HUME? A CZECH? OR AN UNDRY MARTINI?
Andrew Brown on who the next Pope might be, and the crisis of celibacy that he will face
IT IS a mortal sin to wish for the death of a Pope, something which must have made it easier for the Devil to harvest liberal Catholic souls over the last 20 years. Pope John Paul II is neither a liberal nor a democrat and has fought throughout his reign against almost everything that the middle classes in liberal democracies believe, and especially against their inter- pretation of feminism. His energy has been astounding. He survived being shot with undiminished energy. His tireless travels around the world would bring men half his age to their knees — though that may be the position in which he finds strength. This energy and will-power have battered observers into sup- posing that nothing can stop him. Since he is determined to see in the millennium, most Vatican-watchers are confident that he will suc- ceed.
The question is: who could succeed him when he does? This, oddly enough, is much easier to answer than 'who will succeed him?'. The only honest answer to the sec- ond question is that no one knows, not even the 120 cardinals who will choose his successor from amongst their own number. There was a flurry of excitement earlier this spring when Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the secretary of state or foreign minister, mentioned the name of the dissident Swiss
theologian Hans Kiing in a public lecture. He didn't say anything very complimentary about him, still less did he propose a recon- ciliation between the theologian and the Church, but even to mention the name was construed as an act of significant daring in the stiflingly conformist atmosphere of the Vatican. But it is not enough to install Sodana as a favourite.
Since John Paul II was only 58 when elected, it is almost certain that his succes- sor will be much older. No one wants another 20-year pontificate. This rules out one of the most interesting Conservative candidates, Cardinal Christoph Schoen- born of Vienna, who is only 53. If it were not for his age, he might have made one of the most interesting successors, since he has much in common with the present Pope, but comes from a Church as unlike Poland's as possible. Schoenborn himself is an iron conservative in doctrinal matters. When asked about his policy on the remar- riage of divorcees, he replied that marriage was like riding a motorbike: for divorcees to remarry was as impossible as for a rider paralysed in a smash to mount his bike again. But he is also a gentleman: a week later, he apologised to a remarried woman who had been in the audience when he said that. In Austria he has had to deal with one of the most public outbreaks of discontent anywhere in the Catholic Church, and a scandal over a predecessor as Cardinal who had a fondness for novice monks. More than half a million Catholics, a third of the country's church-going population, signed a petition calling for women priests as well as married clergy and greater democracy in the Church. That is extraordinary in a country historically as loyally Catholic as Ireland.
These are the three causes against which Pope John Paul II has set his face most firmly and they are the three questions which his successor will have to deal with most urgently. Women priests are almost certainly impossible. This Pope has done everything in his power to ensure they will remain so for ever; he would have liked to proclaim his opin- ion on the matter infallible. But even if his successor were to want to reverse this decision it is difficult to see how he could do so without causing a schism. It is a question which divides the Catholic Church even more than it divides Protestants.
Married priests are another matter; in fact their introduc- tion is probably the most press- ing task facing the next Pope. A married parish clergy would not solve all the Church's problems. Married men cost a lot of money, they get divorced, and they can- not be moved around as easily as the celi- bates. In the long run, a married parish clergy would profoundly change the charac- ter of the Catholic Church, tending to blur the distinction between clergy and laity. But that is a price worth paying: the crisis over celibacy is deep, dreadful and world- wide. Almost the first act of John Paul II was to stop all applications to leave the priesthood from men who wanted to get married: about 100,000 had gone in the 30 years following the second Vatican Coun- cil. Solid research conducted by Richard Sipe, a psychiatrist who was for 20 years a monk before leaving to get married, sug- gests that about half the notionally celibate priesthood is involved in sexual relation- ships at any one time. In the parts of the world where the rule of celibacy is out- wardly observed, vocations are collapsing. In Africa, and to a lesser extent Latin America, the rule is just ignored, with some fairly dreadful consequences. A devout Catholic friend travelling in Africa report- ed to me a bishop who kept a harem con- stantly replenished with virgins to minimise the risk of Aids.
