Vatican Corruption – Page 30

March 9, 2013

Roman Catholic leaders need to get rid of their groupthink

By Lisa Miller

Recent events prompt a stating of the obvious. The Roman Catholic Church is not now, nor has it ever been, a democracy. It values neither free speech nor freedom of the press. Its leaders are not elected officials, so they do not sweat opinion polls. Roman Catholic bishops and cardinals do not represent the interests of their members, and members, if dissatisfied with their leadership, cannot vote those leaders out. The next pope, the Vatican press office continually reminds us, will be selected not by the 115 cardinals who will soon be sequestered in the Sistine Chapel, but by God.

But in the 21st century, this blatant disregard of democratic principles rankles. Even the cardinals from the United States showed uncharacteristic irritation when their daily news conferences in Rome were canceled last week. Italian newspapers had published leaked accounts of the closed-door meetings at which the voting cardinals are gathering pre-conclave and painted the leadership of the church as divided, rancorous and political. No one accused the Americans of leaking outright, but the news conferences abruptly stopped, and the U.S. cardinals weren’t happy. “In true old-style Catholic school teacher fashion, someone talks and everybody stays after school,” Sister Mary Ann Walsh, spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told the Associated Press.

After decades of sex scandals, financial improprieties and rumors of further financial scandals to come, the American cardinals had been demanding more transparency from the church’s governing body, the Curia. “Obviously, we want to know and learn as much as we can relative to governance in the Church, and the Curia is part of that issue,” said Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Houston. “So, certainly we want to discuss and learn what we can, and I think that will go on as long as the cardinals feel they need the information.”

When their news conferences were shut down, the USCCB issued a news release: “The U.S. Cardinals are committed to transparency.” Others in the College of Cardinals, the statement seemed to be saying, not so much.

Transparency is not just a post-Enlightenment, democratic ideal. It’s a post-Watergate value, learned the hard way. Corrupt leaders betray the faith and trust of generations to come. Healing and renewed trust in authority happens only when all the secrets have finally been revealed. No one understands this better than Americans, who have gotten used to seeing their government and business leaders apologize, express remorse, and — sometimes cynically, sometimes not — remediate their sins before re-committing themselves to power. The church’s continued refusal to do this after wave upon wave of revelations of abuse of innocents and corporate malfeasance infuriates even her most loyal members.

Institutions as wide-ranging as Google and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia have made transparency a core value. A group called Transparency International ranks countries on the basis of the perceived corruption in their governments. (The United States is 19th, after the United Kingdom but before Chile.) How is it in a world such as this, the men at the Vatican’s highest levels continue to close ranks and insist not only on their own authority but also on their own moral privilege? How is it that the church can continue to be faced with evidence that it abused children and insist that it protects the weak and the vulnerable?

A rereading of Jonathan Haidt’s wonderful book “The Righteous Mind” (just out in paperback) is illuminating here. Groups of like-minded people reinforce their own beliefs. And worse. They convince themselves that those beliefs are moral, even righteous. Individuals “lie, cheat and cut corners quite often when we think we can get away with it,” he writes, “and then we use our moral thinking to manage our reputations and justify ourselves to others. We believe our own post hoc reasoning so thoroughly that we end up self-righteously convinced of our own virtue.”

Groups are worse. Evolutionarily speaking, “group selection pulls for cooperation, for the ability to suppress antisocial behavior and spur individuals to act in ways that benefit their groups. Group-serving behaviors sometimes impose a terrible cost on outsiders.” In other words, in the most powerful groups, people work together — suppressing individual quirks and desires — to protect the group. And then they overlay that group-serving behavior with a moral righteousness that explains and exonerates their ruthlessness. Democratic values — openness, transparency, diversity, free exchange of ideas — do not come naturally to groups, Haidt explains. The brilliance of the American experiment is that it created the freedom for many different groups to thrive.

But then Haidt issues this warning, which the men who run the church would do well to heed: The most effective groups take good care of the people within them.

And the group known as the Catholic Church includes all of its believers, not just the cardinals.

Complete Article HERE!

