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Sunday, April 24, 2005
Mercado: Stampede to judgment
By Juan L. Mercado
HARDLY had the cry “Habemus Papam” ended, Benedict XVI--earlier known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger--was swamped with forecasts. Remarks ranged from the tasteless pun “Papa Ratzi” to the “panzer cardinal.”
What are we to make of this stampede to judgment?
It underscores the worldwide reach of Peter's successor. As head of a 2000-year old institution, he ministers to 1.1 billion people.
“Unlike the Dalai Lama or Pat Robertson, a Pope can press a button and someone in Samoa or Accra will act,”’ a Vatican observer notes.
Some say the 115-cardinal electors didn't want any surprises or a long papacy. “We elect a Holy Father, not an Eternal Father,” one said. Did the 78-year-old Benedict XVI fill the bill of a “transition pope”?
“Transition popes” sometimes turn out “revolutionary pontiffs.” The genial John XXXIII convened Vatican II. Its reforms still rock the church today.
In his first homily as pontiff, Benedict XVI stressed he’d continue Vatican II reforms. His predecessor, John Paul II, made that a centerpiece of his 26-year pontificate.
Ratzinger “was such a close ally of Pope John Paul II that he could have easily chosen the name John Paul III,” the New York Times notes. “Those who expect (him to) simply follow in the footsteps of his predecessor may be in for a surprise, say those who know him.”
“This man is not just going to mind the store,” says George Weigel, whose new book, “The Cube and the Cathederal: Europe, America and Politics Without God,” is provoking comment.
The vote he says, is a “recognition by cardinals that the great battle in the world remains inside the heads of human beings--that it’s a battle of ideas.” In that battle, Benedict XVI could “put his own stamp on the church and to reverse its decline in the secular West.”
That “decline” is symbolized in debate over a la carte Catholicism. Many choose what they want, be it contraception, divorce, homosexuality, a celibate clergy. Is this really about today's fad and yesterday’s doctrine?
Contemporary realities, like population, form part of the context.
“On the day of John Paul II’s funeral, the European Union’s statistics agency reported that the decline of birth rates means that within five years deaths will exceed births in the EU,” the International Herald Tribune notes.
“By 2013, Italy's population will begin to decline; the next year, Germany’s will begin to decline. After 2010, Europe’s population growth will be entirely from immigration... Since 1970, the 20 million legal Islamic immigrants equal the combined populations of Ireland, Denmark and Belgium.
“By 2025, not even immigration will prevent declining fertility from accelerating what one historian calls the largest sustained reduction in European population since the Black Death of the 14th century...”
This is “demographic suicide,” says Weigel, biographer of John Paul II. It will cause its welfare states to buckle and is creating a “vacuum into which Islamic immigrants are flowing.”
“What happens when an entire continent, wealthier and healthier than ever before, declines to create the human future in the most elemental sense, by creating a next generation?” he asks.
In market-driven America, the most successful competitors for congregations are churches with clear doctrinal and strict moral positions. “For these churches, the ‘crisis of Christianity' is congestion in their parking lots,” writes George Will of Washington Post.
“Christianity is a complex structure erected on a foundation of biblical prophecies and accounts of Jesus’ deeds and words. For two millennia, the search has been for sources of authoritative interpretation. It produced great councils, Nicaea, Trent, and the post-Reformation papacy,” adds Will.
John Paul, and after him Benedict, seeks to interpret a “deposit of faith” handed down over 2000 years. They would “present transcendent moral reference points for ordering public life that Christianity offers the political community.”
That does not yield tomorrow to head counts or demonstrators who'd parade in San Pietro en Vaticano with condoms. Not even when it empties church pews, sees many wind up on golf courses Sunday mornings or move over to churches with watered down demands.
“As with the late Polish pope, so with the new German one,” writes H. MacKenzie of Tribune Media Services. “He’s that seeming anomaly, someone who understands that renewal of faith is sophisticated precincts of the heart...that explication and application of standards regarding good and evil, right and wrong--is the fundamental appeal of Christianity, its essence where it is most strong”.
“An adult faith does not follow the waves of fashion and the latest novelty,” Ratzinger said before the conclave. “A dictatorship of relativism is being built that recognizes nothing as definite, and which leaves as the ultimate measure only one’s ego.”
One lives one's faith or leaves it is the message, the New York Times noted.
That is “vintage Ratzinger--calm, deliberate, precise, incisive, ” says the Journal First Things. It is also John Paul II.
Come to think of it, it is also John. He who wrote of an earlier crisis when the Master would not buckle before friends who preferred to go a la carte:
“This is a hard saying” the followers insisted, and left. Refusing to water down his teachings, He asked: “Will you also leave?” And Benedict, like John Paul before him, asks: “To whom shall we go?”
(juan_mercado@pacific.net.ph)
(April 24, 2005 issue)
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