The name of the Pope.(Religion)

ALTHOUGH CONJECTURE about the person of John Paul II's successor has increased in the past year or two, few if any observers have speculated on how a new pontiff might choose to name himself. It is customary for a newly elected pope at the end of a conclave to announce the name by which he wishes henceforth to be known. Like a baptismal name or a "name in religion" adopted by an entrant into vowed religious life, a papal name signals a new start. Upon election, a pontiff enjoys a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to unfurl a fresh vision by choosing an evocative name. Name-choosing is a pope's first public act of ministry. It should be performed with vivacity.

The very word pontiff suggests some possibilities for doing so. This specifically Roman title contrasts with the ubiquitous Greek title papas (father), which the Greek Orthodox Church still uses for any priest and which the Western church affixed to any bishop until in 1073 Pope Gregory VII (1073-85) reserved it for the bishop of Rome. The Coptic Patriarch of Alexandria is likewise designated by the non-biblical title of pope. In contrast, the priestly title of pontifex maximus (supreme pontiff) descends from pre-Christian Rome and since its revival in the fifteenth century has pertained only to the bishop of Rome.

The Latin word pontifex means bridge-builder, and by virtue of having survived some 2500 years, the title bridges the gap between pagan and Christian Rome. A pontiff builds bridges across gaps--between earth and heaven, between Catholics and the world, and among Catholics of every region and rite. From the moment a pontiff chooses a name for his reign, he starts building bridges on a grand scale. Self-naming is a pontiff's first hint of what kind of bridges he will sponsor.

The pope's privilege of choosing a name for his tenure in office ought to be exercised more strategically than has been done during the past few centuries. To my knowledge, the benefits of widening the repertoire of papal names through ressourcement (that is, exploration of ancient sources) has not been discussed in print before. The electee should canvass the fullest possible range of names and assess their pastoral effect. Needless to say, it would be wise for any papabile (likely electee), to have browsed among papal names before a conclave begins.

If we exclude thirty-five antipopes (contested claimants to the office), it appears that 262 popes to date have chosen some eighty-two different names. The most frequent by far is John (22 times), followed by Gregory (16), Benedict (15), Clement (14), and both Innocent and Leo (13). A number of names have been used only twice (Damasus, Marcellus, Paschal, Gelasius), and thirty-eight chosen down to the year 913 have occurred only once, including such apposite ones as Mark, Valentine and Constantine.

For the past thousand years, however, the practice of introducing a name new to the papacy has vanished. Since 913 every newly elected pope had named himself after one of his predecessors until on August 26, 1978, John Paul I broke ranks by honouring not one but two of them. The last times before 1978 that a pope chose an unprecedented name fell twice in the 890s with both Formosus (891-96) and Romanus (897), and then for a final time with Lando (913-14), the 121st pope.

Every subsequent pope named himself for at least one predecessor until John Paul I combined two such names to launch a new type of designation, a double one. In view of the previous thousand years of unbroken respect for precedent, we must salute John Paul I's leap of imagination. It proved a deft way to celebrate a desire to innovate while staying within the bounds of tradition. In what may prove to be his most lasting legacy, the 261st pontiff devised a new way to deploy papal names. It helped no doubt that the two names he chose are short in most of their versions in the European languages. In our media-saturated era it would be hard to imagine a pope selecting a pair of unwieldy names like, say, Eugenius Sylvester or Anastasius Benedict.