AHC: Get a more progressive Pope after John Paul II
- Thread starter Porsenna
- Start date
You'd probably need benedict to either drop dead or have his attempts to resign accepted before JPII's death. In 2005 there was a feeling that he 'deserved' the job after so many years as number two. Also the church wanted a short papacy that would give them a breather while they figured out where they wanted to go in the post JP era.
Benedicts health proved rather robust, he was a hardliner and he was contaminated by the child abuse scandals. If he's not there you would probably still get a hardliner but they might be someone who would drop dead by 2010 or so. At that point the moderates are already in a pretty good place and someone like Francis could get the role. Not that Francis is a massive moderate but he is prepared to address the abuse scandal and to accept that some parts of church doctotine need to be questioned. Well hes a start and given the glacial pace of change in the church I guess its about as good as we were gonna get.
Benedicts health proved rather robust, he was a hardliner and he was contaminated by the child abuse scandals. If he's not there you would probably still get a hardliner but they might be someone who would drop dead by 2010 or so. At that point the moderates are already in a pretty good place and someone like Francis could get the role. Not that Francis is a massive moderate but he is prepared to address the abuse scandal and to accept that some parts of church doctotine need to be questioned. Well hes a start and given the glacial pace of change in the church I guess its about as good as we were gonna get.
Right, how much of a chance is there that Ratzinger gets so tainted by the child abuse scandals that he isn't considered viable anymore?
Where the idea comes from, that Benedikt in any form was tainted by the child abuse scandals?
I think anything short of him crucifying all real and suspected offenders would be considered "tainted" by the press.
I also simply don't get all these fantasy threads about a "progressive" or "liberal" Pope - have you guys never heard the question "is the Pope a Catholic"? Shift a Pope's teaching and beliefs far enough across for the media to consider them a "progressive" and there is no way they would be a Catholic - indeed, in most cases it would be pretty hard to regard them even as Christian. It's almost a miracle that Francis is regarded like this by the media - in his teaching and actions he is really no different from his predecessors, he just has a very much more effective way of dealing with the press and getting them to print what has always been Catholic teaching.
It actually wouldn't be that difficult, John Paul II wasn't that different from Benedict XVI when it came to doctrine, but he was better at PR (for lack of a better term).
Alot of the media blamed the then papal hierarchy for the cover up. Now there is no proof yay or nay, but as the number two for that period Benedict was seen to have done nothing to clean up the mess, and it's taken Francis coming to power to start that process. Also the man was an arch conservative (even by catholic standards) and was no JPII as far as charisma and leadership went. Combine the two and you get alot of people seeing his rule as a continuation of a system that helped out a bunch of paedophiles.
Irony of it all is a full scale papal investigation ten years ago could have cleaned up alot of the mess. I highly doubt the Pope himself (either of them) was involved in the actual cover up, but by not doing anything about it and finding, defrocking and jailed those who were behind it the upper hierarchy of the church ended up tarred with the same brush. It's almost Nixon/Watergate, the president had nothing to do with the break in, but by trying to cover it up he destroyed himself.
Francis is seen as something of an outsider who never had anything to do with the papal administration and while a conservative has always practised what he preached. He's seen as a clean pair of hands, and the fact he's been cracking down hard on those who fail to live up to the Church's own standards (like that Bishop in Germany) is winning him some pundits .
As someone said Francis isn't a liberal because that isn't what the Church is, but he is seen as a good man, and someone who can help restore the churches place in the world by setting a good example.
Part of the problem the church has had is that Vatican II was never really accepted inside the church hierarchy but welcomed by lay members and outsiders. Some reforms (local language, priest facing congregation) were seen as common sense and accepted but others were seen as straying to far. Witness how the only Monastic or convent communities that are on the grow are the ones that return to the old ways and not the post VII reforms,and of course the schism groups that rejected VII in the first place. For fifty years the church has been debating it's place in the world and it doesn't seem to have figured it out yet.
On the other hand it is pretty much the oldest active organisation in the world so I guess slow reform is to be expected.
