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Rationally Speaking: May 2005
This column can be posted for free on any appropriate web site and reprinted
in hard copy by permission. If you are interested in receiving the html
code or the text, please send an email.
Habemus Papa!
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Or, rather, they (the roughly one billion Catholics of this planet) now
have a new Pope, former German cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now known as
Benedict XVI. As a former Catholic (sort of) and an Italian who grew up
not far from the Vatican, I followed the American media frenzy over the
death of John Paul II with much interest, although the whole coverage
by CNN and company struck me as rather odd. It is true that Catholics
still make up a large fraction of Americans (and they vote based on
some – but apparently not others – of their beliefs, as John Kerry
discovered when it turned out that abortion is a moral issue, but war
somehow isn't). Still, only 20% of American Catholics actually claim to
closely follow the dictates of any Pope, and the US media usually pays
little or no attention to what the self-described infallible sage from
Rome says or does. No, the media frenzy was really just another example
of celebrity worship, no different from the coverage of Michael
Jackson's trial or the ever-fascinating saga of who Brad Pitt really
goes to bed with.
That said, what ought we to think about the just departed Pope, Carol
Wojtyla? As a scientist, I can't really complain that much about him.
He managed to officially pardon Galileo (almost four centuries later,
but hey!), though he refused to apologize for burning Giordano Bruno at
the stakes. John Paul II also wrote a letter to the Pontificial Academy
of Sciences in 1997 advising Vatican scientists (and Catholics at
large) that the Church doesn’t have a problem with the scientific
theory of evolution (that didn't help me much when I was living in
Tennessee, since most of the local creationists would simply retort
that the Pope was wrong and sure to go to Hell, which I'm confident
would have come as shocking news to the man from Poland!).
On the other hand, Wojtyla was certainly a very conservative Pope, even
by the standards of the Catholic Church as they had evolved since the
Second Vatican Council. John Paul II refused to consider a larger role
of women in the Church, actively campaigned against the use of
contraceptives worldwide (Church officials on the ground in Africa have
been accused of lying about the effectiveness of condoms to prevent
AIDS, just to promote their senseless “abstinence only” policy), not to
mention of course his opposition to gay rights and abortion. While one
can surely expect the 2000-year old institution based in Rome to
fighting a rear-guard war against human progress, it seems to me that a
man indirectly responsible for the death and suffering of millions
around the globe should hardly be considered for a fast-track to
sainthood! Indeed, there have been many dissenting Catholic voices,
even within the Roman Curia, against the strictness of Wojtyla's views.
Which brings us to Benedict XVI. Although Ratzinger chose his name with
the intent of being conciliatory (Benedict the XV inherited a highly
divided Church at the beginning of the 20th century, with progressives
once again pitted against conservatives, and did his best to bring
about a reconciliation), he isn't exactly known as a moderate within
the Vatican. On the contrary, Ratzinger served under John Paul II as
head of the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” a position
that allowed him to punish a score of “liberals” within the Church.
According to the New York Times, one of Ratzinger's comments on his
role as defender of Catholic orthodoxy was that “The Pope told me that
it is my biggest religious obligation not to have my opinions.” How
sad. And yet, how remarkably apt to capture not just Ratzinger's
position, but the whole idea of the Catholic Church: not only there is
one invariable truth, but nobody else can access it other than the
highest ranks of the Church itself. It is precisely this sort of
attitude, of course, that started the Protestant Reform and brought
about a major schism among Christians, a schism that Benedict XVI is
highly unlikely to help heal.
There are good reasons to think that Ratzinger has been chosen to
succeed John Paul II because the august cardinals debating inside the
Sistine Chapel had no idea of where the Church should go, and just
wanted to buy some time (they are supposed to be inspired directly by
God, but it seems that even the Almighty needed five rounds of voting
to make up His mind). On the one hand, North Americans, and especially
Europeans, have been abandoning the Church precisely on the ground of
the kind of strict orthodoxy enforced by John Paul II and, likely, by
Benedict XVI. Most Catholics in Western countries seem to feel an
increasing cognitive dissonance between the realities of a complex
multi-cultural society and a set of teachings that has hardened over
two millennia. Then again, the Church has been growing especially in
South America and Africa, where evangelical Christians and
ultra-orthodox Catholics have been making the fastest gains in terms of
converts. Thorned between choosing a liberal Pope to recoup some of the
losses in Europe and the US, and an even more conservative one to help
the expansion in the new territories, the college of cardinals went for
the safest choice: an old Pope (Ratzinger is 78), who will maintain the
same course established by John Paul II for a few more years. After
that, God will provide. Or will She?
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Massimo's other ramblings can be found at his Skeptic
Web.
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