Who's Next?

By Tp O’mahony
Irish Examiner
March 2, 2013

http://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/whos-next-224237.html

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With Pope Benedict XVI’s sudden resignation, his successor faces a difficult task with a Church seen by many as outdated, and a papal bureaucracy deeply flawed, writes TP O’Mahony

FOR the first time in the 2,000-year history of the papacy there will be two popes in the Vatican, living in close proximity. And the unprecedented situation created by Pope Benedict XVI’s surprise decision to resign could well serve as a template for the future.

Fr Andrew Greeley, the Chicago-based sociologist and author of The Making of the Pope, believes popes in the future may serve for fixed terms, thus removing the need for voluntary retirement. Under the current Code of Canon Law, however, only a pope can enforce that provision.

The code itself, the updated version of which was promulgated by Pope John Paul II in January 1983, provides for a papal resignation. Canon 332 states: “Should it happen that the Roman pontiff resigns from his office, it is required for validity that the resignation be freely made and properly manifested, but it is not necessary that it be accepted by anyone.”

This unexpected resignation, though, creates real difficulties. An editorial in the English Catholic weekly The Tablet identified the core problem: “There is a real danger of splitting the loyalties of hitherto faithful Catholics, particularly if the new pope does things, as he is more or less bound to do eventually, that depart from the policies of his predecessor and near neighbour”.

We have to go back nearly 600 years and nearly 720 years respectively to find the last papal resignations — that of Gregory XII in 1415 and Celestine V in 1294. Looking for parallels between then and now is not really helpful. In the cases of 1294 and 1415, though for different reasons, there was an element of the bizarre. One of these was a forced abdication. Gregory was forced out to heal a breach caused by the presence of antipopes. He lived for another two years after his resignation, during which time he served as the Cardinal bishop of Porto. Celestine V, who was just Pope from Jul 5 to Dec 13, 1294, was imprisoned in the tower of Castel Fumone, east of Ferentino, by his successor, Boniface VIII. He was fearful that Celestine, who died in May 1296, could become the rallying-point for a schism. Celestine’s was the last voluntary abdication; he, like Benedict, was just overwhelmed by the job.

Since then Benedict XVI is the only other pope to freely abdicate, though his continued presence in the Vatican is inevitably going to cast a shadow over the papacy of his successor. Could the new pope, if he were so minded, take the Church in a very different direction from that pursued by Benedict XVI, knowing that the latter is living just a short distance away?

We’re entering uncharted waters here, and what happens in the next few years could set a pattern. Fixed-term pontificates are as yet futuristic, but the next pope and those who come after him will now have to take account of the novel situation established by the unexpected resignation of Joseph Ratzinger. His decision to step down from the chair of St Peter on grounds of “incapacity” will weigh on all future popes.

Benedict said he was leaving with “humility and honour”, and he undoubtedly believes that in deciding to abdicate he has acted honourably and in the best interest of the papacy and the Church. He was ideally placed to witness the way the papacy of John Paul II crash-landed three years before Karol Wojtyla actually died.

It must not be forgotten that he witnessed at first hand the distressing spectacle of the final years of his predecessor’s long pontificate when it was evident that John Paul II, stricken by Parkinson’s disease, was no longer in control. The reality is that for the last three years of that papacy no one was really in charge in the Vatican.

He would also have seen that where you have a pope who is clearly incapacitated, there will inevitably be unseemly manoeuvrings and plotting within the papal inner circle and the higher echelons of the Vatican to assume some measure of control.

The most bizarre example of this happened during the final stages of the pontificate of Pius XII, who was Pope from 1939 to 1958. When the white smoke swirled from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel in 1939, the world knew it had a new pope: Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli was now Pius XII. What the world did not know was that the Church had also acquired a “Popessa” — a tiny, beautiful, brilliant nun named Sister Pascalina.

A native of Germany, she wielded a secret and unprecedented power within the Vatican. “She was the pope’s aide, his housekeeper, his confidant, his adviser, his surrogate mother, and, in critical times, his conscience,” explained Paul Murphy in his acclaimed 1983 biography (La Popessa) of the Bavarian nun.