Celibacy among the parish clergy is only a disciplinary norm: sacrificing it would change no profound doctrine. The moral price of maintaining this discipline is paid in double standards, hypocrisy and human suffering. Rigid conservatives might argue that suffering is the true currency of the Church, which it should not stint. But, like bad money, hypocrisy and double standards drive out the good.
This is one reason why the traditional speculation naming Cardinal Hume for the job should be taken seriously for a while. He has done an extraordinarily skilful job in introducing married priests in this coun- try while minimising the dissent and grum- bles from the clergy still condemned to celibacy, many of whom are deeply suspi- cious of the motives of the married Angli- cans who came over to escape from women priests. It would appeal to his romantic his- torical imagination if the Church of Eng- land were to collapse, but in the process hand back to the Church of Rome a solu- tion to the problems of priestly celibacy.
Cardinal Hume's real qualification for the role, though, may lie in his attitude to church democracy. He's agin it, but in the most charming way. He practises autocracy with consent and it works. He is almost the only candidate from the affluent West to preside over a Church that is not in a state of cold civil war. The Austrian petition for church democracy (and against the Pope) was also offered round the German Church, where one and a half million signed it, despite the active opposition of the bishops to the movement. But when it came to this country it fizzled out without trace. This is not because there is no sup- port for these policies here, but because the Cardinal has somehow managed to ensure that his liberal opposition is entirely loyal — partly because almost all are employed by his Church, and partly because his mixture of exquisite manners, headmasterly autocracy and shining per- sonal holiness disarms all but the most determined critics.
All this has been accomplished without any interference from Rome. So to some observers he seems to be a candidate for decentralisation, if not for democracy. Since the electorate is composed of cardi- nals who would, many of them, benefit from a decentralised regime in which they could run their dioceses without the con- stant threat of delation to Rome by their opponents, this is a point in his favour. In North America, the split between conserva- tives and liberals is so absolute that Cardi- nal Mahony of Los Angeles, who is accounted a liberal, has formally reported to the Vatican authorities the terrifying fig- ure of Mother Angelica, a nun who runs the largest religious cable TV network in the world from a position somewhere to the right of Torquemada and who has been attacking his theology on air. No one from that continent would be possible since there are no neutrals: the same considera- tions apply with greater force in Latin America, where radicals tend to be shot rather than merely execrated.
There is a further difficulty with Latin American candidates, and this is that they come from a continent where the Reforma- tion is being re-enacted. Pentecostal Protestantism is spreading like wildfire, as it is in eastern Europe, 400 years after the same thing happened in our part of Europe. Because Pentecostals make their own clergy and are radically decentralised, they respond to a market economy in reli- gion much better than the command struc- ture of an established church can do. Though they seem extremely patriarchal, they offer women better treatment and, often, more responsibility than can the Catholic Church, which is writhing in knots around feminism like a worm impaled on a hook.
There are other European candidates besides Cardinal Hume. For Cardinal Miroslav Vlk of Prague, a conclave repre- sents his last chance of adding some vowels to his name. But he would be another cen- tral European, too much like the present Pope. Cardinal Martini, a Jesuit from Milan, is probably the strongest contender. He is wise, holy, brilliant, and carries all the hopes of the liberals, but the present Pope has changed the rules for election so that a candidate no longer needs a two thirds majority: after 12 ballots, a simple majority will do; and some observers think that this might give extremist candidates a chance. But I doubt things are that desperate.
What the next Pope needs to be is a complicated conservative who can recog- nise the inevitability of change. I'm afraid our cardinal fits the bill, even though he is nearly too old at 75, and even though it would wreck his plans for a quiet funeral. There is a scurrilous story which I entirely believe, which has him emerging from a gruelling meeting with Dr Carey. 'When I die,' Cardinal Hume said, 'I don't want that man coming to my funeral. Hold it while he's out of the country or something.' The stratagem won't work if he's Pope.
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