March 7, 2013

Flocks and shepherds

As a conclave gathers to elect a pope, many in the Catholic church want change

WANTED: man of God; good at languages; preferably under 75; extensive pastoral experience; no record of covering up clerical sex abuse, deeply spiritual and, mentally, tough as old boots. It is a lot to ask, but that is the emerging profile of the man many of his fellow-cardinals would like to see replace Benedict XVI as the next pope.

On March 4th the princes of the church began a series of preliminary “general congregations”, the first step to electing a pontiff. They have much to discuss. After four sessions, they had still not—as expected—fixed a date for the Conclave, the electoral college, made up of cardinals below the age of 80, which will actually choose the next pope.

The papal spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, said the members of the general congregation, who include older cardinals, are not “hurrying things”. By March 6th, when they adjourned, the assembly had heard 51 speeches. As Father Lombardi tactfully put it, they spoke “freely and with rather effective colour”. That is code for candour—even bluntness. Indeed, given the crises the church faces, delicacy might seem remiss.

The procedure is usually to identify the main threats facing the church and then find the cardinal best able to deal with them. Of the subjects cited by Father Lombardi, half concerned the Vatican itself. Deeper questions include the loss of religious faith in Europe; the challenge from evangelical Protestantism in Latin America; persecution of Christians in the Middle East and clerical sex abuse. But none is as pressing as the turmoil in the Roman Curia, the church’s central administration.

Benedict, intellectually fearless yet personally timid, was unable to keep order. Many in Rome believe that was the true reason for his departure. The Curia has become a battleground. Prelates loyal to the secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who in many cases were appointed by him or come from his native region of Piedmont, are at furious odds with papal diplomats who resented the appointment of a secretary of state with no knowledge of their business. Other feuds abound too. The leaking of documents by the pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, though apparently motivated by genuine dismay at decisions taken in the Vatican, was entwined with this venomous plotting and squabbling.

Following the will of God
The findings of an investigative panel of three cardinals will cast a long shadow over the conclave. Last month an Italian newspaper wrote of a ring of gay prelates, some being blackmailed by outsiders. In the first general congregation, three cardinals—reportedly all Europeans—demanded (in vain) access to the findings. If the report will indeed be kept secret until it is handed to the new pope, it is unclear who made that decision. Secrecy fosters suspicions that the contents are dreadful.

The episode may also strengthen the resolve of the mainly English- and German-speaking cardinals who want a vigorous pope to clean up the Curia. This was last reformed under Paul VI, who reigned from 1963 to 1978. Cardinal George Pell, the burly archbishop of Sydney, said he wanted “a strategist, a decision-maker, a planner, somebody who has got strong pastoral capacities already demonstrated so that he can take a grip of the situation.”

For I have sinned

Among those watching the decision making in Rome with apprehension, fear and optimism is the Catholic priesthood. In many countries, their declining and ageing ranks are beset by the revelation of past scandals—both at the parish and at the top. This week Scotland’s most senior cleric, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, admitted that his sexual conduct at times “has fallen below the standards” expected of him. A radio interview by his former counterpart in England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, marked by a nervous laugh and opaque language, compounded the ire.

Victims of sexual abuse believe the reckoning has barely begun. They want not just proper investigation, but apologies and punishments—and in some cases cash. For them, Benedict exemplified the secretive, cautious response that aggravated the misconduct. It will be hard for any new pope to meet their expectations.

Along with frustrations of church politics and shame about misconduct, attendance at mass is falling. In America it has declined by over a third since 1960. In Britain data from the 2011 census show a similar trend, with numbers of Christians down 12 percentage points since 2001. Average Sunday attendance has fallen for the past 20 years. In mostly Catholic Italy only 39% attend on a monthly basis.

But parish life goes on. Timothy Radcliffe, the former head of the Dominican order, says priests are mostly happy, albeit overstretched. After a peak of 110 vocations in England and Wales in 1996, the figure dropped to a mere 19 in 2006. But this year 38 ordinations are expected. In a reversal of the old days of Western missionaries, many were born overseas. Father Stephen Wang, of Allen Hall seminary in London, counts men from Africa, India and Australia in this year’s cohort of 54.

