Pope's Successor Must Be Right Choice or Church Faces Disaster

By Fergus Finlay
Irish Examiner
February 19, 2013

http://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/fergus-finlay/popes-successor-must-be-right-choice-or-church-faces-disaster-223053.html

I WAS with a group of young people the other day when the news broke on a telly in the background. The Pope had resigned.

Astonishing, remarkable news. So I shushed the conversation, naturally, and turned to focus on the television. And the young people looked at me as if I had two heads.

It was clear that, in expressing an interest in the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, I had confirmed myself as a complete dinosaur (not the first time, of course). It was just as clear that the passing of a pope held absolutely no interest whatsoever for the young people I was with. And, over the following couple of days, the vast majority of people I met could care less.

Without asking all sorts of impertinent questions, I couldn’t establish whether the people I was talking to were Catholic, or what kind of Catholic they were. But surely the odds are that the majority of people for whom the resignation of the pope is a matter of supreme indifference are themselves members of his flock, at least nominally. And yet their eyes glaze over if you talk about it.

If it is the case — and it seems to be — that so significant a historic event as the resignation of a pope means so little to so many people raised in the Catholic faith, then surely the Church in Ireland, and presumably elsewhere, faces fundamental problems.

A pope visited Ireland in 1979. If you’re 40 or older, you’ll remember it well. If you’re younger than that, here’s a couple of paragraphs from an article in the Irish Times written to commemorate that event, just to give you a flavour: “As the Aer Lingus Boeing 747 carrying Pope John Paul II to Ireland swooped low over the Phoenix Park where hundreds of thousands were already in place for the papal Mass (and more than a million people attended), the cheering broke out and the first tears of joy were shed... The pope had arrived in a country where normal life came to a virtual standstill over the next three days and where an estimated two-thirds of the population crowded various venues to see and hear the first Roman pontiff to visit Ireland since St Patrick brought Christianity more than 1,500 years ago... A special stamp was issued, an amnesty was granted to selected prisoners, and the Orange Order sent the pope a letter criticising his visit on political and theological grounds... In Galway 200,000 mainly young people had crowded into the Ballybrit racecourse for the papal Mass. The ceremonies had been organised with precision by Bishop Eamonn Casey of Galway. It was a grey, damp day but the youthful throng had been entertained and warmed up during their wait by the ‘singing priest’ from Dublin, Fr Michael Cleary... And his last words, before boarding the aircraft, were ‘Ireland — semper fidelis, always faithful’.”

Of course, if you’re younger than 40, Bishop Eamonn Casey, or even Fr Michael Cleary, mightn’t mean an awful lot to you. They both fell from grace after that extraordinary visit, and were revealed as hypocrites. Their behaviour was emblematic of much of the reason why the authority of the Church in Ireland has been so grievously undermined since those heady days of the papal visit.

But as my colleague Terry Prone pointed out here yesterday, in a different context, we’re quite prepared to hold the Church responsible, as we should, for all the scandals it has perpetrated, but we still (some of us at least) want it to run the local school. So, as much as we abhor the terrible things that have been done in the Church’s name, the roots of our indifference must lie somewhere else.

Is it in the personality of the retiring pope? To be sure, he will probably be remembered as a nondescript pontiff. A master of Vatican politics, his was the only election in my lifetime that surprised no-one. A close confidante of John Paul II, it was always clear that, not only was he going to be his successor, but also that he would seek to entrench the conservative values his charismatic predecessor had espoused.

In doing “exactly what he said on the tin”, but without the charisma, Benedict alienated millions of already despairing Catholics. The things I will remember him for are first, his failure to convince anyone, apart from apologists, that he was truly sincere about the Church’s role in covering up the child abuse scandal and, second, the number of good priests silenced under his regime. Silenced because they had opinions that were not 100% in line with his orthodoxy.

And yet I can remember the excitement of waiting for a new pope, even after papacies that had appeared to disappoint. The controversy that raged around Pope Paul VI’s pronouncements about birth control was perhaps the first thing that drove a wedge between previously accepting Catholics and their Church in Ireland. But the arrival of his two successors, the short-lived John Paul I and the pope we know best, John Paul II, was still greeted with huge excitement. We still crowded around radios and televisions to hear if white smoke had been seen from the relevant Vatican chimney.

THIS time, there’ll probably be a website or two that will show nothing but the chimney on the roof of the Sistine Chapel from the moment the papal conclave begins. How many hits will they get, I wonder? The sadness in all this is that if we have stopped caring, it may be our loss. Like many others, I lost interest in organised religion a long time ago, and stopped believing what it preached. I now regard myself as a humanist.

But we are all the poorer for the loss of values. Benedict XVI talked and wrote about the tragedy of what he called moral relativism, or the absence of objective values in our lives. How could we listen to anyone preaching objective values when they were themselves the head of an organisation which had for years tolerated the ultimate corruption inherent in paedophilia? How is anyone supposed to accept guidance about how to live our own lives from the head of an institution whose power and prestige has always seemed more important than the damage done to people who have been abused? And yet a world that is capable of being inspired by real leadership is in dire need of it. We may be agog with indifference about who the next pope is, but if the Church gets it wrong, that will be a further disaster for the institution, and for the world.

For my part, I confess that I’ve read a lot about who the next pope might be. In all the pen pictures that have been printed about leading candidates, the words I’ve been looking for are missing. And that’s terribly sad, for Catholics and non-Catholics alike. If the influence of the Church is ever to be restored, the things that must characterise the next papacy are simple enough. We need a humble, penitent, and loving pope. Nothing else will make any difference to us. Nothing else will make us care.