THE OTHER POPE

It is intriguing, in current Catholic Masses, to hear prayers for "le Pape François", and to see him everywhere referred to by his title AND his name. But that should remind us that there is, for the first time since the Avignon schism, another Pope, a "Pope emeritus", living in well-earned peace and quiet in a small ugly convent in the Vatican and occupied in prayer. Going through some old MSS on my computer I found this note I wrote on him at the time of his abdication, which I here repeat with pleasure and with deep affection for that saintly scholar.

BENEDICT XVI

Everyone remembers that he was known as ‘the Panzer Cardinal’, and almost everyone has been surprised at the Pope he turned out to be. This exquisitely sensitive man, with the spirit of a true scholar, met a turning-point in his life ca. 1968, when at his beloved University of Tübingen he saw fine scholars howled out of the classroom and physically molested for expressing facts and insights deemed politically incorrect by an army of ignorant and so-called progressive taliban. Having realised that certain ideologies, certain prejudices and certain ignorances are the enemies of reason as well as of true faith, he devoted the rest of his scholarly life until now to the convergence of those two human qualities, so often thought irreconcileable.

His famous “Regensburg address”, which the media and the “Arab street” – without, of course, bothering to read it -- interpreted as insulting Islam, was in fact a powerful meditation on the topic of reason and faith (which I read in German, translated into English, published on my old blog, and will now re-publish here). His short catecheses, given as mini-homilies in Rome, on the great minds of Christendom have now been published as Doctors of the Church, and may go some way to helping Christians close up the lamentable gulf that separates us from devout Jews and their knowledge of their faith’s great thinkers. And his three short books on Jesus – the life, the Passion, and the infancy narratives – are both distinguished and eminently readable.

As long as he has been Pope I, as a non-Catholic and a scholar, felt that here was a man I understood, respected, and liked. Yes, he was austere in his liturgical tastes, but there a lover of the Book of Common Prayer can follow him. Yes, he was strict in his traditional dogmas, and there we would differ. But I am as glad to differ as to agree with one whose mind I can not only respect but regard with admiration bordering on awe.

Moreover, there has been about him since he acceded to the Chair of Peter a kind of gentleness, a kindness, a sensitivity that many would not have expected. And this, I believe, comes from the fact that apart from being a scholar he is a man of prayer, genuinely and absolutely concerned with the things of the spirit and of the soul. It is this that seems to have allowed him to bring out the vulnerable young man he was, and to connect (in a way so very different from the ebullient John Paul II) with simple and humble people. When he speaks German it is a soft, intelligent, mostly kind murmur that reminds those of us whose childhood was marked by the Nazi bark, the Schnauze, of the German language’s other registers, of simple courtesy and of the poetry of deep feeling.

A religious boffin on French TV said that the negative side of his papacy would be remembered in his attempts to reconcile the Lefebvrists, which struck me as both one-sided and short-sighted. Few people care much about the Fraternity of Pius X; lovers of Latin liturgy feel a sneaking sympathy for them; and only those who dig a little deeper see the essential gloom of their grim and uncompromising nineteenth-century Catholicism. (I went to a Latin Mass in Venice where all was delicious until the elderly priest, biretta- and lace-clad, gave to the small elderly congregation a morose sermon on sexual purity.) The fact that one of their number was also a Holocaust denier just means that they have nuts just like all insitutions.

I suspect that in his heart of hearts Benedict XVI, like many devout Christians both Roman and other, is not a full-fledged enthusiast for Vatican II, its evangelical mateyness and its lamentable liturgical and aesthetic taste; but I am sure that he has also seen the way in which it has begun to renew the Church, to banish some of the gloom and doom, to make parishioners smile at one another during Mass, and to enthuse hundreds of thousands of young people to travel thousands of miles for the experience of the World Youth Days.

He is not a man easily understood by a 24/7 media culture (“What Made Benedict Conservative?” trumpeted an American journal, introducing its story with the words “according to the media . . .”). He is, I believe, private, profound, prayerful, bookish, and shy. His decision to abdicate is both innovative and personally courageous. He is now very frail, and eminently deserves to end his earthly life in the peace of a monastery. One can only hope that his successor will proclaim him, as he has been for many decades, a Doctor Ecclesiae, a Doctor of the Church.

FIDDLING ON THE TITANIC OR SINGING ON THE ARK?

I have been reading the admirable French daily La Croix’s decennial survey of the state of the French Catholic church and its presumed development over the next ten years. It is dire, of course: the number of baptisms is falling, the number of committed lay persons is falling, the number of those calling themselves Catholic is falling, and the number of vocations is plunging.

The suggested remedies are many, various, energetic and coming from all over. They include foreign priests, more work by the laity, reorganising dioceses, etcetera. And yet there is a vast and dense silence on a number of possibilities that instantly suggest themselves to a non-Roman-Catholic.

In the first place, married priests. Admittedly, that would prove complicated in terms of salaries, pensions, and adaptability to movement. But it would instantly augment the number of vocations, and in the face of 450 years of Anglican experience it is impossible to maintain that married men make less good parish clergy. To do the Pope justice, he did recently tell a bishop from Amazonia that the church would not exclude the consecration of viri probati, “proven” married men. But only in such extreme cases.

Secondly, women priests. This would double the pool of vocations if not triple it. And again, as the Anglicans are discovering, women make excellent priests.

Thirdly, a conservative redefinition of celibacy. Conservative in the sense of going back to medieval practice. Celibacy should mean not living in the context of a marriage and a family, and thus being available on a permanent basis. It should not mean giving up all sexual relations for the rest of one’s life. That is a great deal to ask of young males: and such a demand may be fine when there are many – in ages where priesthood confers status, education, and security --, but it should be completely reconsidered when the flood of vocations is reduced to a trickle.

Fourthly, the possibility of couples, straight or gay, both serving as priests, perhaps in the same parish or neighbouring parishes.  

Pope Francis memorably said, a year or so ago, that it would be wonderful if the Church could stop thinking about sex all the time. Notice that all the solutions I’ve mentioned as not being discussed or (publicly) envisaged have to do with sex.

As for the dwindling of the laity, I have long suspected that it had something to do with the Church’s (no: the churches’) relentless “updating” and “modernizing” of their habitus. And I notice that all the suggested remedies in the La Croix issue go in the same direction.

If each diocese decided to have a number of churches where a traditional liturgy was used – and not only at 8 a.m. -- , these might stop the drifting away, or the not turning up, of those whose faith is best served by a liturgy of reverence, of formal beauty, and of some distance. At the moment, such believers are faced with the choice of either post-Vatican II liturgical chumminess or Lefebvrist theological archaism. An unfair choice, that I’m sure alienates a larger number of the faithful than the Church realizes.

Finally, a number of French dioceses are moving in the direction of laymen getting together for church services without a priest. I have attended one or two of those, and they are embarrassing in their lack of direction and form. Once again, if there were more contact between French Catholics and Anglicans, the latter could suggest a translated version (which exists already) of their Prayer-Book Matins and Evensong services (minus the prayers for the Royal Family), which would meet the case admirably. This would also mean going back to an earlier conception of Communion, or Mass, as an occasional, say monthly, liturgical high point; something the Reformation instituted but has been moving away from.

In a time when the seas are rising, Christians should reflect on the nature and course of the ship they are manning. Are we bound for an iceberg or for Ararat?