Back in 1415, with the decadent Borgio papacy nearly 80 years away and the
Reformation’s challenge more than a century away, there was no hint that
catastrophe was approaching Catholicism itself, even when a three-way battle for
the Holy See made a pope resign.
Now, as Pope Benedict XVI prepares to
retire on Thursday and his successor’s selection process starts Friday, it takes
no church historian to realize that the world’s best-organized faith is in deep
moral, institutional and political crisis.
Similarly, it takes no
fortune-teller to predict that the next pope will be expected to impact an
embattled Vatican’s relevance in a world wedged between a largely post-religious
north and an increasingly Islamist south.
The 117 cardinals and
archbishops who will convene Friday in the Sistine Chapel are expected to
produce a new pope within 24 days, during which they will meet daily in order to
hear and scrutinize each other before finally selecting someone in their midst
and sending white smoke to billow through the chimney atop St. Peter’s
Square.
THE MOST vexing crisis pervading the conclave will be the
sex-abuse scandals that have shaken the Catholic world in recent
years.
The abuses, whose main victims were thousands of boys ages 10 to
14, resulted in cover-ups, investigations, prosecutions, convictions and
high-profile resignations – most memorably Boston’s Archbishop Bernard Francis
Law in 2002 – as well as a flood of lawsuits that have forced some dioceses to
shut down entire churches and some to declare bankruptcy.
The span of the
sex-abuse allegations – multiple countries in four continents over more than
half a century – has made some suspect that, just like the dioceses of San
Diego, Portland and Tuscon were compelled to declare financial bankruptcy, the
entire Church might as well declare moral bankruptcy.
The consequent
institutional crisis, which the National Catholic Reporter has described as one
of the worst in the Church’s history, comes at a time when Catholicism is
steadily losing followers.
The US has lost more than 1,000 parishes over
the past two decades, and European church attendance has plunged to well under
50 percent even in Catholic bastions like Spain and Ireland.
While these
trends have been accelerated by the recent scandals, they also reflect a rich
West’s post-religious Zeitgeist highlighted by abandoned churches’ reincarnation
as quaint real estate projects.
This, in essence, is the major internal
challenge Catholicism faces as its top clergy gather to anoint their new leader.
Though this crisis had long matured by the time Benedict began his eight-year
papacy, the image problem the Church faced when he entered office has not
changed and was in fact exacerbated with this papacy’s own share of brouhahas,
from financial disorders in the Vatican’s innermost banking to document leaks
from the pope’s innermost chambers.
Beyond image, there is no indication
that the deeper theological value at play in the sex scandals – clerical
celibacy – will be seriously reviewed any time soon. The conservatives who have
efficiently resisted contraception and family planning are believed to vastly
outnumber the liberals, a ratio that leaves consideration of priestly marriages
and feminine priesthood highly unlikely.
Moreover, with Islam steadily
expanding in Europe while evangelical churches sprout from Brazil to Africa,
Catholicism is challenged not only morally but also geographically.
Symbolically, Rome’s own great mosque, whose construction was financed by Saudi
Arabia, seats 12,000 worshippers representing an estimated one million Muslims
throughout Italy whose quest to build yet more mosques is facing political
resistance.
Understandably, then, some are beginning to eulogize
Catholicism as a declining faith whose colorful ceremonies and sprawling
business interests can no longer conceal its moral crisis and political
irrelevance.
Such eulogies have been made in the past and proved
premature.
BACK IN 1978, with some 100 million Catholics trapped beyond
the Iron Curtain while communism coran the world, Stalin’s famous disparagement
of the pope as a general with no divisions seemed vindicated.
Hardly a
decade of history had turned on its head.
The daring appointment of a
charismatic Polish bishop as pope was soon followed by hugely attended masses
beyond the Iron Curtain. Communism’s subsequent downfall was at least partly
related to Catholicism’s underestimated energy and untapped resources.
Catholicism had displayed such resilience previously, during the
Counter-Reformation, when it retook much of the turf it had previously lost to
Protestantism.
It follows that when the Conclave convenes next Friday, it
will try to define the turf it must conquer this century if it is to restore its diminishing
historic relevance.
While the Church must find a way to restore its
following in Europe and North America, that is essentially a defensive
battle.
To go on the offensive the way it did under John Paul’s
leadership, the Vatican will have to seek a geopolitical niche where it can have
a relative advantage. And in today’s perplexed international system, such a
niche actually exists and begs to be filled. Circling the entire globe, it runs
along the cleavage that separates the rich north from the poor
south.
With Islam mainly in the south, Protestantism mostly in the north
and other faiths lacking global reach and pretensions, Catholicism is the only
religion firmly positioned to suspend bridges across this fault line. Similarly,
with the rich world perplexed in the face of capitalism’s moral failures and
economic malfunctions in recent years, the Cardinals may think they can inspire
a counter-greed Zeitgeist of chastity and charity.
The selection of a
charismatic pope from the Third World would help change the subject from recent
decades’ sex scandals and the affairs that haunted Benedict’s papacy to issues
of wealth and poverty and north-south relations.
Then again, to make such
a choice, the Conclave must share a sense of historic urgency of the sort it
felt in the face of communism’s assault. The Italian names that have been touted
– Milan Archbishop Angelo Scola and Cardinal Angelo Bagnasca of Genoa – like
Canada’s Marc Ouellet, may fail to deliver such dramatic change. Then again, a
choice like Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana is considered problematic because of
his anti- Islamic militancy. Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle of the Philippines has
been more careful and, at 56, is also younger than the others, who are between
the ages of 65 and 72.
The next pope may well be someone whose name has
not come up at all. But whoever he is, the choice will immediately be
interpreted as a statement either for or against change. The Church, after all,
did not always confront history’s challenges as successfully as it fought
communism. Next month’s choice will therefore be judged by the extent that it
resembles one of two precedents: the vision with which the papacy confronted
communism or the impotence with which it met fascism.
WHILE RELEVANT for
a broad range of issues, from clerical morality and Western greed to north-south
relations and Islamist expansion, one issue that does not stand to be affected
by the papal succession is the Jewish world.
Theologically, the
transition since Vatican II’s retreat from Christianity’s historic accusations
against the Jews has since matured and become a quiet harmony, albeit one where
many still find room for improvement.
Politically, the Vatican’s full
recognition of the Jewish state two decades ago and the papal visits here by
both John Paul and Benedict have cemented a normal relationship between the
Jewish people and its former archenemy, a relationship Israel can only dream to
someday have with its current enemies.
Ironically, the Vatican’s current
relations with the Jews are much better than its relations with the millions of
disenfranchised Catholics whom the new pope will be expected to somehow
appease.
The writer is a Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute.