#385: The New Pope's Challenges

Some thoughts on the as-yet unfinished papal election: 

Black Smoke From Ballot #1

       The conclave’s first day has produced only black smoke.  Wall-to-wall coverage will continue, and millions will watch, until white smoke announces the election of the new pope and he appears before the masses in Saint Peter’s Square and the world’s TV screens.

If nothing else, the Catholic Church is good theater, and the conclave’s very secrecy generates the ironic suspense that comes when the players know more than the audience.

Some alienated Catholics, especially in North America, remain immune to a spectacle that offers no choice of movement on issues like contraception, same-sex marriage, or women priests.  For them, the whole papal election--indeed the papacy itself--is largely irrelevant.  That cuts both ways, of course: their concerns are largely irrelevant to judging what difference the new pope might make.

Since all 115 electors were handpicked by either John-Paul II or Benedict XVI, we know in advance that on major church teachings, as well as on the most controversial minor ones (mostly about sex and gender), the next pope, no matter who he is, will bring continuity rather than change.

But within the mainstream of that continuity are several challenges facing whoever is elected, and we will measure his success based on (1) how he sets his priorities and (2) how the engages them.

CrossCurrents readers know my take on this: the new pope inherits a 50-year process that has transformed the papacy itself, and our current challenges call for further transformation.  For me, this means taking action on several fronts:

Corruption and hypocrisy.  The fallout of the sex-abuse scandal is a widespread (and still spreading) perception of the Catholic Church is an institution steeped in malfeasance and cover-ups.  We cannot expect the next generation to invest themselves or their children in the Church unless that perception changes.  This will take visible action at all levels, and could take an entire papacy—or more—to accomplish.  So from the start, the new pope must bring a forthright and upright presence to his role by establishing accountability at all levels of the hierarchy.

Housecleaning.  Fifty years ago John XXIII hung the renewal of Catholicism on three things: Vatican Council II (1962-1965), the revision of canon law (moderately revised in 1983), and the reform of the curia (Vatican bureaucracy).  Since then, the curia is more international and has fewer minor clerics holding too much authority, but it remains an isolated bureaucracy.  Too many of its bishops are too far (in place or time or both) from the experience of day-to-day church life.

At Vatican II the curia’s scheme for a quick, do-nothing rubber stamp council exploded when the world’s bishops balked at being bossed by bureaucrats and recreated a meaningful council agenda.  The result: Vatican II was truly the product of the Church’s shepherds, not its bureaucrats.

But 50 years later the bureaucrats are back in charge (and often committing grievous errors of governance).

The last two popes not only allowed the world’s bishops to languish (the occasionally convened Synod of Bishops became increasingly toothless under John-Paul II and Benedict XVI), they also neglected their own responsibility to manage the curia.

The new pope will need to reassert the right order of things: his place as the leader of all bishops, with the curia under their direction.

On pilgrimage.  Since Paul VI, the papacy has become a pilgrim post, no longer secluded away in the Vatican but traveling the world’s continents to make the Church’s presence and mission visible in human form. His successors followed his example, but lost control of day-to-day management.

 The challenge facing the new pope: how can he continue this global presence but keep control of what goes on in Rome?  It will help if he is truly a man of the world, a people’s pope, rather than a closeted cleric.

Evangelizing.  Worldwide Catholicism continues to grow, but not everywhere: it is losing relative ground in Latin America, it is losing absolute numbers in North America (and only avoids shrinking thanks to millions of immigrants), and is nearly moribund in much of Europe.

Vatican II aimed to enrich the secular the world with gospel values by reaching out, by engaging in what Paul VI called “a conversation with the entire world.” But in many places that conversation has broken down even among our own members.

My view is simple: since Vatican II, secular culture has outrun Catholic renewal, and we risk falling further behind unless the new pope can preserve and rekindle the flame of renewal.  If Vatican II sought to assert Catholicism as a world church, the new pope must solidify the papacy’s role in world leadership.

These four challenges are central to the new pope’s success.  My own conviction is that such challenges are too big for one man to tackle solo.  Upon his own election in 1958, John XXIII knew he needed help to face post-war modernity, so he called the world’s bishops to convene in council.  In so doing he dispelled a century-old myth that the pope could lead the church alone.  We should hope and pray that the new man thinks like John, and mobilizes his bishops to join him in leading the way ahead.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2013

#301: Time for a NEW BRAND of Catholicism

EXCERPT:
Catholicism has often depended on good branding. When millions of immigrants from Ireland, Poland, Italy, Canada, and Portugal faced discrimination and thwarted opportunities, American Catholicism thrived in its trademark working-class role as "your refuge, your strength, your protector." Meanwhile, in much of Europe, Catholicism's brand as the aristocracy’s ally against the working class weakened the Church well into the 21st century.

