As you point out, encyclicals are the heaviest ammunition in the papacy’s intellectual arsenal (“New Sins, New Virtues,” July 11, 2009). Caritas in veritate (Charity in Truth), issued a week ago by Pope Benedict XVI after years of careful preparation, thus warrants serious consideration. You pay particular attention to one of the pope’s most concrete proposals that calls for an overhaul of global institutions—such as an expanded rôle for the United Nations or some other authority. Vatican aides argue that this is not a call for world government, but you admit that this is how it sounds to you, at least a bit. However, another possible reading of the encyclical is that it envisages an expanded rôle for the papacy itself. It is good to remember that this institution arose in the vacuum left after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the Fifth Century, when the pope took over many of the former emperor’s powers. Of course, this analogy cannot be pushed too far. But in today’s polycentric world, which is becoming too big for a single “policeman” that America used to be until not so long ago, Benedict XVI may well be angling for much more than world government.

Addendum (July 15, 2009)

The rise of the medieval papacy as an overreaching authority for the whole of western Christendom is inconceivable without the collapse of the Roman Empire. In the Middle Ages, popes came to play many of the rôles within the Church that Christian Roman emperors had appropriated to themselves—making laws, calling councils, making or influencing important appointments. Had western emperors of the Roman type still existed, it is inconceivable that popes would have been able to carve out for themselves a position of such independence. In the east, where emperors still ruled, successive Patriarchs of Constantinople, whose legal and administrative position was modeled on that of the Roman papacy, found it impossible to act other than as imperial yes-men. Appointed by the emperors at will, they tended to be ex imperial bureaucrats highly receptive to imperial orders.

From Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History, London: Pan Books, 2006 (first published in 2005), pp. 442-443.