Why don’t Popes ever win the Nobel Peace Prize? – Crux Now

HAYS, Kansas Once again a Nobel Peace Prize was announced Friday, and once again a pope didnt win.

This years honor went to human rights campaigners in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, in whats widely been seen as an implicit condemnation of Russian President Vladimir Putin and both his war in Ukraine and his anti-democratic tendencies at home.

Russias Memorial organization, Ukraines Center for Civil Liberties and Belaruss Ales Bialiatski will share the prize money of 10 million Swedish krona, roughly $900,000, and will receive the award in a Dec. 9 ceremony in Oslo, Norway.

While four U.S. presidents have won (Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama), along with several prime ministers and statesmen from other countries, no pope has been honored since the inception of the prize in 1901.

Pontiffs routinely are nominated, as Pope Francis was again this year by Dag Inge Ulstein, Norways Minister of International Development, who cited the popes efforts to help solve the climate crisis as well as his work towards peace and reconciliation.

In the run-up to Fridays announcement, online oddsmakers had installed Pope Francis as about a 15-1 favorite to win the prize, more or less the same odds given to Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg and the UN Refugee Agency. Over the years, on several occasions Ive been asked to stand by on a TV platform someplace on the day of the announcement in case the pope wins; in each case, weve always had to stand down.

(Ive sometimes considered billing the prize committee for all the appearance fees I never collected, but somehow I doubt theyd pay the invoice.)

To date, four other Catholic leaders have received the Peace Prize:

Recently Belo has faced charges of sexual abuse and misconduct, which reportedly led to a previously undisclosed Vatican sanction in 2020. To date, however, theres not been any suggestion that his prize might be revoked.

Every pope has been nominated at one point or another since Benedict XV, who reigned from 1914 to 1922, but so far none of them have ever become Nobel laureates.

Why dont popes win?

To begin with, the Nobel Peace Prize is bestowed by a five-member committee selected by the parliament of Norway, a traditionally Protestant country where levels of interest and attention to popes arent especially high.

Its not that Norwegian parliamentarians are caught up in old debates over, say, Philip Melanchthon (whom many of them would probably think is a striker for Bayern) or the Diet of Worms. But in general, in a country where national identity was forged in part through the rejection of papal authority, giving such an award to a pope just isnt the most natural thing to do.

In some cases, the anti-papal bias is explicit. When Bishop Gunnar Stalsett of Oslo of the Church of Norway, who also served as leader of the countrys Centre Party, was a member of the Nobel Peace Prize committee from 1985 to 1990 and again from 1994 to 2003, he explicitly stated he would not support the candidacy of Pope John Paul II due to the Catholic Churchs position on contraception.

Many observers believed at the time that without Stalsetts informal veto, John Paul II likely would have been named a co-winner in 1990 along with Mikhail Gorbachev for their roles in the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet empire.

In part, the logic for not giving the award to popes also has to do with the fact that popes dont need the money, nor do they need the media spotlight the award always generates, whereas lesser-known activists and organizations can benefit immensely from both.

Of course, the same arguments could be made about giving the prize to presidents, prime ministers and other high profile public figures, which hasnt stopped the committee in the past from doing precisely that.

In the end, its probably fair to say that theres a vague secularist bias in the process which assumes that religion simply isnt as important, or as helpful, in global affairs as Realpolitik or civil society. Over the 121 years the prize has been awarded, relatively few of the laureates have been religious figures of any sort Swedish Lutheran Archbishop Nathan Sderblom in 1930, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa in 1984 and the Dali Lama in 1989 are among the handful of exceptions.

Naturally, its not that losing out on the Nobel Prize somehow diminishes a popes moral authority, or that popes themselves hunger for the recognition. Popes already get plenty of acclaim Francis, for example, has been proclaimed Times person of the year, he won the Charlemagne Prize for European unity, and hes even been on the cover ofRolling Stone.

On the other hand, its not as if the Vatican doesnt notice. During the John Paul II years, employees of Vatican media outlets sometimes were advised to downplay the prize announcement on the grounds that any winner who wasnt the pope was, de facto, an insult.

In any event, the statutes of the Nobel Peace Prize state that its to be awarded to those who have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.

Its hard to believe that not once over the last 121 years has any pontiff ever qualified unless, of course, theres some reason the committee simply doesnt want to recognize a pope.

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Why don't Popes ever win the Nobel Peace Prize? - Crux Now