Movements such as “Youth 2000” and World Youth Day encourage vocations through what has been called “evangelical Catholicism”, says Father Wang, in which the faith is “more confident” about presenting itself. Traditionalist groups such as the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter or the Institute of Christ the King are attracting younger members. The provost of the Brompton Oratory, a traditionalist church in central London, is Father Julian Large, a 43-year-old former journalist who draws a youthful following.

The brighter shore

In some respects the woes of the church in the West seem far away from the parts of the world where it is thriving. In a leafy sanctuary from the heat and frenzy of Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire’s biggest city, Father Aurel da Silva sits under a tree on the tidy front lawn of a monastery. On the wall behind him hangs an oversize portrait of Michel Nielly, who a half-century ago established it as a beachhead for the Dominican order. Today it houses some 30 seminarians from across the region and its small wooden chapel attracts Abidjan’s elites for Sunday mass.

Near the guardhouse, employees raise money for local charities by selling mushrooms that grow in the monastery’s garden. Ceramic water filters distributed to the poor are also displayed prominently. A pink leaflet posted on a bulletin board advertises job-training programmes for unemployed youth. When violence engulfed Côte d’Ivoire after its disputed 2010 presidential election, the towering St Paul’s cathedral in the heart of Abidjan sheltered nearly 2,000 people.

The rapidly growing African Catholic church, says Father da Silva, has great ambitions as a social force. But autonomy must be the watchword. The doctrinal debates and papal intrigue in Rome hardly concern him. “I haven’t spent time in Rome, but I don’t need to,” he says. “What I do here is more important.”

Some of his seminarians have softer attitudes to the Vatican, but they insist that the church’s social message is secondary: spirituality comes first. The African church is no hotbed of liberalism. Its leading contender for the papacy, the Ghanaian cardinal Peter Turkson, is widely regarded as a conservative in the mold of Benedict.

But one of Father da Silva’s older colleagues stakes out a more radical position. The church must evolve, he says. His priorities are: the end of clerical celibacy, women’s ordination, and, above all, greater tolerance for dissent: “You have to accept other people’s way of thinking.”

Those views chime across continents and oceans. In the beautiful, desolate west of Ireland is the village of Moygownagh, the home parish of Father Brendan Hoban. He is a co-founder of the Association of Catholic Priests, which aspires to represent the 2m Irish people who attend mass at least once a month. It is campaigning for an end to celibacy, “inclusive ministry” (code for women priests) and a rethinking of sexual teaching, especially on contraception.

Nearly a quarter of Ireland’s 4,500 priests (and probably a higher share of its able-bodied, energetic ones) has joined. It is in touch with similar bodies in Austria, where a grass-roots initiative among priests incurred a papal rebuke last year, as well as France, the Czech Republic, Australia and the United States.

The Irish association has special credibility. It speaks for a country where the hierarchy is reeling from horrific revelations about abuse in church-run institutions and clerical cover-ups, but where the population, despite the onrush of secularism, remains relatively pious by the standards of the rich world.

The village exemplifies both the crisis and strength of Irish Catholicism. Half of its residents attend weekly mass and most of the remainder look to the church for rites of passage, from first communion to anniversary masses for the dead. Despite the recession, generous donations are paying for church refurbishment.

Moygownagh belongs to a small diocese with 32 priests serving 22 parishes; that number sounds high, and it reflects a flood of vocations in the 1960s and 1970s. But only seven priests are under 55. Father Hoban is nearly 65. When he retires, he expects that the village will be left without a priest of its own for the first time in centuries. In his parents’ time, he recalls, a local farming family would be proud if a son joined the priesthood. Now, he says, even a “faithful Catholic family might panic” if a son announced a similar vocation. “They would feel he was embarking on a life of stress, isolation and low social prestige.”

Almost all the church’s recent woes can be ascribed, in Father Hoban’s view, to the top-down decision-making which has marked the past two papacies. Like many Catholic liberals, he feels that the trouble started when the church hierarchy hijacked the devolutionary reforms of the second Vatican council and blocked change or implemented it badly.

