"Should Pope John Paul II retire?" The question was posed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal on March 28th and what really interests me about it isn't the answer, since there isn't a right answer, but comments made by a devout American catholic in the article. The Catholic's name is Gerard Roche, CEO of Heidrick and Struggles, an executive headhunting firm (they're like agents for CEOs). This is what he said:

"What corporation would put up with a CEO like this for so long?" To be fair, before that he said that the Pope's recent tour through the Holy Land was a beautiful event. Roche doesn't hate the Pope. He just thinks the Pope is too old. Some companies love their CEOs, but they do get too lode eventually, and there is such a thing as a gracious retirement in the business world, a retirement with love.

The point is, the comment misses the point. The Vatican, if you discount the cynical take, isn't really a business. It's a focal point of worship for just over 1 billion Catholics. It's a powerful symbol of faith. Consider this. I was raised Catholic but lapsed so early in life that I can't even say I lapsed. I've developed a secular-humanistic outlook towards life with shades of existentialism. I'm an atheist some days and an agnostic if things seem particularly gorgeous. But I'm not religious. Yet I'm still offended by the notion that the Pope should be compared to a CEO of a company. It's just such a base simile.

I'd be offended if you substituted the Dalai Lama or a protestant minister or Jewish rabbi for the Pope, by the way. It strikes me as a little sick that we think we should choose our spiritual leaders the way we choose our business leaders. It's bad enough that politicians win as outsiders who are successful entrepreneurs and CEOs, because public life has little to do with running a company, but the Papacy is even farther form the boardroom than the Presidency.

We've lost all sense of proportion in our lives because we have allowed ourselves to be defined by our jobs. Once we see ourselves as shadows of our occupations, we can't help but see the rest of the world through that lens.

Here's the counter argument: The Pope has to run the Vatican, which is a sovereign nation. He has to oversee a $200 million a year operating budget, 151 cardinals and 4,400 bishops. There's also a pretty complicated city to be run. But I somehow doubt the Pope is really involved with, say, making sure a museum meets its budget for the year, or in making sure that traffic doesn't clog the narrow streets. Obviously, the Pope has hired or assigned people to deal with the nuts and bolts problems of management. The Pope functions as spiritual leader of the catholic flock and as a philosopher. He spends most of his time praying, meditating, and discussing both the large and small implications of theology with the bishops and cardinals. He's a spiritual intellectual, not an administrator.

The other argument is that the Vatican makes bishops retire at 75 and the Pope is 80. That's a good argument. But the Pope should answer that by not forcing retirements elsewhere in his realm, not by retiring. Unless, of course, he wants to retire.

All the practical arguments for his retiring or staying on would be useful in a corporate environment. But what we tend to forget at the start of the double-o decade, is that not all environments are corporate. In fact, most aren't. This is a spiritual environment, a question to be answered in the minds and hearts of the leader and the faithful. What would happen at Xerox or AT&T just isn't important here. Hopefully, with an election coming up in America, we'll realize that the public arena isn't corporate either. At least, it doesn't have to be, if we're willing to think clearly.

Michael Maiello is running to become the new Pope of MicroStrategy. See how silly that is?