A lot of that is John Paul II's way of seeing the world. The way he saw it, the reports of pedophile priests coming onto his desk were like those back in Communist Poland - which were snow jobs by the anticlerical Communist secret police. He thought, especially given some of the loudest voices calling for accountability, that this was just scaremongering by anti-Catholic elements, just like in Poland. The Maciel case was a prime example - Ratzinger was IIRC gunning for harsher treatment to be given to Maciel, but JPII thought Maciel was a second Popieluzko, in a way. By the time it really exploded in Benedict's face, and he started defrocking these priests, it was too late PR wise.
Essentially, John Paul, while in my opinion a saint, was also in this case horribly naive, disregarding the advice of even his number two.
Regarding the rise of non-schismatic traditionalism, part of it is that a lot of young hard-core Catholics - aka the kind that generally do go into the priesthood or the religious life even when there's little economic or social prestige in it for the wider society - are those that saw the LCWR-type orders as heretical (which I argue they often are), which unfortunately created a backlash against communities that are orthodox but often like to think outside the box (I'm thinking about the Jesuits, to a lesser extent the Franciscans). This is changing for the Jesuits and the Franciscans, though, partly because your Bob Drinan types are retiring or dying, and partly because of the example of the present Holy Father, who breaks the stereotype of the quasi-heretical Jesuit that had been in place during the 90s.
Also, the Church isn't uniformly "conservative" in the modern political sense either - see the Iraq War, Catholic Social Teaching, and so on.
Wasn't Pope Francis considered papabile during the 2005 conclave? Would he be considered "progressive" enough for you?
Nope. I respect him, and I find him an improvement as a Pope and a leader compared to Ratzinger, but not what I'd consider progressive.
Not sure who I'd pick, as I'm not an expert on the Catholic hierarchy; I was speculating whether there'd be a way to have someone willing to push hard for significant changes. Something similar to the Anglican church today. Take your pick of, let's say, women in the priesthood, priests being able to marry, some acceptance of homosexuality, accepting divorced people, acquiring a more realistic attitude towards human sexuality and birth control. And I put in "take your pick" because I'm well aware you aren't going to get them all.
DTanza
Banned
By those standards, I don't think there's anyone who was being seriously considered by the conclave who could be elected Pope.
Schonborn? Not likely. In any event, he's not that "progressive".
Yeah, aside from married priests in the Latin Rite, all of those would be easentially heresy.
Then basically, you want Pope Francis, or the equivalent, ten years early. He has articulated tolerance, at least to a point, for gays/lesbians with his "Who am I to judge" comments. He has said that the door is closed to women priests but he has explicitly called for a far greater role for women in the Church in accordance with the views and expectations of modern society and he has chastized priests for withholding the Eucharist without just cause, saying the Eucharist is the means to salvation, not the end goal in and of itself. That could be construed acceptance of divorced people. I don't know what his views on the possibility of a married priesthood is, or his thoughts on contraception/birth control, but he is known to asked for a full survey of the laity on a wide variety of issues and questions, including gay rights, same sex marriage, married priests, abortion and birth control. That suggests that he is a realist and he's trying to figure out what people actually expect of the Church and how to deliver it.
On the other hand, we are talking about the same Pope that's roundly condemned abortion, multiple times, and has stated IIRC as Pope his agreement with Humanae Vitae. Also, the "laity survey" had as its purpose a sort of report card into how the clergy were teaching Church teaching (tl;dr: horribly historically in the West). Changing teaching on the issue was not at issue at all. Also, the divorce-remarriage controversy, raised by Schonborn, seems to have quietly faded away as a discussion topic.
The only thing on that list that's even achievable at all (even in the ASB case that Francis wanted to) is married priests, and he's shown a reluctance to raise that question as a general practice for the Latin Rite (which is to be expected; he is a religious, who since day one have always been celibate even when priests were not.)
And if we presuppose John Paul II's papacy, even discounting the Holy Spirit factor in my personal belief, I don't think the kind of papal progressivism required by the OP is anything but ASB after the pontificate of Paul VI.
Flo, the Progressive Pope....
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(For those fortunate enough to have avoided those ads, Flo the Progressive Girl is a major (mostly auto) insurance campaign.)