2012-01-08                                        The Cardinals                  David Timbs

Benedict XVI has just announced the appointment of twenty two new Cardinals bringing up the number of Electoral College voting members to one hundred and twenty six.

John Allen, NRC’s Vatican observer, has given an initial analysis of the make-up of the new members of the Pope’s inner advisory circle. He cannot in his view detect any partisan slant in Benedict’s appointments other than that most are Europeans; there are no ‘liberals’ on the list and that around half are Curial officials, mostly Italians.

There is a noticeable absence of new Cardinals chosen from Africa and Asia (with the exceptions of Hong Kong’s Bishop John Tong Hon and Indian Syro-Malabar Major-Archbishop George Alencherry).

Few of the Cardinals-elect are serving diocesan bishops and this must be of concern when one considers that the Pope’s first calling is to be pastor and functions best in his primary role when he receives advice from active, functioning pastors not from bureaucrats.

There has been some serious speculation over recent months that the Pope’s health is deteriorating. While this has been hosed down by Vatican communications officials, it has been argued by Marco Politi, Italian Vatican watcher and observer, that Benedict has become something of a ‘part time’ Pope, showing little interest both in Church administration and the necessary outward focus demanded by the social teaching of the Gospel. Politi may well be hinting at something deeper than Benedict’s retreat into his first loves, private study and scholarship.

It could be inferred from these new appointments that Benedict is planning in advance for his death by stabilising the shaky apparatus of ecclesiastical bureaucracy and confirming the overseers of the key agenda of his Pontificate, the Hermeneutic of Reform. There are signs of this already.

In his December ‘State of the Union’ address to the Curia,  Benedict, rather curiously, nailed the flag of the success of this program to the mast of the World Youth Day! This might well be read by either serious critics or cynics as an emphatic statement of ‘I’ve run out of new ideas and I give up’ on any more solutions to the struggle with creeping secularism and moral relativism.

I think it is patently obvious that the Pope is running out of energy and, above all, what little imagination or vision he might have had for the Church after a lifetime gated inside a ‘green zone’ of Vatican bureaucracy. He lacks, I believe, the courage and evangelical riskiness to de-clericalise the institutions of the inner circle, half of whom were appointed by him, the rest by JP II.

Both of these chief pastors have failed the Church by their blinkered visions of governance and accountability. The Church is reduced to the stunted idol of clericalism. They have passed up on those initiatives of Vat II which call for a more active role of the laity in church leadership across the board. These two Popes have effectively sidelined and marginalised most bishops, priests, religious and laity and excluded them from anything more than the menial and relatively insignificant.

These voices are neither heard nor heeded at the Top. They clearly do not rate. Consequently, the Top needs to be reformed daringly and seen within the more authentic context suggested by those notions intrinsic to the constitution of the Church, the People of God and the dignity of our common Baptism.

David Timbs blogs from Melbourne, Australia.

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