By the time you read this delayed issue of Position Papers (my apologies), 133 cardinals will have entered the Sistine Chapel to elect a successor to the late Pope Francis – and, ultimately, to Saint Peter. This month, we lead with a retrospective on Pope Francis’ papacy by George Weigel, biographer of Pope Saint John Paul II. If events have unfolded swiftly, the 267th pope may already have been chosen, ending the flurry of speculation about which cardinal will emerge as the next pontiff.
A lot of ink has been spilled on this topic. While I sympathize with editors tasked with filling pages weekly or monthly, I’ve come to see little value in wading through endless conjecture – whether the next pope will be a liberal continuing Pope Francis’ legacy, a conservative steering the Church toward tradition, or a moderate compromise. The truth will soon be revealed, rendering such speculation largely futile. This breathless guessing game feels more like entertainment than insight. (And so this month we carry George Weigel’s insightful retrospective on the papacy of Pope Francis, rather than joining in with the slightly useless guessing game about the Pope to be.)
Much of our modern obsession with “news” follows the same pattern. Recently, a friend confided that he was stepping back from his compulsive immersion in the “now”– the constant stream of headlines about Trump and tariffs, Putin’s saber-rattling, J.D. Vance’s latest speech, the newest outrage from “wokedom,” or even the conclave, both the real one in the Sistine Chapel and the fictional one portrayed in the film “Conclave”. Seeking something more enduring, he turned to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. By coincidence, I had made the same choice. A few chapters in, I felt the effects of a “news detox.”
Listening to the novel on Audible (I am one of those who believes that listening is the new reading) I found myself immersed in what Luke Power, in his review of Joseph Epstein’s The Novel, Who Needs It?, calls a “philosophical enquiry.” Far from mere entertainment, Dostoevsky’s work probes profound moral questions through the lives of its characters. There’s a timelessness in such classic literature that anchors us, offering an antidote to the superficiality of being swept along by the torrent of current events.
As David Gibney also shows in his look at Pope Francis’ 2024 letter to the faithful “On the role of literature in formation”, the late Pope saw serious literature as something which innoculates readers against a simplistic reading of life, for “Books, novels, and poetry sensitise us to how fascinatingly complex humans can be.” It is certainly the mark of maturity to appreciate how complex persons and situations can be, and serious literature is not populated with the cartoonish good guys and bad guys of much of contemporary online debate.
Already back in 1985 Neil Postman, in his Amusing Ourselves to Death, famously observed how the growing dominance of TV over print was making public discourse more superficial, emotional and performative. And a lot of what passes for public discourse on social media today makes 1980s TV look positively cerebral in comparison.
Superficiality is not the only flaw in much of mainstream and social media; their use as tools for social manipulation is equally concerning. This theme is central to Jon Snow’s The State of Us: The Good News and Bad News About Today’s Society, reviewed by Pat Hanratty. As Hanratty notes, media manipulation is not confined to authoritarian regimes. In Ireland, a pervasive groupthink shapes media narratives, with an implicit nihil obstat dictating what can be said about hot topics such as Trump, Israel, the Catholic Church, and more. This curated discourse stifles open debate and reinforces ideological conformity.
Anyway, this is all by way of encouraging you to keep reading (or alternatively listening to) good books, including classic literature, and perhaps some of the interesting books reviewed here in Position Papers.