Conclave: The Politics, Personalities and Process of the Next Papal Election - Softcover

Allen, John

 
9780385504539: Conclave: The Politics, Personalities and Process of the Next Papal Election
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0385504535 ISBN 13: 9780385504539
Verlag: Image, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

A captivating insider’s guide to the politics and personalities that will have a tremendous impact on one of the world’s most secretive and important events–the election of a pope.

The next time a conclave unfolds in Rome, some 6,000 journalists are expected to descend on the Eternal City to cover the death of John Paul II and report on the election of his successor. The man in white who emerges from the Sistine Chapel at its conclusion will automatically become one of the most important figures on earth, a leader who commands a unique combination of political and spiritual power. Depending on how he chooses to exercise that power, governments and political systems may rise or fall, religious wars may heat up or abate, and the Church may undergo a radical transformation–from changes in its stances on such issues as sexuality, the place of women in the Church, to the role of the papacy itself.

Conclave is a fascinating look at the election process and at what this headline-making occasion will mean to the world. John L. Allen, Jr., takes readers behind the scenes to reveal the issues, parties, and people most likely to determine the outcome. Setting the election within a broader context, he explains why it matters who becomes pope, discusses their role in the modern world, and examines the issues that will form the agenda of the next papacy.

Although the book is not intended as a “handicapper’s guide,” Allen does offer his own informed list of the “top twenty” contenders for the position. He creates, as well, a classification system that clarifies the differences among the informal political parties that exist within the College of Cardinals, the body of 130-plus men who will elect John Paul II’s successor. In conclusion, he presents a critical, independent-minded profile of each of those cardinals–for one of them will certainly be the new pope.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John L. Allen, Jr., is the Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter and the author of the controversial biography Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican’s Enforcer of the Faith. His work has appeared in a variety of American and European publications, including The Miami Herald, The Nation, the Irish Examiner, and Commonweal. During the next conclave, Allen will be an expert analyst for the Fox News television network. He lives in Rome, Italy.

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1.

What Does the Pope Do?

To understand why the election of a pope is important, we first need to grasp what the pope does. Unfortunately, there is no job description for the head of the Roman Catholic Church. Lots of titles go with the job, but they are of little immediate help: supreme pontiff (pontifex maximus), servant of the servants of God, vicar of Christ, successor of Peter, bishop of Rome, patriarch of the West. Catholics sometimes say the pope steps into "the shoes of the fisherman," meaning that he follows Saint Peter, who was a fisherman before being called by Jesus Christ to lead the church. That phrase, unfortunately, is more metaphorical than informative. A twentieth-century way to describe the pope might be to say that he is the legal and spiritual head of the Roman Catholic Church, at 1 billion members the largest Christian denomination in the world, and certainly the most vertically integrated. One way of putting the point: the pope can push a button in Rome and see something happen in Singapore in ways that the archbishop of Canterbury or the Dalai Lama cannot.

In reality, however, the demands of the position are far more vast. A modern pope is called upon to be an intellectual, a politician, a pastor, a media superstar, and a Fortune 500 CEO. He must produce complex documents setting out the thinking of the Catholic Church on the most vexing problems that confront humanity. While he has a staff and as many advisers as he wants to help with writing and research, ultimately the message is for him to determine. He must oversee the work of the oldest diplomatic corps on earth, involved in mediating conflicts and protecting the institutional interests of the Catholic Church in dozens of global hot spots. On any given day, the pope may be briefed about the latest violence in the Middle East, about Muslim-Christian slaughter in Indonesia, and about the role of Western commercial interests in sustaining the civil war in the Congo. Then he will be expected to make decisions. If he does too little, he will be accused of indifference; if he does too much, he will be accused of meddling. The pope must be a skilled public figure who knows how to use, rather than be used by, the global communications industry. If he shrinks from publicity, they will say he is weak; if he courts it, they will say he's an egomaniac. Finally, the pope must manage the personnel and financial resources of an enormous multinational religious organization. Since to govern is to choose, as de Gaulle once said, some of those choices are bound to make people unhappy.

