Consider, please, three modern Popes: A gifted linguist with an intense Marian devotion who had to contend with the threat of Communism; an introverted, highly respected European scholar, fond of hikes in the Alps; a man of Italian peasant stock, a former seminary rector who as Pope made for good newspaper copy with stories about his beguiling humility.

The reader will be forgiven if these brief sketches bring to mind Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis. Instead, they refer to Popes Pius XII, Pius XI, and Pius X. In these overlapping identities one finds the secret of papal history: Each Pope is a fascinating character in his own right, and he seems like a breath of fresh air, a new dawn of hope for Catholic renewal. In time, though, one old man in a white cassock and zucchetto soon blurs into the long line of all the others that have gone before him. That blurring is appropriate, since each Pope succeeds Saint Peter, and so it is like the succession of actors filling the lead role in a long-running play.

The current glamour surrounding Pope Francis and his much vaunted humility is but another example of the media swooning that attends any new Pope of recent years. If one goes back in time, though, and looks at news coverage of other modern Popes, one finds much the same thing. New Popes become instant celebrities, their smiling faces adorning magazine covers and tacky souvenirs. Seemingly within days of his election, each new Pope becomes the subject of best-selling biographies and richly illustrated coffee table books, while all the hoopla over the old Pope and his wisdom and the record crowds he used to draw gets quietly forgotten.

For example, Pope John XXIII, portly and avuncular, was a new face and a new style after the long years of the austere and aristocratic Pius XII. The image of Good Pope John, everybody’s rumpled parish priest, has passed into legend. No one seems to remember that in his lifetime Pius XII was widely respected, even revered, or that John XXIII was never a parish priest but rather was the insider’s insider, first as secretary to his bishop, then for decades as a trusted Vatican diplomat, then as cardinal of a prestigious city. Early in his life some overheated heresy hunters suspected him of Modernism, but one did not rise through the ranks under Pius XI and Pius XII by being thought a subversive radical.

An amusing aspect of people cheering this papal phenomenon of “in with the new, out with the old” is the expectations for reform projected onto the new Pope. Those projections turn the new Pope into a kind of ink blot test, so that regardless of his age or background, he takes on heroic shapes to suit his beholders. As the most recent specimen, Pope Francis was hailed as just the fresh-faced outsider that the Church needed to clean up the Curia, especially the scandal- ridden Vatican Bank. Spontaneous conventional wisdom insisted that cerebral and seemingly complacent, perhaps even compromised, Vatican insiders like Cardinals Marc Ouellet or Angelo Scola could not possibly have done the job.

However, if one recalls the joy and excitement in 2005 when Pope Benedict XVI was elected, there was much chattering among pundits and others that only such a veteran of the Curia, only such an experienced and wily Vatican insider, could reform the Curia and its corrupt company bank. After all, he had spent more than twenty years deep inside the belly of the beast.

Who else could take on such a Herculean labor left over from his long ailing predecessor?

Well, in 1978, when Pope John Paul II was elected, he was seen as just the right man for the job of Curial reform. After all, many claimed, only such a relatively young outsider could tackle the mess left him by the hapless John Paul I, whose sudden, unexpected death seemed to some to have something suspicious to do with his desire to clean up the Curia, especially the scandalous Vatican Bank.

Whether anyone can reform the Curia, and whether reforming the Curia really matters to ordinary people, Catholics must believe that come what may, there will always be an old man in a white cassock and zucchetto (color of shoes optional and largely irrelevant) waving from a window in Rome. Pope Francis is but the latest in a long line, a shrewd and holy and strong- willed man typical of the kind of Pope the Church has been blessed with in the 450 years since the reforming Council of Trent. Like those Popes, he is to be loved and obeyed by the faithful when he strives with heart and mind to hand on the torch of the faith that has come to us from the Apostles.

Yet, however excitingly novel a new Pope may seem, that papal striving to hand on two thousand years of Catholic teaching will always take the same form, volumes of verbiage unread by nearly everybody. Secular journalists will skim over the latest encyclical or exhortation and then write accounts of it reminiscent of the blind men trying to describe an elephant.

Theological specialists will study the latest papal documents, but they (we) are a rare breed, like classical scholars or people who follow the chess column in the newspaper. Haunting is a rhetorical question some years ago from a Catholic layman regarding what was then a much- publicized but is now a forgotten encyclical: “Yeah, and this puts food on my table how?”

So, please consider the Pope: A long-shot outsider whose election filled liberals inside and outside the Church with hopes of big changes in Rome, while his writings and homilies strongly reiterated traditional Church teaching, thereby dismaying liberals yet encouraging conservatives by bracketing the secular age with the spirit of Satan. Pope Francis? No. Pope Pius IX.

Daniel J. Heisey, O. S. B., is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno. He teaches Church History at Saint Vincent Seminary.