Papacy too heavy for one man to
carry
By GIANCARLO
ZIZOLA
This is the fourth of 11 articles exploring the future of the
papacy. The series of essays, edited by Gary MacEoin, will be expanded and
published as a book, The Papacy and the People of God, by Orbis Books, in the
near future. This article was translated by MacEoin.
Who will succeed John Paul II? Will a new pope mean papal
reform?
John Paul himself, in May 1996, linked these two questions
organically in the encyclical Ut Unum Sint (that they may be one).
The Catholic church, he said, should join other Christians in a search
for a way of exercising the primacy that would be open to a new
situation.
This was a daring initiative. The pope was proposing to resolve,
as an item of ordinary business, in dialogue with other Christian churches, an
issue so delicate and so loaded with explosive tensions as to require in
earlier centuries the intervention of an ecumenical council.
The initiative immediately raised the temperature of the customary
pre-papal election discussions. The task now is not simply to identify the
suitable candidates, the papabili, but also to define the nature of the papal
office.
One of the first discussions it provoked was an interdisciplinary
symposium organized by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in
December 1996 on The Primacy of the Successor of Peter.
Representatives of other Christian confessions participated, and Cardinals
Joseph Ratzinger and Godfried Danneels made interventions.
Also noteworthy were former San Francisco Archbishop John
Quinns remarkable conference at Oxford and Jesuit Fr. Klaus Schatzs
essay on primacy. These constituted an effective exercise of the sense of
faith, which Vatican II recognized as existing in the universitas
fidelium (collectivity of the faithful), as did John Pauls
statement in the 1996 Apostolic Constitution, Universi Dominici Gregis, that a
papal election is not an event isolated from the people of God and of
concern only to the electoral college, but in a certain sense an action of the
entire church.
How radical must the reform be? French Jesuit Pierre Vallin
insists that it must involve an evolution of dogma. It is possible to
anticipate in this regard that historical and theological studies carried out
in common with the other ecclesial traditions will lead in years to come to a
renewed understanding of what is really tied to the confession of faith in the
Western churchs perception of a universal primacy of the bishop of Rome.
... A raising of theological consciousness regarding the relativity of the
doctrinal formulations of a given epoch and a given cultural ambience can in
time develop a process that would lift itself to the level of a dogmatic
conscience, worked out in interecclesial processes of reception and
recognition.
In addition to deeper theological understanding, a prime element
for such reform is water from the spiritual well. This involves collective
spiritual processes modeled on what occurred in the primitive church of
Jerusalem during the incarceration of Peter when they prayed unceasingly
for him. Men and women of the cloister, such as St. Bernard of Clairvaux,
St. Peter Damien and St. Catherine of Siena, have always taken the lead in
criticizing legal centralism in the church, the dizzy pretensions of papal
control and temporal power.
John Paul II has again presented the church, under the guise of an
updating, as a societas perfecta inequalis (unequal perfect
society), committed to the systematic exercise of an ethico-political
role in the center of modern society. This has confused spiritual primacy with
a neo-medieval re-edition of a political primacy among the nations and has
resulted in an objectively harmful compromise of the papacy with worldly
powers.
Even after Vatican II, many still confuse papal primacy and
infallibility with absolute sovereignty, a confusion editorially deplored by La
Civilta Cattolica, the Italian Jesuit magazine: The superimposing of
these elements -- perhaps at times with the connivance of some church
opinion-makers -- has meant that the pope continues to be erroneously regarded
by large parts of public and church opinion as the holder of extensive
political, financial and -- more generally -- temporal power.
A belief in infallibilism, which confuses
infallibility with impeccability, naturally follows. We have here, says
La Civilta Cattolica, a psycho-sociological attitude, not always free of
servility, typical of the court mentality that arises -- outside the pure
doctrine of personal papal infallibility -- as an abnormal growth on that
doctrine, [producing] a proliferation of papolatry and courtly
Byzantinism.
There exists consequently in the church a consistent -- even if
not yet theologically decisive -- current of opinion that challenges the papacy
to clarify the dogmatic definitions of 1870 by a courageous effort to
contextualize these definitions within the cultural and political framework of
that historic period.
The Schatz essay mentioned above contains a pertinent suggestion.
Can we not use the Council of Constances decree, Haec Sancta, to deal
with -- beyond the specific emergency of that moment (the Western Schism) --
extreme situations of a breakdown of the papacy, for example, a new papal
schism, a heretical pope, a pope who preys on the church through
simony or a pope who is losing his mind?
This last situation, which cannot be excluded, would today create,
Schatz notes, a serious structural crisis, and the same is
true also and even more emphatically for the preceding gray zone of
reduced psychic capacity and nervous resistance.
The church also needs to develop a higher level of synodal
culture. The synod of bishops must be restructured to ensure better
participation of the bishops in the exercise of primacy. Danneels, primate of
Malines-Brussels, has called for a council of the crown around the
pope, to consist of six or seven cardinals from around the world to function as
counselors. What this and similar proposals seek to emphasize is that the
church was established by Christ simultaneously on the foundation of
Peter and on the foundation of the apostles.
When all the cards are put on the table, it becomes clear that the
papacy can no longer be filled by a single person, simply because of the
present absolutist definition of the popes dogmatic status. When Vatican
Council I formulated the dogmas of papal primacy and infallibility, the bishops
present in the hall were 774 out of about a thousand active bishops in the
whole Catholic church. The 1997 Annuario Pontificio lists Catholic bishops
today in office at some 4,600. Those retired, about a thousand, are more
numerous than the fathers at Pius IXs council.
