What’s in a name? Well that depends. It depends on who is doing the naming, the time of the naming, and it also depends on how well versed in the linguistic history one is. Not many of us can claim much distinction there. Certainly we don’t name our children in the same fashion Pharaoh’s daughter did when she name her adopted son, Moses. According to Exodus 2: 10 she named him Moses because she drew him out of the water.

Mostly, today in the United States, babies are named for several reasons: after a relative, because the parents - most likely the mother - likes the sound of the name, or after some celebrity that has caught the public’s imagination. My own father was named after a popular president at the time of his birth. And, needless to say, most of the Franklin Delano’s are pretty aged men by now.

And yet, even with the seemingly casualness of naming, it often is a serious matter, but first and foremost it is a personal matter. Take the process of how the newly elected Popes decide which successive line to join. Narrowing that down to our present Benedict XV1, what is in the name for him? Of course only he can answer that but surely, most of us believe, it is Saint Benedict.

Wow, fifteenth in line of Benedicts. Surely, we think, not all of those were worthy of the name, and researching show us our thinking is not too far off course. We say that while understanding that history often is not kind to God-fearing people and the papal authority has, since the time of Saint Peter and more correctly the time of the first Church in Rome, been maligned. Truth and lies intermingle and do so today, yet, it is true that many pretenders that sat in the Chair of Saint Peter were only that, pretenders. The Church labels many of these anti-popes, but even some who are correctly aligned were not always morally correct.

The Benedicts when taken together fill in many years. The first pope who took the name Benedict sat in the seat of Saint Peter from the years 575 to 579. Up to this time most popes had kept their own name, and Benedict 1 was only the third to change his name. Before him there had been three popes named John, four named Felix, one Clement, three named Sixtus, a Pius, an Urban, A Julius, A Mark, An Innocent, a Boniface, a Celestine, a Leo, a Clement and others. It is easy to understand why Mark and John were chosen; they were namesakes of two writer apostles. But Benedict 1 chose not to use his own name which was, according to my papal source - The Popes: Histories and Secrets by Claudia Rending (Translated by Paul D. Mc Cusker) Seven Locks Press, California, possibly the third to do so. They are not exactly clear as to his real name but suggest it was Bonoseus.

That brings us up to the now presiding Pope and takes me back to the day that he was selected. I remember the event well. I also was taken aback by his choice of names and have pondered his choice ever since. He is well loved and is bookish and is a fantastic writer. He was no more interested in being pope than many of the others, but who obeyed willingly the Lord’s call. As a writer and a researcher he would probably would have much more preferred living with his brother Georg and using his last days to write and reflect without all the ceremony and traveling he has done.

What then is in a name when all is said and done. Well certainly all has not been said nor done, but as you can see, it is the man that makes the name, and not the name making the man. (Man, when I write means man and woman, in other words a lone soul of either gender.) Therefore the saying, a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet could well apply to Benedict or to any name. As good and evil march side by side down the corridors of time, they are not lined up evenly. One must refrain, therefore, from giving either too much of the other, however tempting and authoritarian it may be. In the final analysis, it is the Creator that makes use of both as He sees fit. What then is in a name. Nothing except the wearer of it. The first and last Benedict - up to the present - have honored the name they bestowed upon themselves, not the other way around.

By the above statement I don’t mean to imply that all the other linear popes were fraudulent, many were honorable and up to their task. Nonetheless, Benedict 1 and Benedict XV1 have, time wise, wedged in between them thirteen other popes name Benedict. Some of them were also saintly, possibly, and some of them were scoundrels and antipopes. Thus I reiterate, the man makes the name and the name is only a place holder designating who resides therein. It belongs to them only while on earth. It also identifies their actions while on earth.

 As to the now present most famous beholder’s of the name Benedict, the pope, He is giving renewed honor to an old and honorable - sometimes - name.