The result, viewed from an Irish village, is that “Rome doesn’t listen to the national bishops; the bishops don’t tell Rome the truth because Rome doesn’t want to hear it; the bishops don’t listen to the priests, the priests haven’t listened enough to the people.” With lay involvement, the child-abuse cover-ups would not have happened. He does not want the church to be “literally democratic”, but nor should it “preserve structures inherited from the Roman empire.”

What do priests of his school expect from the conclave? “In some ways we don’t hope for that much, because all the cardinals have been appointed under the present order. But we hope that some can see the dysfunctionality of the Vatican in its present form…the cardinals need to bite the bullet and appoint somebody who can challenge the Curia.”

Complete Article HERE!

March 6, 2013

College of Cardinals imposes media blackout

These old men will never get that their pathological need for secrecy is one of the main reasons their church is in crisis. When all else fails, redouble the effort to keep the lid on.

By Jason Horowitz

The College of Cardinals that will elect the next pope cut off formal communications with the news media on Wednesday after their private deliberations emerged in the Italian press, raising the specter of a leaking scandal that cast a pall over the last year in office of Pope Benedict XVI.

“Concern was expressed in the General Congregation about leaks of confidential proceedings reported in Italian newspapers,” said Sister Mary Ann Walsh, director of media relations for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who has organized news conferences with American cardinals in recent days. “As a precaution, the cardinals have agreed not to do interviews.”

The decision, communicated only an hour before a scheduled news conference with American cardinals on Wednesday afternoon, marked a quick end to a brief period of openness on the part of the Americans, who had said they hoped to keep reporters as informed as possible without breaking vows of secrecy.

The Vatican declined to specify who in the college expressed opposition to the news briefings, saying only that as the cardinals prepare for the conclave that will elect the next pontiff, “they realize the importance of keeping things among themselves,” said the Rev. Tom Rosica, a Vatican spokesman.

A report Wednesday by Italy’s most authoritative Vatican reporter, La Stampa’s Andrea Tornielli, disclosed details of the cardinals’ private deliberations, including the revelation that they had called for reforms of the Roman Curia, the bureaucracy that governs the Catholic Church, and had asked for more information about the leaking of papal correspondence, a scandal known as VatiLeaks that engulfed the Vatican last year. Tornielli also reported that embattled Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles had spoken, that cardinals called for better communications between the pope and the heads of the various church departments, and that some cardinals wanted to extend the preliminary talks into next week.

According to Vatican officials and experts, the media blackout might be more than a crackdown in reaction to the leak. It could also have a political dimension. One Vatican official speaking on background said that Italian cardinals, some of whom stand to benefit most from a quick conclave, had expressed misgivings about the American news conferences, during which U.S. prelates articulated what they were looking for in a pope. They often described criteria that did not match the characteristics of cardinals in the curia. The American cardinals also repeatedly said they wanted more time to listen to their colleagues and get to know one another, a position that Vatican experts said diminished the chances and power of better-known Roman officials, many of them Italian, who would gain from a speedier process.

In conclaves, as in comedy, timing is everything. And it has itself been a point of contention.

Contrary to the statements of some of the American cardinals in the news conferences, the Vatican has said that the selection of the conclave’s start date could occur without all the voting members of the college in attendance. In light of his retirement, Benedict had amended the Apostolic Constitution to empower the College of Cardinals to select the start date, as long as everyone was present.

In the last few days, the Vatican briefing theater has amounted to a semantics seminar on the meaning of “attend.” The Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican’s chief spokesman, has argued that if an absent but expected voting cardinal were going to attend, it was tantamount to his already being in attendance, and so the college could consider itself in plenary session.

American cardinals disagreed that they could tackle the start of the conclave without every seat filled.

“If the electors aren’t all there, why bother?” Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Texas said in one of the news conferences at the North American Pontifical College on a hill overlooking the Vatican. “It takes as long as it takes.”

Of the 115 cardinal electors, only two remained absent Wednesday: Jean-Baptiste Pham of Vietnam and Kazimierz Nycz of Poland. The Vatican said they were expected Thursday.

“The date of the conclave was not decided,” Lombardi said Wednesday. “Rather than try to interpret the so-called delay,” added Rosica, “we should view this in terms of a process of discernment and reflection. All the electors will be here, and they can enter a full discussion about this.”