At the end of the 19th century, the Catholics who feared for the
freedom of a pope who had just been despoiled of his kingdom, numbered 272
million, most of them in Europe. Catholics now number nearly a billion, the
majority in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Three years from now, nearly three
of every four Catholics will live in what we call the South, while their church
will continue to function according to theological and canonical paradigms that
are predominantly Eurocentric.
In 1900 a dozen countries had ambassadors accredited to the Holy
See. Now there are 180. The head and sovereign of the principal Christian
church has thus become a world religious leader whose duties include
ecumenical, interreligious, diplomatic, theological, pastoral and political
activities, all on a global scale.
An obvious question arises: Has the papal institution become so
insupportable as to be sacrificial? We have the example of Pope Luciani (John
Paul I) whose reign lasted a mere 33 days, and now the pyramidal
syndrome that has struck the psychophysical colossus that was Pope
Wojtyla (John Paul II) in a context in which we cannot exclude with certainty
that his brain problems are not traceable to the pyramidal structure of his
office and to the stress created by this kind of sovereignty.
If there is a probable linkage between the personal pathology of
John Paul II and the structural pathology of the papal system, then the therapy
adopted by the Roman curia to keep the pope on his feet is a mere placebo that
must end up causing more harm. Austrian Cardinal Franz König declared in
1995 that the bureaucratic apparatus of the Vatican has developed its own
life to such a level as to take on (de facto, non de jure) functions that are
proper to collegiality and to consultation with bishops. From that point of
view, there is still no solution to this problem.
The same cardinal had said, just after the sudden death of Pope
Luciani in 1978, that it is necessary to reduce more than has been done
up to now, the physical and psychic overload to which the pope is subjected,
the burden involved in the office, delegating to others some of the papal
functions so as not to exceed the limits of fatigue a human being can
tolerate.
The failure of the strategy of a new Christendom has
been recognized even by Cardinal Ratzinger. Secularization has developed and
spread beyond all anticipation, making it necessary to undertake a profound
re-evaluation of every Christian form if Christianity is to survive. A clear
awareness of that prospect demands a dramatic discussion with the entire
Christian tradition while trying to decide which aspects of the papacy should
be retained and which should change.
Ratzinger recognizes that Christian society is being pulverized
before our eyes by the process of secularization, and he rejects as
false the view of those who fool themselves by thinking that
faith will again become a mass phenomenon. He notes that the
cultural and public role of the church will no longer be the same as it has
presented itself up to now, and that the relationship between
church and society continues to change and will presumably evolve in the
direction of a non-Christian society.
Still, he doesnt despair. Rather, in the exhaustion of the
strategy of a religio societatis (religion of the society) in an
era of a quantatively reduced Christianity, he continues to entertain the
possibility of a more aware Christianity.
That prospect, however, forces the church to invest all its energy
in forming interior Christians, and in forming consciences, with the object of
creating a generation of Christians able to offer new models of life, to
present a barrier against universal homogenization, to recover the ability to
criticize and oppose the dominant myths and earthly interests.
If the Ratzinger analysis -- in its almost apocalyptic lucidity --
is correct, then it follows inescapably that the shape of the papacy on the
horizon must reflect the development of the radical crisis of the Christian
project to the extent that it survives as a residual form of Constantinian
Christendom.
This is a papacy that has to redesign itself according to the
pattern of Vatican IIs pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes,
notwithstanding the fact that this approach has been too often contradicted by
Vatican behaviors and choices: The apostles, their successors and those
who assist those successors have been sent to announce to men Christ, the
savior of the world. Hence in the exercise of their apostolate they must depend
on the power of God, who very often reveals the might of the gospel through the
weakness of its witnesses. For those who dedicate themselves to the ministry of
Gods word should use means and helps proper to the gospel. In many
respects these differ from the supports of the earthly city.
Even when the issue is to undertake the ethico-critical mission in
the political order, the document insists that the church must use all
and only means proper to the gospel.
The remedy is not really in the power of the means but in the
awareness of the spiritual purposes of the church. The advice of St. Bernard of
Clairvaux in De Consideratione to Pope Eugene III comes to us from the 13th
century to illuminate still the papal function at the end of this millennium:
Authority has been given to you so that you may share, not that you give
orders. Yes; act as a servant. Yourself a man, do not try to make other men
your servants -- you would make yourself the servant of a thousand
villanies.
Yes, you occupy the first rank, the first rank by
excellence; but for what purpose do you occupy it? ... Even we, therefore, no
matter how high an opinion we may have of our prerogatives, let us not hesitate
to recognize that a service has been placed on us, not that we have been
granted power. ... And so that you may not think that this has been said solely
for humility, and not for truth, here is what the Lord says in the gospel:
Among pagans it is the kings that lord it over them, and those who have
authority over them are given the name of benefactor. And he adds:
This must not happen with you. Nothing could be clearer: Dominion
is forbidden to the apostles.
Giancarlo Zizola, who lives in Rome, is considered the dean of
todays Vaticanologists. He has covered the Vatican for publications in
many countries since before Vatican II. Many of his books, which include
biographies of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, have been widely translated.
National Catholic Reporter, October 31,
1997
|