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God's new manJohn Paul II's legacy and the election of the new popeRoman holiday?GOD’S NEW MAN This book looks back on the Papacy of John Paul II and forward at the new Pope Benedict XVI (formerly Cardinal Ratzinger) and what he is likely to do. It is written by a Catholic theologian and religious affairs commentator, Paul Collins, who has himself fallen foul of the Vatican. The sense of hurt and the corresponding cynicism comes across somewhat in the book from time to time. But nevertheless the book is interesting in that it gives a fairly balanced view of modern Rome from the viewpoint of a disaffected insider. JP’s legacyEarly on in the book he spells out lessons which the Roman Church ought to learn from the final years of John Paul II when he was very ill. The pope’s incapacity highlighted the weakness of a church structure modelled on that of an absolute ‘monarch’ who does not resign and no one could sack. During these years, Catholicism was forced to mark time and shelve important issues. The author therefore argues that the Roman Catholic Church needs to move away from power residing so centrally in the pope to a more collegial and consultative system among cardinals and bishops. ‘The pope is not the managing director with the bishops merely as branch managers. He is the president of the college of bishops, primus inter pares — first among equals. The doctrinal distortion that the peripatetic pope introduced was that he never treated the bishops as equals.’ The Polish pope was famous for his travels, with almost 100 trips outside Italy to 130 countries. By these visits he was practically making himself ‘bishop of the world.’ This had the effect of equating Catholicism almost entirely with the pope, who was actually a man, with his Polish background, of quite limited experience. He stood for Catholic culture, but had never had to handle what most Catholics have to cope with, namely living out their Catholicism within multi-cultural pluralistic societies. Coupled with the fact that the former pope’s ‘reign’ was the second longest in history, this lack of understanding of Catholic experience of ordinary people has contributed greatly to what is seen as the crisis of authority within the Roman Church. ‘Local people did not understand the reason for Rome’s decisions, so they ignored them.’ So though Pope Wojtyla saw the need of the church as a more disciplined orthodoxy which he sought to impose, the author reads the situation rather differently. Since the death of John Paul II, Collins sees the Catholic Church as deeply divided. This division reaches back to the different interpretations given to Vatican II from the 1960s. Whereas, according to Collins, Vatican II sought to empower the laity, John Paul II saw this move as undermining the clergy. The Vatican’s intransigence concerning the role of women, single clergy, reproductive ethics and, at a practical level, failure to help the poor (including squashing ‘liberation theology’) has exacerbated the situation. Collins writes very movingly concerning the current circumstances of many ordinary Catholic priests. Caught between the pastoral concerns of local people and the demands of Rome many priests are disoriented. The continued insistence on unmarried celibate clergy, along with the fall-out from the many accusations of child sexual abuse leaves them feeling hurt, misunderstood, lonely and in a ‘no win’ situation. No wonder there is a crisis of recruitment to the priesthood. Benedict’s futureAs prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the group which acts as a kind of theological policeman for Roman Catholicism, since 1981, Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, was alongside the former Pope as an adviser for many years. So the new papacy is unlikely to see a major shift from the past. Certainly the political stance towards issues such as the war in Iraq are unlikely to change. Born in Bavaria to a Catholic family who opposed the Nazis, Ratzinger was forced to join the Hitler youth. He trained as a theologian. He is said to be very Augustinian in his theology. By this Collins means that Ratzinger takes the fallen state of the world very seriously. He would share an analysis of the corruption and collapse of Western culture under postmodernism which would be fairly similar to that of many evangelicals. He would tend to reject the ideas of Karl Rahner, who believes that every ‘good person’ is an ‘anonymous Christian’, no matter what their religion or non-religion. Rather Ratzinger is much more in line with the ‘right wing’ theologian Hans Urs von Balthazar. What then are we to expect from the new pope? Given Ratzinger being 78 years old when he was elected he is obviously meant to be a short-term leader. Perhaps he was elected in order to give the Catholic Church a breathing space to decide on its future. He is a more shy person, so we are likely to see less world-stage razzmatazz from this pope than we had from the previous incumbent. It may even be that he will be a pope who is more open to consultation rather than steamrollering other bishops. He will emphasise traditional Catholicism and has even spoken in the past of the possibility that the Catholic Church might need to become more ‘sectarian’ as it stands for ‘orthodoxy’. Ratzinger, through the CDF, has acted as a kind of inquisitor in the past. Now, as pope, he is meant to have a more unifying influence, but it is unlikely that he will relax his drive for more doctrinal discipline. Similarly, there is likely to be a move to a more weighty emphasis in liturgy and ‘a focus on the transcendent rather than the horizontal’ in worship. If there are to be any positive ecumenical moves it is likely to be towards Orthodox churches. Given that he believes that there are secularists in positions of power who are seeking to sever Europe from its Christian roots, and given the loss of many Catholics to evangelical Protestant churches in South America, this is likely to be a ‘missionary’ papacy. He will want to recruit for Catholicism. Ratzinger has already mentioned the need to re-evangelise Africa. The consequences of such missionary zeal for relations with Islam, and indeed other missionary faiths like that of evangelicals, remains to be seen. John Benton© Evangelicals Now - February 2006 |