Vatican experts instead interpreted the delay as they did the tension over talking to the media — as another political power struggle between officials in the Roman Curia and outsiders.

A subsequent statement by Walsh seemed to cast the American cardinals’ lot with the outsiders, a development that could help the papal candidates among them shed their superpower stigma. “The U.S. cardinals are committed to transparency and have been pleased to share a process-related overview of their work with members of the media and with the public,” she said, not mentioning who was not pleased.

“Some people in the curia wanted an early election because it would benefit the front-runners, and it would benefit the curial cardinals who already know everybody in the College of Cardinals,” said the Rev. Tom Reese, a political scientist and author of the book, “Inside the Vatican.”

“Who does it hurt?” he asked. “The unknown candidate who would make a great pope, the younger cardinals; they are going to be dependent on the curial officials.”

Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the archbishop of Boston, is one such person who could benefit from a longer process. Though a long shot, he has remained on many short lists to become the next pope. But in the news conferences, he rejected the idea that there was a political dimension to slower deliberations.

“I don’t think that so much is a factor as many cardinals are concerned that if there is not enough time spent in the general congregations, that once we get into the conclave, it could drag on,” he said at a news conference Tuesday. He said the goal was “to have enough discussions previous that when people go to the conclave, they already have sort of a very clear idea of who they are going to vote for at that point. If you cut short the discussion beforehand, the conclave could go on and on.”

The Vatican said Wednesday there was no connection between extended preliminary meetings and a short conclave. “We should resist the link,” Rosica said.

News that the Americans had canceled their news conferences, which had become a daily ritual here, streamed into the smartphones of reporters during the daily Vatican briefing. It was the first thing reporters asked Lombardi about when he opened the floor to questions, reflecting the inconvenient story lines that can emerge for the Vatican in what is essentially a newsless environment.

It is a vacuum that critics of the church have rushed to fill. Earlier Wednesday, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), an organization that supports victims of sex abuse by clerics, held a well-attended news conference in which it released a list of a “dirty dozen” cardinals it considers unacceptable leaders of the church based on their past handling of the child sex-abuse crisis. Among them were cardinals often mentioned as prime candidates for the pontificate, including cardinals Timothy Dolan of New York, O’Malley of Boston, Leonardo Sandri of Argentina, Peter Turkson of Ghana, Angelo Scola of Italy and Marc Ouellet of Canada.

The College of Cardinals, which will choose the next pope, expressed concern about leaks of deliberations.

“It really isn’t up to SNAP to decide who should or should not participate in the conclave,” said Rosica.

One Vatican insider close to the church hierarchy questioned the wisdom of a media blackout, suggesting that the church was only creating a headache for itself.

(The front page of Wednesday’s Il Giornale, an Italian daily, carried a paparazzi-style photo of Benedict, who said before retiring and assuming the title of “pope emeritus” that he would be “hidden from the world,” taking a stroll in a white cassock, coat and ball cap.)

Instead, the Vatican has sought to satiate the army of accredited journalists flowing into Rome with brief glimpses behind the conclave curtain. On Monday, the Vatican showed a video of cardinals sitting, standing and reading in the theater where the congregations are held. On Tuesday, the feature presentation was a silent film with a camera panning over the three urns that will contain ballots during the election.

The video, which had the disembodied hands of a home shopping network presentation and the glacial pace of a Michelangelo Antonioni film, was accompanied by a Vatican press release explaining the significance and artistry of the containers. (“These are treated with a light patina which underlines the various chromatics of the bronze, the irregularities on the surface and the contrast between opaqueness and brightness.”)

On Wednesday, two flat screen televisions above the Vatican spokesmen showed blue-gloved workers carrying boards to protect the floor into the frescoed Sistine Chapel, unscrewing screws and unpacking from wooden crates the ovens that will burn the ballots.

The Vatican said, officially, that 18 cardinals spoke on Wednesday on topics ranging from their expectations, hopes and desired characteristics for the next pope to the church’s new evangelization efforts and the relations between the church government and bishops around the world. Speakers were asked to keep their remarks to about five minutes. Lombardi made a point to mention that the cardinals had wished a member of the college happy birthday.

Complete Article HERE!