“Her immense impact on his controversial papacy had so aroused the Sacred College of Cardinals that many of the Vatican’s purple-robed prelates had repeated demanded that he oust her.” It was towards the end of Pius’s 19-year pontificate that her role was most pronounced. She blocked access to the ailing pontiff and controlled the flow of paper to his study.

The influence wielded by Sister Pascalina was exceptional and it’s unlikely that any member of the papal household will be so powerful ever again. One of the difficulties Benedict XVI had to contend with was a dysfunctional Roman Curia (the Church’s central administration). Internal squabbling, rivalries, jealousies, and power-plays had come to the fore in the final years of John Paul II’s papacy when he was patently and painfully incapable of governing.

The continuation of this came embarrassingly into the public forum during the “Vatileaks” scandal in October 2012 when the pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, was arrested and placed on trial for stealing thousands of sensitive documents from the pope’s apartment and leaking them to an Italian journalist. The latter, Gianluigi Nuzzi, selected dozens of those stolen documents and used them as the basis for a best-selling book called Sua Santita (“His Holiness”).

Robert Mickens, the Vatican correspondent for The Tablet, reported that these documents showed “instances of financial corruption, mismanagement, factional fighting, and careerism involving the priests and bishops that run the Roman Curia”.

Benedict’s failure to tackle these problems so alarmed one of his champions that, in April 2009, George Wiegel (author of a biography of John Paul II) wrote an impassioned article for Standpoint magazine in which he pleaded with the pope to take decisiveaction. Noting that his pontificate was proceeding “under storm clouds of crisis”, Wiegel highlighted a “complex set of administrative and managerial problems that Benedict must confront and resolve”. The title of the article was instructive: “The Pope Versus the Vatican”.

What Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger witnessed during the final years of John Paul II’s papacy left a lasting impression, so much so that three years before his shock decision he spoke of an “obligation” on an incapacitated pope to resign.

In an interview with the German journalist Peter Seewald for a book called Light of the World published in 2010, Benedict XVI said: “If a pope clearly realises that he is no longer physically, psychologically, and spiritually capable of handling the duties of his office, then he has a right and, under some circumstances, also an obligation, to resign.” Benedict added: “One can resign at a peaceful moment or when one simply cannot go on.”

Asked directly whether he would ever consider resigning, he said: “Yes.” In fact, we know that as Cardinal Ratziznger had asked John Paul II three times to allow him to retire but was turned down on each occasion.

Marco Politi, Vatican correspondent for La Repubblica and co-author (with Carl Bernstein) of His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time, told BBC Radio 4 after the pope’s resignation that he believed Joseph Ratzinger “was unsuited to the papal role”.

His papacy was certainly a fraught one, punctuated by a series of gaffes, all the more surprising coming from a man who was a professional theologian. Equally surprising, given that he had been at the centre of Vatican affairs for 30 years, was his inability to handle the bureaucracy, leaving in his wake a dysfunctional Roman Curia.

“He has hardly governed the Church,” wrote John Wilkins, former editor of The Tablet, “preferring to write encyclical letters, books, and speeches.” John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter, compared Benedict to a headmaster writing great essays while around him the school building was on fire.

Nevertheless, when he did make his momentous decision known on Monday, Feb 11, it took top cardinals as well as the rest of the world by surprise. So an otherwise unremarkable papacy is ending with the bequest of a template that will undoubtedly impact on future popes. The decision to abdicate may even be Benedict XVI’s best service to the Church.

Benedict’s brother, Georg Ratzinger , said the outgoing pope would not in any way seek to influence the election of his successor, but that has already happened. In two addresses he gave after his momentous announcement, he pleaded for an end to divisions (an oblique admission that Church governance needs reform), and then followed this with an ultra-conservative account of Vatican II, expounding what the Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch (author of A History of Christianity) described as “a narrative of Vatican II in which nothing much happened at all to the Church”. Taken together, these two addresses amount to a blueprint of sorts for his successor.