The Long View

The Prayers of the Pope

Ross Douthat at The New York Times posted a much-discussed article this week in which he argued that Benedict XVI will be remembered as a Better Pope than his predecessor:

So the high-flying John Paul let scandals spread beneath his feet, and the uncharismatic Ratzinger was left to clean them up. This pattern extends to other fraught issues that the last pope tended to avoid — the debasement of the Catholic liturgy, or the rise of Islam in once-Christian Europe. And it extends to the caliber of the church's bishops, where Benedict's appointments are widely viewed as an improvement over the choices John Paul made. It isn't a coincidence that some of the most forthright ecclesiastical responses to the abuse scandal have come from friends and protégés of the current pope.

I have, frankly, always been more enthusiastic about Benedict's papacy than I ever was about John Paul's, and now more so than ever. In part, the assault on the papacy is friction generated by the inflection of the West away from modernity, an inflection of which the Benedictine reforms in liturgy, social doctrine, and internal administration are important components. (Reforms, course, imply an earlier period of deformation, and there was quite a lot of that in the last third of the 20th century.) Still, let us postpone the poll for "best pope ever." Fr. John Zuhlsdorf is a great admirer of Benedict, too, but he says that the difficulty of JPII's situation has still not been fully appreciated:

I think that when John Paul II came to the See of Peter, the Church was in the verge of splintering. I think that one of the late Pope's greatest accomplishments was to drag us back from the edge of schism. One of the things he did was bypass elements of the hierarchy and appeal to people directly. Another thing he did, over many years, was shift the balance of the world's episcopate. He slowly began to approve the nominations of men who were more men of the Church than men of the world. He could not simply do his own thing in the case of nominations, in my opinion, because there was for a long while a real danger of revolt from the left, the liberal camp in the episcopate, not just in the academy or rank and file of clergy. I think this explains in part why the late Pope seemingly inexplicably was willing to promote men he had to have known were something like enemies to his views about the direction of the Church and her teaching, especially about human sexuality. Thus, he had to work slowly, over the decades he seemed he knew from the very beginning of his pontificate would be granted to him. He slowly shifted the episcopate, focusing especially on regions such as the central part of the USA (in the vitally important anglophone world), and spreading outward from there. He made incremental changes and, over time, they worked. The episcopate and college of cardinals as of April 2005 was quite different from that of 1978.

We may note that there actually was schism, in a modest sort of way, during the pontificate of JPII, but it was on the Right. Be that as it may, this item is a useful reminder that the power of the popes is far more constrained than their authority. Legend has it that John XXIII once agreed with a visitor that some feature of the Vatican bureaucracy was ridiculous. When the visitor asked why John did not change it, he replied. "What can I do? I'm just the pope around here."

* * *

Some things never change, of course, among them the views of old Hans Küng, who is using the current storm as an occasion to call on the world's bishops to resist the pope, perhaps by calling their own synod, in order to create a regime of greater local autonomy. Today's scandals are in fact good evidence that many of the world's bishops should not be trusted with sharp objects, much less increased disciplinary autonomy, but that is a large subject. The anti-papal campaign is the last chance for liberal Catholicism. If it succeeds, its proponents will be the heirs of ruins, but their whole careers have been dedicated to arguing that the old order passed away at the Second Vatican Council anyway. They are pleased enough at the prospect that only "cultural Christianit"y will survive them. Even in liquidation, the endowment of ecclesial institutions will last just long enough to pay their pensions.

In any case, Fr. Küng is a Usual Suspect of long standing, whose views are very familiar. Far more interesting is the call for 1970s-style reforms from Peggy Noonan, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

They need to let younger generations of priests and nuns rise to positions of authority within a new church. Most especially and most immediately, they need to elevate women. As a nun said to me this week, if a woman had been sitting beside a bishop transferring a priest with a history of abuse, she would have said: "Hey, wait a minute!"

That younger clergy now have a chance for unusually rapid promotion is not in doubt. Anyone who has met younger clergy lately, however, will be aware that the younger they are, the more "orthodox" they are likely to be. (There isn't really a good term for this mindset: "conservative" suggests a residual recalcitrance, while "Traditional" has been hijacked by, well, don't get me started…) Young nuns are in short supply, but where they exist in numbers they rarely do so in an institutional context that Fr. Küng would find theologically congenial.

As for women at the table when the disposition of suspect priests was concerned, are we to suppose that they would have been less likely than male advisors to advise handling such cases with therapy instead of punitive measures? Indeed, why should we think that women in the more progressive dioceses were not involved with these decisions?

It is probably not wholly irrelevant to Benedict's difficulties that his views of social and global governance questions are European devices that do not run on America's Movement Conservatism current. Even his social conservatism is being displaced in the American mix by pure economic libertarianism.