March 6, 2013

Strong policies on abusive priests vital, O’Malley says

Ya gotta love this guy!

By Lisa Wangsness

Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley said Tuesday that the next pope must make sure the Roman Catholic Church adopts measures to deal with bishops whose “malfeasance” allowed abusive priests to remain in ministry.

O’Malley said in an interview that the successor to Pope Benedict XVI will need to continue Benedict’s campaign to get bishops across the world to adopt policies for dealing with accused abusers. That should include procedures for disciplining bishops who protect abusive priests, said O’Malley, among dozens of cardinals gathered at the Vatican.

The US bishops adopted a zero-tolerance policy on clergy sexual abuse a decade ago, requiring removal from ministry of any priest credibly accused of abusing a minor, but some church leaders have not followed it. The bishop of Kansas City was convicted last fall of failing to report child abuse by a priest, but the church has not sanctioned him.

“There needs to be a path” for disciplining bishops, O’Malley said. “Right now, it’s not terribly clear, but it’s something the next pope will have to deal with.”

Without a protocol in place, he said, it falls to the Vatican to decide what to do with each errant bishop on a case-by-case basis. “My point is always that if you don’t have policies, you’ll be improvising, and when you improvise, you make a lot of mistakes,” he said.

‘There needs to be a path’ for disciplining bishops. ‘Right now, it’s not terribly clear.’

The Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston discussed some of the issues at stake in the papal election in a brief interview Tuesday in a corridor of the Pontifical North American College in Rome, a peaceful hilltop seminary about 10 minutes by foot from the Vatican.

O’Malley is among the US cardinals staying there before the conclave. Once voting begins, the cardinals will move to lodgings within the Vatican and remain isolated from the world until they elect a pontiff.

The conclave is held in the Sistine Chapel, which closed at 1 p.m. Tuesday so that work crews could begin installing a raised floor, under which they will put antibugging devices, and the stoves in which the ballots will be burned.

O’Malley, who during the interview wore a gray cardigan over his hooded brown habit and blue socks peeking through his sandals, spent the morning in one of a series of meetings the cardinals are holding before the conclave, called general congregations, in which they discuss issues facing the church.

Being part of the papal process is “surrealistic,” he said, but also moving.

“Growing up a Catholic and knowing a little bit about these traditions and the way the Holy Father is selected in the church — it’s a far cry from seeing it up close and being part of it,” he said.

O’Malley also seemed to ache for a little down time. He had just finished a long press conference and had more reporters to speak with before a dinner with cardinals. He said he had not been able to spend much time going out to dinner or otherwise enjoying the city. “If I didn’t have all these interviews,” he said with a laugh, “I could be in a bookstore right now.”

Yet the shy O’Malley seemed at ease at the press conference. He said that after almost 30 years of being a bishop, he had grown accustomed to being the face of the church and interacting with the press. “It’s not always easy, but it’s important; it’s the way we can communicate with the largest number of people,” he said.

He has been highly sought after by the Spanish-speaking press because of his fluency in the language and his work with the Hispanic community in the United States and with the church in Latin America.

Asked in the Globe interview what he was looking for in a potential candidate, O’Malley said the next pope must “relate well to the universal church.” The Catholic Church is growing quickly in Africa, and more than 40 percent of the world’s Catholics live in Latin America.

He said Benedict’s successor also needs the spiritual and intellectual capacity to deal with the church’s many challenges. Governance of the Vatican, he added, is also an issue.

“We want the Holy Father to have a good team of people around him in a way that will support his ministry and allow him to focus on his teaching office, which we see as so important,” he said.

O’Malley has been deflecting a lot of questions lately about the possibility he could be a contender for pope. Most Vatican analysts consider the notion of an American pope a long shot, but some say that O’Malley’s chances could improve if there is no consensus after a few days of voting.

One reporter at the news conference said she had a question from her daughter: Would O’Malley continue to wear his “cappuccino robe” if elected pope? O’Malley, a Capuchin friar whose order’s name derives from the brown hooded habits its members wear, blushed and chuckled with his audience.

“I have worn this uniform for over 40 years, and I presume I will wear it until I die, because I don’t expect to be elected pope,” he said. He stammered slightly. “So — I don’t expect to have a change of wardrobe.”

