I have to admit I’ve been watching (well, reading) the spectacle of the Pope’s death and the election of the new one with a curiosity that has surprised me. As spectacles go, this has been one of medieval proportion and character. It seems like a thing from another time. In the days after John Paul II died, traffic in the streets around the Vatican ground to a halt as pilgrims gathered by the thousands to mourn and later to watch for the white smoke that would signal the election of a new Holy Father. Rituals were enacted as they had been for hundreds of years.

With the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger many pope watchers have looked to his actions, previous and current, for signs of what’s to come under Benedict XVI. Some take his choice of name as an indication that he plans to soften the hard-line conservatism of his predecessor and back down from his own hard-line stance as Cardinal. Others see Benedict’s appointment of all of John Paul’s top officials as an indication that the last Holy Father’s influence will continue to be felt for some time beyond his death. Others take Benedict’s age as a signal that the church is in transition. A 78 year old man has only so much time and in a few years perhaps a less conservative, or a non-European cardinal could be elected to lead the church. With the death of one pope so recent in memory, imaginations of the death of the next are already at work.

The reenactment of rituals and the interpretations of signs speak of a long tradition stretching back into the past and of the influence of the Pope, in many ways an anachronistic figure, in the modern world. In America, and perhaps elsewhere, that influence seems to be waning as church doctrine comes more and more into conflict with the ways many Catholics think about the world and practice their everyday lives.

In Donald Barthleme’s The Dead Father, nineteen or so of the Dead Father’s children drag his body across a bizarre landscape, hoping eventually to bury him. It isn’t an easy task. Measuring 3,200 cubits, not yet actually dead and constantly haranguing them, the father is quite a burden to the kids who tow his hulking figure for the novel’s 177 or so pages. Bulldozers appear in the last lines and set to work as he calls for “one moment more.” An amalgamation of all kinds of fathers – Christian, political, authorial, actual – the Dead Father symbolizes the persistent and debilitating influence of numerous structures of patriarchal authority on those who inherit them.

Somewhere along the way, the kids come across a book titled “A Manual for Sons,” both a taxonomy of fathers and a guide to living as a child of a father. In the last entry, “Patricide a poor idea, and summation,” the kids learn their “true task”:

While the novel doesn’t make that “golden age of decency, quiet, and calmed fevers” seem inevitable, or maybe even possible, it does point the way to a somewhat brighter future.