But such national variations in Catholicism's brand were challenged in 1959 when Pope John XXIII called for a world-wide council of bishops (Vatican II, 1962-1965) to renew the Church with a new, improved brand of Catholicism.

This re-branding did not abandon Catholicism's ancient values and traditions, but it did re-package them to enable the Church to more powerfully penetrate the modern, global culture that had emerged in the 20th century. Picture John's successor, Paul VI, trading in the old sedia gestatoria (portable throne) for a bubble-top Lincoln, rolling into Yankee Stadium to celebrate Mass carrying his favorite crosier with its modernist rendition of the crucifix, and you get the picture: it's still the Pope, but the packaging has changed.

John XXIII, Vatican II, Paul VI, John-Paul II -- all these transformed Catholicism's brand, so that by 2000 the Catholic Church was once more a moral force to be reckoned with, and moreover was re-fitting itself for a global future, replacing much of its trappings (descended from the Roman Empire and medieval Europe) with new, more truly global features. By 2000 it was no longer our grandparents' Church -- the stodgy chrome-and-fin-studded gas guzzler of the 1950s had given way to a simpler fuel-efficient model that brought the Pope to 100 countries in twenty years.

But Paul VI also planted a second legacy, when his 1968 birth control cyclical Humanae Vitae left millions of Catholics -- and millions more outside the church -- wondering if Catholicism ancient wisdom had revealed its Achilles heel: its inability to comprehend human sexuality in the post-Freud era.

In retrospect, 1968 marks the birth of another, sex-obsessed Catholic brand that has competed with the Vatican II brand for more than 40 years. Of course, common sense tells us that competing brands are bad for any enterprise; but worse than that, the 1968 brand of seems to be taking over—and taking the Church's good name with it.

For millions of Catholics, Humanae Vitae alone was enough to dismiss the Catholic hierarchy’s authority on matters sexual, but things got no easier after that. The 1970s and 1980s saw huge numbers of priests leaving to marry, and equally large numbers of younger men by-passing their priestly vocation to avoid committing to celibacy in the first place. Mass attendance began dropping, and by the late 1980s American Catholicism's brand included increasingly empty pews, empty seminaries, and even closing parishes.

Sexually-loaded moral issues like abortion, homosexuality, and women's ordination reinforced the split between loyalists convinced Rome was always right and heartsick faithful equally convinced that the “Old Boys’ Club” had lost touch with human nature.

Then the 1990S are brought, over the distant horizon, a sex-based tsunami rolling in from the past. First in Newfoundland, then in New Orleans, then Fall River and Springfield and Palm Beach, and finally crashing ashore in Boston in 2002, its backwash splashing across all oceans, came the sex-abuse scandal...

The laity's reluctance to challenge authorities -- especially the reluctance to bring suit -- had protected the ecclesiastical cover-up from exposure, but that only meant the tide of evil kept rolling deeper and higher until its eventual crash brought scandal of biblical proportions. Imagine BP claiming its spill was "only a gulf problem," only to have more spills break out in every ocean it drills. Imagine Toyota claiming mechanical failures were rare, only to have 5% of all their cars crashing on our interstates.

Like those corporations, the hierarchy makes feeble PR pleas, only to commit further gaffes that further damage its brand…The Vatican announces new rules urging bishops to report priest-criminals to authorities if civil laws require it… then that same Vatican publishes a document explicitly linking pedophilia with ordaining women, under the common heading of "grave sins" committed by clergy.

…Today’s brand of Catholicism is so tarnished that, when the Church presents its face to the world, reactions range from shame to disgust to laughter.

The Church's mission cannot be accomplished by a laughing-stock, a public pervert, or a village idiot. If these are the public face of today's Catholicism, there can be no more urgent task than rescuing our tradition from such a PR disaster and restoring its good name with a better, credible, authentic brand of Catholicism.

How about a pre-owned “Vatican II”? It's got some miles and nicks on it, but its owners only drove it on Sundays, and never really gave it full throttle on the open road. No model out since can match it. With a little work, it'll run like it’s Brand New.