No Hope for the Pope

I t should have come as no surprise, but somehow liberal Catholics in the U.S. were caught off guard when the conservative Cardinal John Ratzinger became Benedict XVI. With this new hardline Pope in place, U.S. liberals, both Catholic and non-Catholic, are going to have to come to terms with some hard realities about the Pope and the Vatican. 

As became very clear in the media commentary on the papal election, the world-wide Roman Catholic church—especially the rapidly growing communities in Africa and Asia, as well as large parts of South America—is deeply conservative on issues of moral and sexual theology and orthodoxy. While Catholics in the United States, as well as European countries such as Germany and Ireland, are far more inclined to be liberal leaning in their stands on sexual morality, they make up just over 10 percent of world Catholics. The fact that Roman Catholicism—which under the pastoral care of Pope John Paul II had become aggressively involved in secular politics—takes an overwhelmingly right-wing, condemnatory stance on anything it sees as deviating from traditional Catholic sexual morality is going to present an unprecedented problem for progressives in the United States and around the world. 

Since his election the U.S. media has attempted to separate Pope Benedict XVI from his former persona as arch-conservative Cardinal John Ratzinger. Noting his humility and conciliatory statements—he stated that he was “a simple and humble worker in the Lord’s vineyards”—even the New York Times , which had been highly critical of Ratzinger’s work as the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, managed to rehabilitate him as “shy, orderly, funny” and printed charming stories of his drinking German beer and playing Mozart on his piano. 

For decades the U.S. liberal establishment and U.S. Catholics have held onto a fantasy of Vatican II as the defining moment of post-war Catholicism, not just for Europe and the Americas, but for the world. John XXIII was, in many people’s eyes, the Kennedy Pope and Vatican II was his Camelot—a glorious, Roman Catholic version of the New Deal and the New Frontier that would move Catholicism from the medieval past into the beautiful future of social equality in which mass would be celebrated in the vernacular, nuns’ habits would be modernized, and the Pope mobile would replace the traditional chair as a form of papal transportation. 

While Pope John XXIII was a progressive pope in many ways— his love of the people was a direct and moving contrast to the public austerity and rigidness of his predecessor Pius XII—he also vigorously upheld traditional Catholic morality. In his 1959 Ad Petri Cathe- dram he proclaimed that there was one revealed truth, which was to be found in Catholicism, and that to hold this in “contempt” would “result in incalculable losses to the individual and the whole social structure.” In his 1961 Mater et Magistra he affirmed that, according to natural law, the role of human sexuality is permissible only in marriage and that, “Everyone [i.e., non-Catholics as well] without exception is bound to accept these laws.” Most important, John XXIII urged new efforts in the Third World and the ordination of “native clergy” to work with their own people. This was the beginning of a massive church effort of conversions akin to those that occurred in the great territorial conquests of the 15th and 16th centuries—and the basis for the cultural and theological makeup of the church today. 

Under his successor Paul VI there was a shift to a more hard line on issues of personal morality as he reaffirmed the church’s stand on birth control, divorce, and celibacy for priests. Along with urging more missionary work in the Third World, he also insisted on a larger role for non-European and U.S. Catholics and clergy, thereby shifting the makeup of the College of Cardinals to make sure some of them came from Third World countries.