It seemed good to the cardinals and to the Holy
Spirit to elect someone who would be a good, convenient, transitional
Pope, a harmless old man, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli.
The Cardinals were
right on one of them.
In taking the name John, Roncalli joked that not many of that name
occupied the chair of Peter for very long.
He was 77 and died at the age
of 83.
On the second count, harmless he was not as he would demonstrate
before very long.
From his ordination as a priest in 1904 until his death as Pope John
XXIII in 1963, Angelo Roncalli experienced a life of extraordinary
service, as parish priest, seminary educator, assistant to his bishop,
work in the Curia, Vatican diplomat from 1925 to post WWII and finally
as Cardinal Patriarch of Venice.
Roncalli’s motto was Obedientia et Pax.
Obedience was not
simple docility but an active listening and service to truth. Peace, for
him, was the fruit born of unity in essentials and harmony in
difference.
By the 50s the world and Christianity were beset with
pressing questions in search of real answers. Answers, an observer
remarks, are a mechanism for avoiding questions!
John XXIII convened Vatican II as a pastoral Council,
an ecumenical assembly of broad representation.
He invited the Church
to ask the tough questions, to examine itself with honesty and courage,
to re-imagine and re express itself in the modern world; to re-enflesh
the mystery of Christ and his Gospel with renewed evangelical vigour.
In a sense, the Pope was putting the Church on notice that its
credibility would stand or fall on these. This was not welcomed by
everyone.
A resistant Curia went to enormous lengths to promote its own
predetermined, entrenched and self interested agenda.
When, for example,
John insisted on inviting Protestant observers, Cardinal Ottaviani
complained that they were heretics and in league with the devil!
John’s response was that they should be recognised as separated brethren and separated angels.
But the Pope called for more than minor adjustments in attitude.
He
wanted Catholics to rethink, re-imagine and re-express the faith in ways
which would be more readily comprehensible to modern humanity.
The vision and legacy of Vatican II involved the re-Inspiration of
the Tradition and attention to the movement of the Spirit over
ecclesiastical stasis and stagnation.
The priority of the Council was to
ensure that the Incarnation and the Kingdom of God were not compromised
by the creations of a lesser, self interested ‘deity.’
A CathNews blog
in April stresses that these concerns continue to be of enduring and
critical importance.
As a commenter pointed out, the Church is not an
end in itself but the servant of Christ and the Gospel.
There are clear
and evident signs that this image of the Church as the living
incarnation and presence of Christ in the world is being inverted.
I
think this distortion started in earnest and quite consciously so over
thirty years ago.
While John Paul II spent most of his pontificate on the road being the great communicator between the Church and the World,
he demonstrated little interest in administration.
The Curia
increasingly set in place policies to reestablish Vatican centralism, to
dis-empower national episcopal conferences, effectively to muffle the
voice of the laity, to extend the power and control of Vatican
departments and to mask all of this by promoting the celebrity cult of
the papal personality.
Much of this has been accomplished by stealth, by the gradual affirmation of now three sources of divine Revelation: Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium – increasingly appropriated conveniently by the Curia!
The last of these is really what many call creeping infallibility.
At core, it is largely about centralised bureaucratic power and
control.
This has resulted in episcopal collegiality and authority being
eroded, compromised and devalued globally.
Bishops seem to have become alienated from one another and lost their
collective nerve and confidence.
They have been domesticated and
reduced to Confucian compliance.
There is, as well, little evident
respect for or regard given to the legitimate Sense of the Faithful across Church life.
Catholic laity in their millions over the past thirty years, long
rendered voiceless and ignored, have taken a walk, maybe for ever!
Sadly, I think, the Curial underlings, the managerial class, really
don’t care a damn! What a paradox that these people are, in reality, sine cura – care free!
This kind of contempt for God’s People leads to inertia, despondency,
loss of Spirit and connectedness with what it’s all about, faith in
Jesus Christ and the power of his Gospel. John XXIII’s garden is
re-morphing into a museum.
The Church is badly, almost terminally,
divided and in rapid decline right now especially in the West.
It’s about time we invoked the historian’s fifty year criterion and do a serious reassessment of where we are. We need the re-Inspiration of the Tradition again and urgently ask of it some 21st Century questions.
At our peril we might ignore the counsel of Bernard Lonergan
SJ: “Bad insight leads to bad policy which in turn leads to worse
insight which then leads to worse policy until change becomes the
preserve of the violent.” (Insight, 1957).
Maybe that ‘Harmless old Man’ long, long time ago read about Jesus
saying something like this about people taking the Kingdom by force!
(Mt 11: 12-15)