The Vatican is the oldest computer in the world
playing with a metaphor from a piece for The New World
Francis Spufford once said that Bletchley Park was an attempt to build a computer out of human beings so the credit for this metaphor belongs to him. But it can be generalised to any bureaucracy. They are all attempts to impose an algorithmic order on the messiness of the world, and to extract from it only only those facts which are useful to decision makers.
With that said, it’s clear that the Vatican is the oldest continuously running computer in the world. Now read on …
One way of understanding the Roman Catholic Church is to think of the Vatican as the oldest computer in the world. It is a computer made of human parts rather than electronics, but so are all bureaucracies: just like computers, they take in information, process it according to a set of algorithms, and act on the result.
The Vatican has an operating system that has been running since the days of the Roman Empire. Its major departments are still called “dicasteries”, a term last used in the Roman civil service in about 450 AD.
Like any very long running computer system, the Vatican has problems with legacy code: all that embarrassing stuff about usury and cousin marriage from the Middle Ages, or the more recent “Syllabus of Errors” in which Pope Pius IX in 1864 denounced as heresy the belief that he, or any Pope, can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization,” can no longer be acted on, but can’t be thrown away, either. Instead it is commented out and entirely different code added: this process is known as development.
But changing the code that the system runs on, while it is running, is a notoriously tricky operation. For the Catholic Church it requires a church council, drawing bishops from all over the world into years of deliberation.
The most recent council is known as Vatican II, and it took place in a series of meetings that ran from 1962-65, each lasting anything up to 12 weeks. It changed a lot of the underlying code: by the end the Vatican had come to terms with democracy and embraced religious freedom as an ideal. It also abandoned centuries of condemnation of the Jews.
Vatican II was unstable at first, like most new operating systems. In the decades immediately following, when everything seemed up for grabs, hundreds of thousands of men left the priesthood, most to get married, and attendance at Mass collapsed in the western world.
Pope John Paul II and his immediate successor Benedict XVI spent much of their time applying patches to restore some of the old functionality, so much so that traditionalists hoped and progressives feared that the whole Vatican II experiment would be reverted. That could not happen though. The changes were too deep and too far reaching and the code that had been replaced had too many problems.
Of course there were disgruntled users who refused to upgrade. Often they were the ones most invested in the old system, who understood how to work it in their own favour.
The outward and visible sign of the changes was in the user interface: the church largely replaced the Latin mass, standardised throughout the world at the Council of Trent 400 years before, with localised versions using vernacular languages. Perhaps more importantly it changed the body language of the priest, who now faced the congregation, rather than looking away from them towards god on the altar.
Many people disliked this; some hated it. The traditional Latin Mass was much more aesthetically pleasing than the translations that replaced it and if the Latin was incomprehensible this hardly mattered, for so is God and the old Mass brought many people closer to this central mystery.
The opposition crystalised gradually in the US. The Traditional Latin Mass became the outward and visible sign of resistance to all the deeper underlying changes that accommodated the Church to the ideas of the nineteenth century and the political realities of the twentieth.
But it was only, in computing terms, a skin. The traditionalists might run an emulation of the system as it had been after Vatican I, but it was just an emulation, running inside the newer code, and from time to time Popes would have to sack bishops and even Cardinals who forgot this and whose programmes crashed.
Interesting analogy! Some thoughts: How do we talk about the difference between hermeneutics and parsing? It seems like interpreters in the usual computery sense operate completely without ambiguity whereas hermeneutics is mired in it (and indeed that's the fun!), so so human interpreters seem to be very different that computer ones. Also, in this analogy it seems like the people in the vatican are programmers but also components. Do they switch roles or are they both at the same time? Is there a name for this? How do we given an account of it. It's not necessarily a criticism, just something interesting.
The notion of commenting things out was especially interesting to me. It seems like a great analogy for modernizing or changing interpretations to fit a historical moment or shift in the dominant thought-current. Here we still have the literal word as it ever was, but we are not allowing it to have it's power or execute itself literally. We still acknowledge it's existence (it's right there we can still read it!) but it doesn't have the force from being interpreted as it originally was when it was "coded". There are strong connections here to ideas of jurisprudence and textualism vs originalism with respect to old documents.
There is also the issue of how distributed the Vatican is as a computer. It's not a closed system. It interacts with the practitioners of Christianity. Orthodoxy and orthopraxy are bidirectional and changes that the Vatican make may be spurred by actors beyond its cloisters who can choose to adopt or not adopt what is given by the Vatican. Every Christian has a unique idiolect through which they realize their faith; where does this fit into things?
A final question about small patches vs larger overhauls. This is also an interesting analogy. It makes me wonder about what real-world circumstances result in some system requiring a quick patch or hotfix vs a complete overhaul. When can we add one law or bylaw and when do we have to overhaul our founding document? When can we put out a small Papal comment vs a Vatican council. When do we edit a sentence in a essay vs delete the last two paragraphs and start over? What is the critical point? All very interesting I think and looking at the Vatican could make an nice case study whose lessons could perhaps be generalized. Same could go for most of this, which is why I like this analogy—even though I think it raises lots of questions and is imperfect as any analogy is.
The Council of Trent did not produce a Mass. It said that the Pope should endure a revision of old Mass books some of which had acquired interpolations or omissions over the centuries. What is called the Tridentine Mass or Rite is a later Papal production. Trent did not prohibit the vernacular. It only said that Latin was permissible. Indeed Vatican II gave more support to Latin than Trent.