Many of these burdens are similar to demands imposed on other world leaders, such as the president of the United States or the secretary general of the United Nations. One key difference is that the pope, in addition to being a politician and administrator, is also expected to be extraordinarily holy. People might forgive a president all sorts of moral failings, but they have higher standards for pontiffs. Another is that being elected pope is, in effect, a life sentence-there's no retirement to anticipate, no comfortable years as an elder statesman writing memoirs and giving lucrative speeches at foreign policy seminars. Popes carry the burden of their office until they die. (We can't follow the idea here, but it's worth noting that if they wanted to, popes could retire. There's a provision for it in canon 332 of the Code of Canon Law, the supreme law of the Catholic Church. Some reform-minded Catholics wish popes would do so, in effect building term limits into the system. For now, however, the papacy remains a lifetime occupation.)

For all these reasons, being pope is an impossible job, and despite what you may hear, few church leaders actually want it. Mastering any one of its elements is a life's work. Inevitably, popes emphasize some aspects of the job at the expense of others. Beloved, roly-poly, off-the-cuff John XXIII was a magnificent pastor, but he was never accused of worrying about details. He once summoned Cardinal Franz Konig of Vienna and told him to go to Budapest to visit Hungarian cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, who had taken refuge from his country's Communist government in the American embassy. A flabbergasted Konig reminded the pope that it was not simple to get in and out of Iron Curtain countries, especially to visit a man the local authorities regarded as a public menace. Pope John smiled and said, "Find a way." Konig was irritated by such an offhand dismissal of the problems generated by the request. Then, of course, he found a way to carry it out. Globe-trotting John Paul II strikes an imposing figure for the news producers at CNN, but he too leaves many day-to-day details to others-more, some say, than the CEO of any multinational corporation could without being asked to step down by his board of directors. (The pope, of course, has no board of directors, just a corps of advisers, called cardinals.) He once signed three different criticisms of the work of a major Catholic theologian, Belgian Jesuit Jacques Dupuis, each one changed in important respects, even though each one was supposedly an expression of the pope's quasi-infallible ordinary teaching authority. John Paul was simply signing what was put in front of him without noting the fine print.

Despite the naturally unequal distribution of gifts, the fact remains that popes are called upon to fulfill all of these roles. Inattention to any one of them leads to problems; excellence in any one of them can change the world.

Priest and Bishop

To get a better grip on the job, let's start with the word itself. Pope is an English equivalent of the Italian term papa, which is the word for father (though with a different accent). The idea is that the pope is a spiritual father for the Catholic family, which in some sense includes all the 1 billion members of the Roman Catholic Church worldwide. Popes take this notion very seriously; Paul VI, for example, who served as pope from 1963 to 1978, once said that he could not resign his office because it is not possible to give up "spiritual paternity." A father of a family can't lay down that burden just because he's tired of carrying it, Paul reasoned, and in the same way a pope can't renounce being a spiritual father to his children. (Some Catholic theologians point out, however, that Paul VI decreed a retirement age of seventy-five for bishops, who are also supposed to be spiritual fathers of the Catholics in their care. In this case Paul's logic stopped at the papal doorstep.)

A pope, like any priest, is first and foremost a pastor, someone who offers spiritual guidance, who preaches the word of God, who celebrates the sacraments of the Catholic Church, and whose job it is to help Catholics live holy lives and prepare for communion with God in the next world. John Paul II takes his priesthood to heart, sending out annual letters on Holy Thursday to all the priests of the world, giving advice and offering encouragement. The celebration of his fiftieth anniversary of priestly ordination, in 1996, was one of the biggest events in Rome during his tenure.

The pope is also a bishop. He is the chief shepherd of the archdiocese of Rome, and whenever Catholics in Rome celebrate mass, they pray for "John Paul, our bishop." In fact, theologically speaking, every other function of the papacy is rooted in his status as the bishop of Rome. His claim to primacy comes from the fact that Rome was one of the pillars of the primitive Christian church, the place where both Peter, the leader of the twelve apostles, and Paul, the great missionary, were imprisoned and executed. As the Roman empire was divided into Eastern and Western halves, the bishop of Rome became the leader of the churches in Europe. The sees of Constantinople (modern Istanbul, in Turkey), Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem...

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Verlag
Image
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385504535
ISBN 13 
9780385504539
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
256
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Verantwortliche Person
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