Papacy

To be honest, I had to look and see how many popes I've shared the planet with. When you're a kid--or at least when I was--he's just "the pope," with no other identity beyond that title. I do recall the death of Pope Paul, in 1978--after all, by then I was 22--and the 32-day-long reign of John Paul I; and of course the exciting and unexpected election of Karol Wojtyla, John Paul II.

Anyhow, I looked it up and, to my surprise, there have been five popes since I came on the scene in late 1956. They are...

Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli), pope from 1939 till his death in 1958;
John XXIII (Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli), 1958-1963
Paul VI (Giovanni Battista Montini), 1963-1978
John Paul I (Albino Luciani), 1978
John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla), 1978-2005

The Holy See's official website has, as you might expect, a good deal of information about recent popes. See http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/.

And there's a short article about the "official" mourning process here: http://194.244.5.202/main/notizie/rubriche/approfondimenti/20050403183733356099.html.

Watching news coverage of what can only be described as the death watch for John Paul II was interesting. I guess. First, it was a fabulous example of the problem with 24-hour news networks, viz., you have to be on and talking EVEN WHEN THERE'S OBVIOUSLY NOTHING NEW. I wasted two hours Saturday morning awaiting a news release that was expected "within the hour"..."within the half-hour"..."any minute now"..."an hour ago." Granted the networks can't control whether or when the Vatican chooses to release information. But their fear of being scooped--and the need to fill time even when not much is going on--causes CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News to prattle on breathlessly about something that MIGHT happen...

Second, I was surprised at how seemingly ignorant some of these TV newspeople seem to be of how the Vatican works. More correctly, how bureaucracy works. At least one woman--didn't catch her name; she was on Fox News, which I don't watch much--was pretty breathless in quizzing her guest, a priest, about who was "in charge" now that the pope was gone. Could she really be so stupid as to think that nothing happens unless the pope is there barking out orders like the deranged captain of an ancient sea-vessel?

(Well, it being Fox News, it's entirely possible she was that stupid. And yet, there I was watching it...)

But certainly anyone with any real-world experience at all knows that any institution, religious or secular, has at least a semi-permanent bureaucracy in place, and that that bureaucracy handles much of not virtually all of the mundane trivia that makes up nine-tenths of the undertaking. The White House, General Motors, Harvard University, the Vatican--all of them, I am confident, can function quite tolerably for some time in the absence of "the head."

(But there I go again: Where would a Fox News reporter get any "real"-world experience?)

My take on the late pope is ambivalent. Typical for me. I liked him, and I felt that he always had the best of intentions. Certainly no one can say that he did not give his all for his faith and his church. But his conservatism--and, in later years, his authoritarianism--undermined what had begun as a promising ecumenical initiative. As the Catholic half of a Catholic-Lutheran marriage, I had hoped for, if not full communion between the churches, at least a movement in that direction. Instead, in recent years, came grumblings from the Vatican that Catholics should not be receiving communion at non-Catholic services--as I have been doing for some years now. And continue to do. And will continue to do, as long as my wife's church continues to invite me to do so. The attitude from the Holy See does not advance the cause of unity that Christ wants for his church: quite the opposite. JP2 had the opportunity and authority to set such things right, but he did not take it.

Curiously, while on his watch relations between the Catholic Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, my wife's denomination improved greatly at "high levels," things seemed to stagnate and even backslide on the "pew level." And that is where ecumenism must happen, if it is to have any validity.

The next pope, I think, will be at least as conservative as John Paul II. Probably a short-timer. And after that... As the Catholic church--and the whole Christian church--shifts below the Equator, an even more conservative world, the prospects of a renewal of the church, a revitalization of ecumenism, and the attainment of real Christian unity seem increasingly remote.