Friday, September 17, 2010

A Pope in a Schismatic Islen

A side benefit of a British education used to be learning the mnemonics helpful for sifting through events on this blustery island since 1066.

One ditty lists all the kings and queens, ending with the catchy “Ned, George, Ned, George, at whose death came a second Elizabeth.”

Another addresses the fate of the six wives of Henry VIII: “Divorced, beheaded, died/ Divorced, beheaded, survived.”

The first of these queens was Catherine of Aragon. Henry was 17 when — not yet the fat potentate of Holbein’s portraits — he ascended the throne in 1509 and, months later, married Catherine, his brother’s widow.

Freud might have questioned the wisdom of young Henry wedding a dead sibling’s spouse six years his senior.

But the match had dynastic merits.

It endured through several infant deaths and stillborn children — including the male heirs Henry craved — before the king sought a divorce from Pope Clement VII, was denied, and, in 1534, severed relations with the Roman Catholic Church.

This was a divorce row that did not blow over.

Since 1534 there had been no state papal visit to Britain, a 476-year lacuna that ended Thursday with the arrival of Pope Benedict XVI. (Pope John Paul II made a pastoral visit in 1982.) Seldom has a long-delayed journey been so ill-timed.

Benedict has not been received with open arms. It’s not just historical distaste for popery, or the cost to cash-strapped taxpayers, it’s far deeper.

Britain would have done well to heed tradition and deny the honor of a state visit to this pope, a blunder-prone spiritual leader of rigid intellect and uncommunicative soul, too remote to heal a church in crisis.

He arrived as — after the United States, after Ireland, after the Netherlands, after Austria, after his native Germany — Belgium finds itself convulsed by a scandal over repeated sexual abuse by priests.

A report released last week revealed the extent of the molestations and suggested 13 suicides had resulted from them.

It will not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the evasive response of the Vatican to the sexual abuse of minors by adult men cloaked in the authority of the Roman Catholic Church to find that Belgium’s church leader offered no direct apology.

Benedict would no doubt say he has tried to apologize for what, with exquisite awkwardness, he has called “the abuse of the little ones.” In Belgium, “little” was defined downward to include a child of two.

This year, the pope has written to victims in Ireland to express “shame and remorse” for “sinful and criminal” acts by the clergy. He also told a gathering of priests in St. Peter’s Square that the church would do “everything possible” to stop abuse.

And yet, this man who found himself in the Hitler Youth in his teens, as required then of young Germans, and whose own conduct in handling an abuse case while archbishop of Munich and Freising has raised questions about his forthrightness — this churchman with such ample opportunity to see the darker sides of man’s soul has proved arid in comprehension and unbending in doctrine.

The church’s transparency and openness to justice for crimes committed remain limited. Benedict has shown scant willingness to come to terms with how and why repressed sexuality among a clergy vowed to celibacy led to molestations of minors so widespread as to make the church institutionally ill.

At times it has seemed that, like a chief executive dismissive of non-performing profit centers, he has given up on the West to concentrate on the Church’s growth areas in the developing world.

I can see why Benedict might view modern life on a largely secular European continent as a hedonistic wasteland.

But it is preposterous for him to deplore the “moral relativism” of the West when the moral absolutes of the church have so often proved no more than a hollow shield — or even a seductive disguise — for predators.

It’s hard to follow greatness. The conservatism of Pope John Paul II was accompanied by a riveting moral authority that transformed a divided Europe and set millions free. He was inspiring even to many nonbelievers.

Today, the church’s refusal to adapt to modern life — on the use of condoms, on family planning, on gay rights — often looks like no more than the orthodoxy of a stubborn pope convinced of a monopoly on truth at the very moment when his church appears shot through with dissimulation.

No wonder headlines speaking of “ignominy” have accompanied his arrival in a country where many were angered by the pope’s offer last year to fast-track conversion to Catholicism for Anglicans upset by the Church of England’s acceptance of women priests.

Remarks by an aide accusing Britain of “an aggressive new atheism” did not help.

As with Muslims and Jews, the pope has contrived to irk the Church of England. It remains to be seen whether a service Friday in Westminster Abbey, where the coronation of Henry VIII and Catherine was held, can ease tensions.

I doubt it.

The Protestant Reformation was a precursor of the very modern world on which Benedict’s Vatican has turned its back.

SIC: NYT/USA