We Anglicans have a problem with authority. We variously accept the authority of God (well, most of us do), of scripture and even of Church tradition.But the authority of Church leaders tends to be a fairly pick-n-mix affair, with Anglican congregations tending to choose the authority that suits their desires and prejudices best.
It’s why the Anglican Communion is an uneasy confederation of faith or even, at times, a sack of fighting ferrets.
Anglicans tend to assume that the Pope, by contrast, enjoys an absolute authority. Some, indeed, yearn for an equivalence in this schismatic, reformist tradition; a firm hand on the tiller of Anglican ecclesiology.
As it happens, I’ve been more than unusually busy on Anglican business over the past three days. While His Holiness has been on the exhausting round of an audience with our Supreme Governor (or was it the other way round?), an audience in Hyde Park that would have satisfied Sir Mick Jagger and the beatification of Cardinal Newman, I’ve been about rather more mundane church tasks – three eucharists, one memorial service, a sermon and a committal of ashes.
Where congregants have remarked on the Pope’s visit, it has usually been in the context of his authority: He should have done more about the child-abuse horror, he stops the developing world using condoms or he should tell his billion-plus followers to sort out the world. That sort of thing.
Many of these views make a category error – they assume the Pope is like a global chief executive, accountable to his shareholders, who can force changes in corporate strategy.
Others assume that, as a direct successor to the apostolic throne of St Peter, he enjoys an autocratic power to run the universal Church as he pleases.
I would concur with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s response to the question of why he is not a Roman Catholic: “I don’t believe the Pope is infallible.”
But infallibility is not the same as autocracy or absolute power. I have said before that I think Pope Benedict has a historic opportunity to reform hierarchical structures in the Vatican and throughout the Church of secrecy, deference and obstruction.
But it won’t be easy – he is trammelled by powerful factions within the Vatican and elsewhere which are ossified by centuries of intransigence. These are the same factions, I am reliably led to believe, that frustrated his attempts, as Cardinal Ratzinger, to have institutional child-abuse properly investigated and prosecuted.
So it turns out that, in a different way to we Anglicans, Pope Benedict XVI has a problem with authority too. And what is he meant to do if he finds that problem intolerable? Resign? Again, that is to make the corporatist category error. And, for the rest of us, there is anyway the fear of something much, much worse.
The past few days of the papal visit at least should have provided that as food for thought for non-Roman Catholics who often have taken too glib a view of his authority during the storm of the past months.
As he returns to the Vatican tonight to rest from his travails, we might at least cut Pope Benedict some slack.
He faces enormous tasks and challenges in re-establishing the respect for the Church that he told us had been so undermined by the child-abuse revelations. And resistance to a resolution of those challenges will come from some very powerful elements of that Church.
To have hosted the Pope in our Anglican state and to have seen him up-close has given us, among much else, the opportunity to sympathise with his predicament.
He is, after all, only human.
SIC: TG/UK