Saturday, September 11, 2010

Pope Benedict’s historic state visit

Next week’s visit to Britain by Pope Benedict XVI is, by any yardstick, historic. His charismatic predecessor, Pope John Paul II, came here in 1982 on a barnstorming pastoral visit.

But this first state visit since the Reformation should mark a moment of historical reconciliation between the Catholic and Anglican churches.

The Roman Catholic Church, with about 1.2bn adherents worldwide, remains a uniquely potent spiritual force.

Yet this great but flawed institution is now most often discussed in western Europe and North America in terms of its faults.

This pope will suffer by comparison with his superstar predecessor.

Whereas John Paul perfectly fitted the demands of the age, Benedict is an elderly, retiring and scholarly theologian. Both popes rank as astute students of power, but this one evinces little need to win over wavering believers.

But the main difference between then and now is that the scandal of the sexual abuse of children at Catholic schools and institutions, which started to emerge in John Paul’s final years, has exploded and really bloodied the hierarchy.

The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales has issued an unequivocal apology, not just for these offences but for failure to bring them before the courts.

Pope Benedict, while he has expressed contrition on a number of recent occasions, has yet to issue a similarly complete apology for this criminality and betrayal, and his and the Vatican’s part in concealing it from statutory law.

Benedict’s theological absolutism would seem to preclude a public house-cleaning. Just as John Paul could equate contraception with genocide, as recently as July the Vatican placed the attempt to ordain women priests on the same list of “grave” crimes as the sexual abuse of children.

Like his predecessor, Benedict and his Curia rule with iron centralism, rolling back the reform process set in train by the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965.

His interpretation of Catholicism offers muscular doctrinal certitude, lighting a path through the swamp of moral relativism he often appears to equate with pluralism.

Unlike John Paul, who was respectful of the world’s other great religions, Benedict has needlessly offended Muslims, Jews, and indeed Anglicans, by the way he has sought to facilitate the defection of Anglo-Catholics to Rome – an episode that could colour his beatification next week of Cardinal John Henry Newman, greatest of English converts to Catholicism.

All this has fostered the impression that Benedict seems less interested in adding to Rome’s market share than in a harder, more homogeneous core of true believers.

If he leaves the UK with that view still intact, a historic opportunity will have been missed.

SIC: FT/UK