When Pope Benedict XVI announced that he would vacate the Chair
of Saint Peter before he reached his expiration date, headline
writers the world over expressed shock, and this time it was
genuine. Popes do not, as a rule, voluntarily leave their thrones.
Every pontiff for the last 600 years had died in office. The
suffering unto death of Benedict’s old boss, John Paul II, was a
protracted affair followed by a huge spectacle of a public funeral
with crowds chanting “Santo! Santo! Santo!”
Benedict made clear he didn’t desire anything like that. He
dropped several loud hints during his eight-year papacy that he
would abdicate if he no longer felt he was physically and mentally
up to it. My sense from day one was that he never wanted to be
pope. His papal seal featured a bear with a backpack, a prompt for
the legend of Saint Corbinian. The saint had been called to the
Vatican. On the way, a bear attacked and killed his packhorse.
Corbinian rebuked the bear and told the beast it would just have to
carry the horse’s burden on to Rome. The shocked, dumb animal
complied.
Whenever Benedict told the story, he compared himself not to the
saint but the bear. He lamented that, unlike the bear, he was never
again allowed to roam free.
There are two basic ways you can view a papal election: from
without or from within—though in both cases, distance varies. The
New York Times represents the furthest-out perspective,
welcoming Benedict’s resignation and promptly rooting and
editorializing for a more Sulzbergerian Catholic Church, with
married lesbian priests blessing condoms at the altar. Less far-out
are the great mass of non-Catholic American Protestants who view
the white and black tufts of smoke from the Sistine Chapel with
great curiosity.
Practicing Catholics have a more personal stake in the
proceedings. What popes do can affect how, where, and even in what
language we worship. The bishop of Rome is both the monarch of the
church and something more personal and hard to explain. The pope is
not CEO material. His title comes from the Greek pappas,
the child’s word for father that could be translated as “Papa” or
even, in the more popular vernacular, “Daddy.”
The abdication of a pope in theory presents a serious problem
for Rome. The last pope who abdicated for non-political reasons,
Celestine V, was imprisoned until death by his successor. To his
credit, Benedict saw the spot his decision could put the Catholic
Church in. He swore his “unconditional reverence and obedience” to
the next bishop of Rome before the papal election and pledged to
retire to a life of seclusion and prayer inside the walls of an old
(though renovated) Vatican nunnery. The bear has chosen to confine
himself to a cage of his own making.
If I had only one prayer for the future of the Catholic Church,
it would be for our newly elected pope to let Benedict retire to
his native Germany and continue his writing. Let him preside over
Mass at a country church and churn out another volume of his
memoirs or books on whatever topic his mind roams to in these
twilight years. This allowance would hardly present the Vatican
with any special crisis. During his papacy, Benedict wrote and
published three books on the life of Jesus Christ. He made no
claims of infallibility, but instead practically begged for people
to have at the volumes, to come reason with him over the original
reason for his hope—a hope that all Christians share in common.
A return to Germany is what Benedict would want, I believe. He
never desired to move to Rome but was bound by oath to obey his
pope. There he took on the thankless job of running the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which attempts to
ensure that the Catholic Church’s theologians teach the Catholic
faith. At a meeting in the 1980s with dissenting theologian Charlie
Curran, Benedict’s deputy tried to explain the Church’s position on
orthodoxy and theology. If he disagreed with the Vatican about a
great number of things, the deputy said—and I’m paraphrasing—he
would have to resign his position and live out his days as a
country priest. Curran interrupted, calling that an insult to all
country priests. Benedict sighed and said, I wish I could be a
country priest! Our new pope could make that
happen.
Photo: UPI
