February 26, 2012
David Timbs
Benedict in the
Twilight Zone?
At last weekend’s Consistory in Rome Pope Benedict XVI elevated twenty two new members to the Sacred College of Cardinals. (Giacomo Galeazzi, Vatican Insider. La Stampa, 19/02/12)
The Cardinals currently serve two main purposes in the life of the Church. They form the inner circle of papal advisers and those, under the age of eighty, are eligible to vote for a new pope in Conclave. Both of these roles are established principally by Canon Law and one could legitimately argue that the Law should perhaps be changed to create an advisory and electoral body which provides a more representative cross section of Catholics.
At present, given the ethos and culture established by Cardinal Ratzinger, the College of Cardinals operates very much like a composite of an elite, secret society and the Praetorian Guard. This time around, the new men in red represent the Roman Curia in disproportionate numbers. This should come as no real surprise. After decades of experience as head of the CDF, Benedict’s habitat of choice is the Curia with its self-interested busyness and its legion of bureaucrats chatting to one another in the encrypted dialects.
The Consistory itself was preceded by a day of prayer and reflection. This and the following solemn events were held amid much ceremonial pomp, colour and spectacle. It is clear also from the record that this Consistory occasioned one of the greatest festivals of cognitive dissonance and conflicting messages the Church has witnessed in a very long while. One might wonder if the Consistory meditated upon the mysteries of the Magnificat and the cleansing of the Temple.
Even Cardinal Bertone, the newly self-appointed monitor of Vatican communications, didn’t seem to pick up on the sheer hubris and shallow spectacle of it all. The Curia itself was no better than the rest either as most of the new red hats, thirteen, belonged to its bureaucratic fraternity.
At a time when a vast number of Catholics are sorely tested to hold and maintain trust and confidence in both senior Church leadership and its promise of good governance, it is perceptions and semantics that really count. Consistories broadcast a loud and clear a message that it is the elite and privileged ones at the top of the ecclesiastical pyramid who rank. The baptized and confirmed many are alienated and their loyalty is stressed to the limit. Their confusion is compounded by a leadership which all too often confuses ecclesiastical structure with the Kingdom of God and the pope with Jesus Christ.
As Andrea
Tornielli wrote in Vatican Insider, the Pope chose as a major theme of his
address to the Cardinals No to the logic of power and glory. Benedict
even called them ‘Lord Cardinals!’
You have only one Lord and
Master…. Among the Gentiles they lord it over them... Doubtlessly, people
could be forgiven for understanding that it was actually all about the opposite
of Jesus’ teaching on Kingdom of God, that at its heart are simple virtues of
discipleship and service, and they left everything and followed him …Go
sell all you possess, then come, follow me… The greatest among you must be the
servant of all…..If I do not wash you (your feet) you
have nothing in common with me.
Benedict continued with his discourse on the counter logic to which the Cardinals are called to interiorise and live, Service to God and our brothers (sic), the gift of self: this is the logic that authentic faith imparts and develops in our daily lives and not that rather mundane style of power and glory.
The evangelical vision of the Jesus Movement and the People of God seems a long way distant from Benedict’s alarming vision of a fixed ecclesiastical entity, The Church is not self-regulating, she does not determine her own structure but receives it from the word of God to which she listens in faith as she seeks to understand it and to live it. Within the ecclesial community, the Fathers of the Church fulfil the function of guaranteeing fidelity to sacred Scriptures. They ensure that the Church receives reliable and solid exegesis, capable of forming with the Chair of Peter a stable and consistent whole
This smacks of a kind of self-serving biblical and theological fundamentalism Benedict explicitly and robustly rejected in an earlier incarnation as Vat II peritus, Fr Professor Ratzinger. The Fathers of the Church may well offer a bounty for quiet, personal Lectio Divina and extraordinary examples of ‘proof texting’ but rigorous exegesis is not normally to be found among them.
Benedict’s teaching on the centrality of the Petrine office with its renewed symbols of power and universal mission is congruent with what he promoted under JP II. Despite the rhetorical nuance about the importance of the Petrine office as such, not the pope, one cannot easily escape the perception that a personality cult is what is being justified and promoted. In the Chiesa article on Benedict’s homily it should be noted that architectural grandeur and ‘sacred’ space are mentioned constantly in reference to Peter.
Again, Tornielli cites Benedict himself referring to the heroic image of Peter (him) as sheet anchor of doctrinal purity and security for believers, Pray for me that I may always be for the people of God the testimony of a secure doctrine and firmly hold the helm of the Church.
This imagery of the heroic pope is almost entirely the work of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s own hands as he promoted JP II as bishop of the world, the papalisation of the Church and its convenient extension of centralised power, creeping infallibility. Now Benedict rides on the very same cushion of papal mystique.
Interestingly, following his election Benedict replaced the mitre with the tiara on the papal coat of arms and he also, to head off any ecumenical speculation that the Pope is merely ‘first among equals,’ discarded one of his former titles, Patriarch of the West.
What Catholics and others have been exposed to in this Consistory is one of those great informative moments when ecclesiastical rhetoric has been subverted by its own attendant conflicting ritualism. The medium has indeed become the message and that message has little or nothing to do with the Gospel. The script and ritual were supposed to be all about humility, ecclesial service and pastoral leadership but they turned out to be more the narrative and display of the Corporation with its trappings of power and glory.
David Timbs writes from Albion, Melbourne, Australia.