* * *

To the extent that jurisprudential issues are implicated in the assault on the papacy, much of the animal spirits for the enterprise seem to be coming from American tort lawyers who hope to lay their hands on the assets of the Vatican. This would require stripping the Vatican of sovereign immunity. A related step would be to strip the pope of his immunity as head of state. Since Benedict XVI is to visit Britain in September for the beatification of John Cardinal Newman, certain polemicists in that country have become keen to do these things, or at least make a public show of trying. Here is a bit of Geoffrey Robertson's argument from The Guardian:

[P]apal immunity is . . . questionable. It hinges on the assumption that the Vatican, or its metaphysical emanation, the Holy See, is a state. But the papal states were extinguished by invasion in 1870 and the Vatican was created by fascist Italy in 1929 when Mussolini endowed this tiny enclave – 0.17 of a square mile containing 900 Catholic bureaucrats – with "sovereignty in the international field ... in conformity with its traditions and the exigencies of its mission in the world".

The notion that statehood can be created by another country's unilateral declaration is risible: Iran could make Qom a state overnight, or the UK could launch Canterbury on to the international stage. But it did not take long for Catholic countries to support the pretentions of the Holy See, sending ambassadors and receiving papal nuncios in return. Even the UK maintains an apostolic mission.

Vatican City State is new. The Holy See, in contrast, may be the oldest continuing political entity in the world. It is a perpetual corporation, analogous in some ways to the British Crown, which has also been the sovereign of a shifting group of territories during its history. It is the Holy See, not Vatican City State, that dispatches and receives ambassadors, something it did before and after the unification of Italy.

One could argue that the status of the Holy See as a sovereign was questionable between 1870 and 1929 (though even during that period Italy granted the Holy See extraterritoriality for its headquarters). However, the international system evolved in such a way during the 20th century that it would be very awkward to win such an argument. Some years ago, in the course of an essay entitled "The Future of the Papacy," I noted:

[T]he papacy has never existed in a vacuum. The mutations it has undergone in the past 2000 years are only partly the result of the logic of its own development. The short explanation for these changes is that the papacy was simply mirroring the political evolution of the societies in which it lived. The pope was once a Roman citizen, then a Byzantine official, then a barbarian chieftain, then a feudal lord, then a Renaissance prince, then a Baroque monarch. Since 1870, he has been the chief executive officer of a remarkably efficient international bureaucracy (well, efficient compared to the UN). What you think the papacy will become next therefore depends on your ideas about the future development of the nature of government and of political theory.

Shoot at St. Peter's and you are likely to hit the ICC; precedents against the legal personality of one can probably be extended to the other. Be that as it may, it may be that sentiment for bringing down the Vatican now stems from the fact that the Holy See bulks far larger on the transnational plane than it did in the international system at any point after the High Middle Ages. Vatican State is a microstate but the Holy See is a tranzie superpower. If a system of global governance crystallizes out of the transnational ether, the Holy See will be an important component of it. Unless steps are taken, of course.

* * *

This analysis has dealt in large part with metahistory. However, it is not at all clear that the Catholic Church in general and the Holy See in particular would be worth preserving simply as utilities for the Imperial phase of Western history. The Church by its own account exists to promote the salvation of souls; for that reason it is worth taking quite a lot of trouble to preserve. Considered simply as a venerable repository of ethical advice and funny hats, however, it is not cost efficient. Indeed, if historical forms impede the soteriological function, then they should be allowed to lapse. We may reasonably suspect, in fact, that history is a tale of the collapse of supposedly eternal institutions precisely to remind us that the good things of this life are not the final good.

Christianity is not Buddhism, however. Buddhism may see the things of this world as illusions that come between us and enlightenment. A distinguishing feature of Christianity is the principle of incarnation, of the transcendent made manifest in the immanent. The principal extends from Christology to a providential understanding of history to a theory of liturgy and art that make them more than merely human systems of signs.

Thus, though all civilizations must fall eventually, they all contain things that are really excellent and that we should try to save. We are justified in asking God to endorse and preserve those artifacts and institutions we have created over thousands of years to express His presence in the world.

This is one of the points Charles Williams was trying to get across (with characteristic obscurity) in his Arthurian poem, The Region of the Summer Stars. The section "The Prayers of the Pope" is set during the great historical crisis of Williams' imagined Arthurian world, when it seems that all Christendom is about to lapse into a dark jungle:

The Pope prayed: 'O Blessed, confirm
nor thee in thine images only but thine images in thee.
Bestow now the double inseparable wonder,
the irrevocable union: set in each thy term.
The formulae of glory are the food of intellectual love,
from the rose-gardens to the wonders of the divine service,
and so to the sacred Heart; the Flesh-taker
with the God-bearer, each the off-springing of other,
the Maker a sharer only and the Making as much.
Let the chief of the images touch the Unimaged, and free
the Love that recovered itself, nor only an image,
nor only all the images, but wholly Itself;
free It that we, solely the rich may pray
send not, send not the rich empty away.'

These sentiments have application beyond the preservation of the pope's sovereign immunity, of course. They are the only form of conservatism worth worrying about.