All papal reigns at their start are fraught with promise,
and have potential for dramatic acts.
The cardinal electors can’t elect a “caretaker pope” without the
possibility that said pope, theoretically picked to keep the Chair of Peter
warm for a better successor, will suddenly take it into his head to do
something climactic … like call an ecumenical council. And even a pope widely regarded as an empty
cassock (e.g. Ven. Paul VI) can drop an atomic bomb on everyone’s expectations
(the prophetic Humanae Vitae). In this respect, the upcoming conclave is no
different from previous conclaves, even with the off-stage presence of a Bishop
Emeritus of Rome.
Those hoping, advising and demanding that the Church change
its moral teachings, as I’ve written elsewhere, will most likely grumble of the
next pope, in the words of Pete Townsend, “Meet the new boss /Same as the old
boss.” But more irritating than those
who expect some kind of dogmatic dive to the left are those who claim that B16’s
resignation introduces a fundamental change to the Petrine office, that it
either makes or proves the papacy “just another job”. “And by so doing,” Giles
Fraser of the Guardian, who
styles himself a “Catholic Protestant”, exults, “it rightly challenges some
of the cult of personality that has built up around that office, as if the
job affords the office holder some special proximity to God. It doesn’t.”
… Catholicism is bigger than the job description of a bishop of an Italian city. To be a Catholic is to regard oneself a part of the universal church, one the stretches back in time, yes, but one also that spreads out over the four corners of the earth.Catholic Protestants, like me, believe in a form of Christianity with a far greater degree of institutional subsidiarity, a religion that is not just top down and doctrinally authoritarian. I guess that is why, at a certain level, we take a certain pride in our theological squabbling, however unedifying that may be at times. Politically, we are natural democrats. And democracy is messy, without the dangerous glamour of any cult of the strong leader.
Whether or not you believe in an ecclesial democracy — and,
having witnessed the doctrinal fragmentation of communions who do, it’s hard to
see why one would — Fraser is uncommonly shy about telling us how Papa Bene’s
resignation changes the papacy, or why we should suddenly abandon all pretense
of a special Petrine charism simply because B16 won’t die in office like most
of the previous 264. “The cult of the
strong leader” may suffice for those who hang on to late eighteenth/early
nineteenth speculative anthropology. However, it’s bad history and bad theology,
not to mention a total misread of Joe Catholic in the pews.
This idea of a “papal mystique”, if you will, also gives
rise to the Catholic fear: If popes are
allowed to resign, then they can be forced to resign — dare we say, “deposed”? And if popes can be forced out of office,
then what happens to the Petrine charism?
Why, any number of horrors may follow when the Pope can be forced out of
office by an antagonistic cabal!
First, other popes in history have been deposed. In fact, one particularly villainous character, Benedict IX, was first bribed to resign (1044), then came back into power and was deposed two more times (1045-1046, 1047-48). Other popes have been murdered, and I’m not thinking of the early martyr popes. If abdication or deposal dispels the Petrine charism, then that went away when St. Pontian, sentenced to die a slave in the mines of Sardinia, willingly gave up his office in 235, or in 654 when St. Eugene I was elected after St. Martin I
was abducted. If, however, neither event undid the charism, then neither will B16.
Which brings up my second point: The Petrine charism belongs to the office, not to the man who holds it. Popes receive no additional consecration beyond the one they receive when elevated to the episcopate. When bishops are transferred or resign, the authority attached to the office they leave ends; as an example, Cdl. Tim Dolan of New York was previously Archbishop of Milwaukee, but that prior occupation gives him no power or right to interfere with Abp. Jerome Listecki’s administration.
Father
Raymond de Souza makes an excellent additional point by referring us to Christus
Dominus 21: “Since the pastoral
office of bishops is so important and weighty, diocesan bishops and others
regarded in law as their equals, who have become less capable of fulfilling
their duties properly because of the increasing burden of age or some other
serious reason, are earnestly requested to offer their resignation from office
either at their own initiative or upon the invitation of the competent
authority” [bold
font mine.—TL].
In other words, it’s precisely because the role of successor
to the apostles is not “just a job” —
some relatively unskilled and unimportant task any man could carry out with
nominal competence — that a bishop needs to be in reasonably good health, of
sound mind, and not impeded by any temporal concern which restricts his ability
to exercise his spiritual authority. If
this is imperative of local bishops, how much more is it needed of the Bishop
of Rome! Blessed John Paul II oversaw
the 1983 revision of canon law which saw the provision for papal resignation, canon 332 §2, inserted. While
he obviously saw a need to carry out the office despite his progressive
physical decline, we can infer that he saw it as a personal obligation and not
one inherent in the office.
One final consideration: Once you subtract the
popes who resigned, who abdicated, who were deposed, martyred or murdered, you
leave a lot of popes who hung on to the Chair for life because it was a source
of wealth and temporal power, or because they were carried off by disease or virus with
little opportunity to resign. Had there
been fewer material rewards and better healthcare for the popes over the
centuries, we might very well have seen more resignations in Church history. In this respect, Benedict’s resignation is
definitely unprecedented, but in line with the abandonment of the triple crown
and the sedia gestatoria.
When Jesus the Good Shepherd passed care of his flock to St.
Peter with the words, “Tend my sheep” (Jn 21:16), he predicted the Rock’s
martyrdom to remind him that the shepherd isn’t free to abandon his flock when
the wolves come to prey. But there’s
another way to die for the sake of the faithful, and that’s to step aside when
someone else can tend the sheep better.
Because the papacy isn’t just a job — it’s the Vicariate of
Christ, the Servant of the Servants of God.