The press conference focused on the general congregation meetings, a tricky subject, because the cardinals take oaths promising not to reveal the content of the discussions to outsiders.

As described by cardinals and Vatican representatives, there is little back and forth in these sessions. Cardinals sign up to speak and essentially make speeches without debate.

A half-hour coffee break gives the cardinals time to chat informally. Cardinals who are over 80 years old — the cutoff for being eligible to vote in the conclave — are invited to join the general congregations.

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, the archbishop of Galveston-Houston, who presided alongside O’Malley at the press conference, said the congregations were “pretty serene — it’s not campaign-like.”

The College of Cardinals has not yet set a date for the conclave, nor have cardinals decided when they will set a date. All electors must be present for the date to be set, and a Vatican representative said 5 of the 115 electors were not yet in Rome. Church law requires the conclave to begin no more than 20 days after a papal vacancy.

O’Malley said the cardinals want to be sure they allow themselves enough time to weigh issues and contenders before the conclave to make sure the voting itself does not “drag on.” All the conclaves in the last century have ended within five days; in earlier centuries, some voting sessions lasted for months or even years.

O’Malley and DiNardo said cardinals who, like themselves, were in charge of dioceses, hoped to return home by March 24 for Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week. But they said the prelates do not want to rush. “This is the most important decision that some of us will ever make, and we need to give it the time that’s necessary,” O’Malley said.

He told the National Catholic Reporter Sunday that he hoped the cardinals would meet twice a day every day this week to move the process along. But Tuesday the cardinals decided against meeting twice that day, and they plan on meeting only during the morning Wednesday. O’Malley smiled a little tightly when asked about that. “This is Rome,” he said.

Complete Article HERE!

March 6, 2013

A Papal Surrender?

I thought this was a particularly insightful article. A bit dated, but still.

By Paolo Flores d’Arcais

“There’s no place for a Pope Emeritus,” John Paul II (born Karol Józef Wojtyła) declared dryly as recently as 1994. Yet beginning at 8 PM today, we have an Emeritus Pope, with consequences for the Catholic Church that are impossible to overstate. The decision announced two and a half weeks ago by Joseph Ratzinger—from now on simply ex-Benedict XVI—took a kind of courage that many cardinals and men of the curia find rash; some see it rather as a sign of weakness bordering on cowardice.

Indeed, Ratzinger’s decision has the momentous effect of desacralizing the Papacy, reducing it, in the minds of the faithful, to the office of a great religious leader and nothing more. This is a paradoxical outcome for a Pope who can claim (from his point of view) a notable record of success, having brought to completion the process begun by Wojtyła of reestablishing traditional Church doctrine and the conservative hierarchy that had been challenged after the Vatican II Council.

The Pope is often described as the world’s last absolute sovereign, but he is more than that. The Pope is—or was—an absolute sovereign who also had, in the eyes of his believers, a unique aura as the Vicar of Christ on Earth, representing the Holy Spirit in the Holy Trinity—a Deputy God, in other words. But an ex-Deputy God is meaningless. The Bishop of Rome will now become merely the leader of a church, like the Archbishop of Canterbury, even if he has vastly more members in his flock than his English counterpart.

And here is a second paradox. By stepping down, Ratzinger has given credence to the more “secularist” view of the modern Church put forward by his longtime antagonist Hans Küng and by the most progressive members of the Vatican II Council, whose influence Ratzinger had succeeded in marginalizing. In short, the Catholic Church now has to contemplate the coexistence of an Emeritus Pope and a Pope-Pope. The new Pope will certainly exercise the full powers of the Papacy (on the assumption that the ex-Pope will truly withdraw to a life of seclusion and prayer), but he will no longer have a divine aura.

Why then did Benedict XVI make such an extreme decision? Why did he want to discard the seemingly inviolable tradition of leaving the length of Papal tenure up to God, even when the Pope reaches a point of great frailty, with the certainty that the Holy Spirit would transcend the human inadequacy of the pastor? The long decline of Wojtyła was a very recent and decisive example of the Church’s adherence to that exceptional principle.

