Medieval imagery strikes home

You don't have to be a big fan of the papacy to be struck by how appropriate this medieval sounding statement by Pope Francis is. He made it in connection with his foot washing yesterday:

  NBC News reports that since Pope Francis became pope, he has "proved many times over that he wants to break away from clerical privilege, come down from St. Peter's throne and act as a humble servant of the faithful."
During a short homily before the ritual, the pope urged priests to go out into the world.
"It is not in soul-searching... that we encounter the Lord," he said, according to the BBC. "We need to go out ... to the outskirts where there is suffering, bloodshed, blindness that longs for sight and prisoners in thrall to many evil masters."

It is good to hear someone powerful admit that many prisoners, today, are in thrall to evil masters.

Image:  Saint Catherine thrust into prison. And  being beaten just for the heck of it.

The Papal Election

Somehow the Atlantic got the idea of getting a historian to write up a piece.  They picked a good one, David Perry. I especially liked this:

1) Voting is medieval.
Voting is a quintessentially medieval activity. Sure, popular representations of the Middle Ages focus on kings and knights, princesses and peasants, but medieval people, especially in cities, loved to vote. They organized themselves into groups - guilds, religious fraternities, charitable organization, drinking societies - and wrote complicated bylaws governing elections. Many cities embraced various kinds of representative government during the High Middle Ages. Even the army outside the walls of Constantinople in 1204 took time to develop a voting system to elect the next emperor.
It's easy to characterize the Conclave of Cardinals as an authoritarian relic of the past. It's not. It's the same kind of democratic tradition that permeates modern American and European life, from board rooms to union halls to church groups to town councils.

My characterization of Pope Innocent III

He was determined to rally Christendom to discipline the whole disobedient world.