How powerful is the pope?

The pope? How many divisions has he got?” Joseph Stalin is said to have shouted at Winston Churchill when the Brit talked about protecting the Catholics in Europe from the Nazis.

- R. PRASANNAN

Now, Donald Trump has hurled a worse insult at the pope. After Francis died, he said he would “like to be pope”, and then posted on the White House X account a doctored image of himself wearing a white cassock and papal headdress. The civilised world treated the boorish act with the contempt it deserved.

The pope has no divisions to command, nor large lands to lord over. Though papacy claims a hoary tradition of 20 centuries, the modern state of the pope is not even a century old. Vatican, the world's smallest sovereign state, was created in 1929 through the Lateran treaties.

Papacy may look an anachronism today—a theocratic monarchy in an increasingly godless world of technology. Not a member of the UN, but with diplomatic ties with most countries, not on behalf of the Vatican state, but on behalf of the Holy See. This Holy See, which many think was always seated in Rome, had often moved its habitat—to Avignon, to Pisa and elsewhere. It was without territory from 1870 till 1929.