As Catholic-in-Chief, Pope Benedict XVI deserved to be fired.
Under his administration, the Roman Catholic Church has become increasingly irrelevant to a growing number of the world?s 1.2 billion (nominally) faithful.
It has regressed into a monk?s cellar of orthodoxy, bluntly conservative and reactionary.
It has apologized for the legions of children sexually abused by priests and brothers, paying out multi-millions, yet never brought those predators to a reckoning.
It has reversed every hint of theological liberalism, essentially erasing Vatican II from history, in a fierce embrace of the rigidly doctrinaire.
It has not always played nice with Anglicans (luring their disenchanted clergy), Jews (Benedict lifted the excommunication of a bishop who openly denied the Holocaust) and Muslims (the pope imprudently quoted, during a university lecture, a 14th century Byzantine emperor?s comment that Islam had been spread by the sword and was thus a violent religion; debatable but not helpful either.)
It has continued to alienate women and, as of 2005, renewed its ban on most homosexuals from the priesthood.
All of that was this Pope?s doing, step-by-backwards-step dragging the Church to smallness and spitefulness as apostle for doctrinal purity. ?God?s Rottweiler? during a quarter-century of bossing everybody about theologically from his perch as leader of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith ? doctrinal enforcer, cerebral academic swinging a heavy sledge ? before matriculating to the Apostolic Palace as successor to John Paul II, voted oldest pontiff in 275 years.
If Benedict had been the CEO of a transnational conglomerate, he would not have survived these last eight years on this record. On his watch, the Church has been in danger of going the way of Bethlehem Steel, the bankruptcy moral rather than financial. (Oh yes, the Vatican is rolling in the dough, as always, barely acknowledging serial corruption scandals.)
Judged by an electorate ? as if ? Benedict would never have had the luxury of pulling the plug on himself, as shocking as Monday?s announcement, in Latin, was: that the Bishop of Rome is retiring from office Feb. 28, at precisely 8 p.m., which is Benedict all over, actually, the exactitude of it. There has never been anything spontaneous or charismatic about the former Joseph Ratzinger, only stiff-necked and unyielding.
But, heavens, Benedict XVI ? as he became ? has gone and done the most unconventional thing imaginable, or unimaginable: He?s put his own papacy out to pasture, the first to do that willingly in eight centuries. The last one to go by his own wishes (as opposed to kicking and screaming, literally) was Celestine V in 1294. A lifelong hermit, the job wore him out in just five months. His bolting got Celestine dumped into the antechamber of hell by Dante in The Divine Comedy. (It will come as scant surprise that no pope since has taken the name Celestine.)
And for the first time since the 15th century schism, there will be two popes at one time, come the conclave at the end of next month. Two at least in the sense that Benedict segues to pope passim, even if reverting to his Cardinal title, but he will remain until his dying breath the ghost of a pope in the garden, likely spooning out what?s left of his life at a monastery within the Vatican grounds ? devoting himself to prayer and reflection.
This is astonishing. Popes don?t just go away. They die with the red velvet slippers on.
Benedict ? Joseph ? will read books and possibly write them. He is an intellectual, arguably the sharpest mind on the papal throne in hundreds of years. But so terribly unsuited to this gig and painful to watch, even before physical infirmities began to take such an obvious toll.
The progressive-minded, the reformers, will take a long, long time forgiving Benedict for returning the Church to the 19th century, though this is exactly what made him beloved to Catholic traditionalists. And became Benedict promoted so many like-minded brethren to the cardinal ranks ? who will be voting for the next pope ? it?s highly inconceivable that any successor will undo what?s been done, and what was actually launched by JP2, who was just as orthodox as Benedict but wore it better, simply by dint of a personality that became a cult, in a nice way.
But the wheels really started to fall off under Benedict, his ministry evincing a lack of empathy at its core, a disregard for the challenges of Catholics around the world, including those who would quite like to stay under the Church?s umbrella, if only it would open its heart a little more.
Most of us ? certainly in North America and Europe ? pay little attention to the Vatican, its primary resident and the canons of Catholicism. Divorce is as rampant in Italy as it is the U.S. Abortion is legal in most Western countries, even papist Ireland (but only when the mother?s life is at risk).
Clearly, we are at best cafeteria-tray practitioners, selecting only those tenets deemed digestible. And I do understand, truly, that the Church can?t ever cave to a sweeping liberalism. There are absolutes it is unable to sacrifice ? abortion, an all-male clergy ? because then it wouldn?t be the Catholic Church; it would be nothing, it would lose its soul. It must astutely judge ? as the Second Vatican Council did ? how much water to add to its wine.
I understand that the Catholic Church can?t and shouldn?t make faith easy.
But this pope, retrogressively, made it too hard.
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