacCulloch.

But then came Vatican II (1962-65), admittedly, in MacCulloch’s words “half a revolution”. Did this council, convoked by John XXIII, and with its emphasis on the doctrine of episcopal collegiality, seen as a counter-weight to Vatican I with its exaltation of papal power, leave an unresolved clash of ecclesiologies, a pope-centred ecclesiology versus a bishop-centred ecclesiology?

The evolution of the papacy over the centuries has been well documented. In the preface to his acclaimed 1997 history of the Popes, Eamon Duffy of Cambridge University outlines the background to what he calls one of the most extraordinary institutions in the history of the world: 

Nearly 90 million human beings, the largest single collection of people the world has ever known, look to the Pope as their spiritual leader. His office symbolises the rule of God himself over their hearts and minds and consciences. The words of the popes weigh in the halls of power, and in the bedrooms of the faithful. And the papacy, is the oldest, as well as arguable the most influential, of all human institutions.

But the same scholar acknowledges that the beginnings of the papacy are shrouded in uncertainty. “To begin with, indeed, there was no ‘pope’, no bishop as such, for the church in Rome was slow to develop the office of chief presbyter, or bishop.” That said, there is no doubt about Peter’s authority. “In all the Gospels, he is the leader, or at any rate the spokesman, of the Apostles,” writes Duffy. “Throughout the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke Peter’s name occurs first in every list of the names of the Twelve. In each Gospel he is the first disciple to be called by Jesus.” 

In an article for America magazine in 2000, the Georgetown University church historian, John W O’Malley SJ reminds readers of how much the papacy as we know it today has evolved since its beginnings. He reminds readers that even as late as Martin Luther’s posting of the 95 theses in the 16th century “relatively few Christians knew that the papacy existed, and surely only a minuscule percentage believed it had anything to do with the way they lived their lives”.

There is no need to insist, he says, that from the earliest centuries the bishop of Rome held a position of special respect and claimed unique prerogatives. “Yet in the first millennium popes did not ‘run the church’, nor did they claim to. They defined no doctrines, they wrote no encyclicals, they called no bishops ad limina. They did not convoke ecumenical councils, and they did not preside at them. In fact their roles in the first eight councils were generally insignificant.”

The real turning point in terms of creating a cult of the papacy didn’t come until the 19th century, and specifically during the pontificate of Pius IX, who was Pope from 1846 to 1878 and who, in 1867, announced the summoning of a general council (Vatican I), to begin on 8 December 1869.

“When in 1870 Garibaldi’s troops entered Rome, Pius IX dramatised the event by enclosing himself within the Vatican sector of the city. Catholics throughout the world, aware through the telegraph (transatlantic cable, 1866) and thence through newspapers that the pope was now ‘the prisoner of the Vatican’, poured out their sympathy for him. They knew the pope’s name, and they might even have seen a photograph of him. The cult of papal personality began to take shape for the first time.” 

O’Malley goes on to point out that in the meantime popes had begun to issue encyclicals. “That is to say, they were no longer merely the judges in cases of contested doctrine; they had themselves become teachers. By the middle of the 19th century publishing encyclicals had become part of the papal job description. So had the appointment of bishops.” Modern means of communication would also play a significant role. In 1929, with the Lateran pacts (an agreement between the papacy and the Italian government of Benito Mussolini), the pope’s self-imposed “exile” inside the Vatican ended.

“Movie cameras were admitted into Saint Peter’s and into the Apostolic Palace, and millions upon millions of people throughout the world could see Pius XI, Pius XII and John XXIII bestow their blessings,” wrote O’Malley. “The popes, no longer prisoners, began to travel. Jets made it easy. Popemobiles did the same. And the rest, as they say, is history.”

In a later article in America magazine, Jeffrey von Arx SJ, who had served as chair of the History Department at Georgetown University, also emphasised the changes in our perception of the papacy that occurred during Pius IX’s time. “The veneration of the pope — in his person and well as in his office — grew initially around Pius IX, the prisoner of the Vatican, and around every pope subsequently until it reached its apotheosis in the rock star status of St. John Paul II. This exaltation of the pope gave individual popes a moral and spiritual authority and a personal popularity and recognition unlike anything that had been seen before.”

Where does the “cult of the papacy” stand today in the light of Vatican I and Vatican II? According to Collins, there is still a major theological question lurking behind all of this.

“Is it possible to reconcile the conciliarist teaching of Constance and the ultramontane teaching of Vatican I? While it is true that a healthy tension can exist between a conciliar and a papal view of the Church, the simple fact is that the two cannot probably be reconciled. The Church needs to face this disjunction.”

Is the Synod on Synodality a step in that direction? The second and critical assembly of the synod is scheduled for October in Rome. For now we can only guess at what may emerge. It may prove a major disappointment. At Vatican II, Paul VI, in the words of MacCulloch, “had doubts about the collegiality of all bishops, and in order to win the consent of a conservative minority to Lumen Gentium, he accepted ‘Prefatory notes’ (Nota praevia) added to it, which spelled out in scholastic language the limits which the main text could place on collegiality”.

Then, in 1968, Paul VI, on his own initiative, published Humanae Vitae — his (again in MacCulloch’s words) “unmodified stand against artificial birth control: this provoked the greatest internal challenge to papal authority in the Western Church’s history since Martin Luther’s protests over the theology of salvation”.

Was that ill-fated papal initiative more in keeping with the spirit of Vatican I than Vatican II? That remains an unanswered question.

But on one thing I am clear — as I reflect again on the crowds of pilgrims in St Peter’s Square, waiting for a glimpse of Pope Francis, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the cult of papal personality is not going away anytime soon.