In contrast, by emphasizing his own physical decline, Ratzinger has introduced an element of rational human calculation into the question of what is “good for the Church”: an approach that in fact suggests a more limited view of the Holy Spirit’s gifts, which are presumed to guarantee papal infallibility at all times. It is a further paradox that the Pope’s recourse to such worldly realism has been blamed on a cowardly desire to evade responsibility precisely for the misdeeds of the most worldly members of the Church hierarchy. (We might add that if Ratzinger’s decision is a demonstration of humility, then we must consider Wotjyla’s decision to remain in power during his long illness arrogant.)

Yet Benedict XVI has explained that he prefers to retire because, as he put it,

in order to govern the bark of St. Peter and proclaim the gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.

Ratzinger emphasized “strength of mind” because that is the key to his reasoning; he added in his statement that he is “well aware of the gravity of this decision.”

In what sense can Benedict XVI regard himself as being unable to “adequately fulfill” his ministry? After all, under his leadership, the Church hierarchy has become more unified than ever; there are no longer major doctrinal rifts between “progressives” and “conservatives.” Never have the bishops shown such doctrinal homogeneity; the last voice that was out of tune with the choir was that of the late Cardinal Martini, who described the Church, in an interview published posthumously last year, as “two hundred years out of date.”

Beyond the Church as well, the theologian-Pope can boast of considerable achievements. Jürgen Habermas, Europe’s leading secular philosopher, has praised his thought; not to mention Julia Kristeva and other fashionable intellectuals in ultra-secular Paris. Indeed, Ratzinger’s counter-enlightenment critique has appealed to a surprisingly long list of secular admirers: for example, his suggestion to non-believers to lead their lives veluti si Deus daretur, as if God existed, because without God, and the ethical principles connected to God, Western society is heading toward collapse.

There is one area of his pontificate, however, in which Benedict XVI can claim “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa”: the administration of the Church in the stricter sense of the Roman curia itself. The feud among cardinals that turned the inner sanctum of the Vatican into a vipers’ nest, the war between factions that has unfolded beneath the frescoes of Michelangelo and Raphael, with shining daggers and poison, in the fatal form of secret dossiers and blackmail.

This battle, the so-called Vatileaks controversy, has been provoked by two problems in particular: the twin scandals of priest pedophiles and the Vatican bank (IOR), which is under investigation for money laundering and mismanagement. Sex and money, the seductions of Mammon to which prelates robed in purple, the symbol of their Christian devotion “till martyrdom,” should be perfectly immune.

Ratzinger chose to deal with these problems in the most circumspect and gradual manner. His efforts to uncover the iniquity of priests, and even that of the rogue finance of the Vatican bank, met with enormous resistance, setting in motion a Catherine’s Wheel of machinations. The pedophile crisis (and the related scandal over the powerful Legion of Christ and its leader, the notorious Marcial Maciel Degollado) was the one area in which Ratzinger had had a major disagreement with Wojtyła. Then-Cardinal Ratzinger insisted that the Polish Pope take a firm and clear stand, but was over-ruled by more powerful members of the Curia at a point when John Paul II, by then in the final years of his illness, was largely incapable of governing—a specter that surely played into Benedict’s XVI own decision to retire.

Vatileaks was only the tip of the iceberg, as even lay observers of the Church are now aware. The secret internal investigation of the Vatican leaks submitted in December by Cardinals Julian Herranz, Josef Tomko, and Salvatore De Giorgi must have shaken the Pope. As La Repubblica has now reported, the investigation apparently describes a hugely influential “homosexual underground” within the Curia, while documenting at length the ferocious struggle among cardinals and factions. Even worse, Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State and the Pope’s closest advisor going back to the time when Ratzinger was in charge of the Doctrine of the Faith, seems to be up to his neck in the allegations.

Benedict XVI was unable to take sides in this internal struggle, because Bertone’s rivals themselves are not shining with sanctity. (Bertone’s predecessor and archenemy, Cardinal Sodano, was one of the long-time protectors of Degollado, the disgraced former Legion of Christ leader.) Confronted with such an overflowing sewer of Church filth, Benedict XVI instead decided to surrender, pleading his own incapacity and choosing the only alternative still open to him: prayer.

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