"HABEMUS PAPAM!" "It's the German!"
Yesterday I was at home, sick with a sinus infection (or maybe just a cold), when just before noon, ABC's broadcast switched to Rome. It looked like white smoke, but since there was a false alarm on Monday, people were uncertain what was up. The bells were supposed to ring if there indeed was a new pope, but they were silent. At 6 pm Rome time, they rang; the crowd cheered; the bells stopped and the crowd went quiet again. At around 10 minutes after 6, the bells started ringing and didn't stop. The smoke remained white. The conclave had lasted only about 24 hours, and the Roman Catholic Church had a new pope. When they announced his name, I opened my window and shouted, "It's the German!", somewhat in reference to the shouts in 1978, "It's the Pole!"

That was my experience of the start of the time of Benedict XVI as pope. My reactions: I'm happy it's a German, if no reason other than that it has been hundreds of years since a German was pope. Adrian VI (Wikipedia entry here) who was pope in 1522, is considered by some to be the last German pope, but if you look at his biography, he really seems more Dutch. The German pope before that dates back to the 1100s, from what I've heard.

The Carpe Bonum blog (with which I'm not very familiar) has a round-up on Benedict's stance on a number of issues here.
I'll copy it below - I hope the hyperlinks still work...

- Abortion and Euthanasia: "Grave sin"
- Priestly Celibacy: Perhaps at odds with John Paul's strong view, Pope Benedict XVI says priestly celibacy is, "Not a dogma of the faith." (Ref or Google cache)
- Sex-Abuse Scandal: Appointed by John Paul II to investigate the scandal. Called for day of penance in May 2002, but victims' advocates not satisfied with the Church's response.
- Vocations: Cautioned against the Protestant view of a, "Priesthood of all believers," which can dilute the attraction of priestly vocation (Ref or Google cache)
- Women Priests: Enforced John Paul II's uncompromising view ("no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women") in 1995 and 2002.
- Homosexuality: Not equivalent to heterosexuality (Ref or Google cache). Labeled by some, of course, as homophobic.
- Liberation Theology: "Constitutes a fundamental threat to the faith of the Church," but contains "a grain of truth." (Ref)
- Feminism: Responsible for a Letter to Bishops seen as denouncing feminism while ignoring its positive contributions

The most interesting to me is the priestly celibacy bit. I personally think a lot of good would result in allowing priests to marry.

Notable to me is the speed in which the conclave made its decision - it seems that the cardinals want to send a clear message that they are not interested in modernizing the Catholic Church right now.

Also notable is that it is an open question whether it is a good idea to moderize the church. As Mike Novak noted in the NYTimes today, "the parishes and dioceses that choose 'modernization' usually end up losing numbers, while the more serious churches grow mightily."
Other authors have noted that modernization is a losing game for a church or even a population - the European countries and religions that have modernized the most seem to have the biggest drop-off in population growth and membership numbers (I don't have a cite for this, but I've seen the argument in a few places). So modernization could be the beginning of the end of a church.

Another argument against modernization I've read is that only a small number of Catholics want it. The wealthy, elite Westerners want to change the church, while the vast majority of the world's one billion Catholics have no interest in this change. According to this argument, it is arrogant for the privileged, rich Catholics to demand that changes of thousands of years of tradition be forced on the entire church, while the vast, vast majority of Catholics do not want this change. Why does a tiny minority of members feel it is entitled to force substantial change upon everyone else?

My final note on modernity is an excellent quote from James Lileks, whom I read every day:

Habeum pap. Note: every era is the modern era to the people who inhabit it; a “modern” pope in 1937 would have announced that godless collectivism was the wave of the future, and ridden the trains to Auschwitz standing on top, holding gilded reins, whooping like Slim Pickens. The defining quality of 20th century modernity is impatience, I think – the nervous, irritated, aggravated impulse to get on with the new now, and be done with those old tiresome constraints. We’re still in that 20th century dynamic, I think, and we will be held to it until something shocks us to our core. Say what you will about Benedict v.16, but he wants there to be a core to which we can be shocked. And I prefer that to a tepid slurry of happy-clappy relativism that leads to animists consecrating geodes beneath the dome of St. Peter's. That will probably happen eventually, but if we can push it off for a century or two, good.

I love Lileks.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on B16. (That, of course, is a reference to Dad's use of the nickname J2P2.)
C
- posted by Christoph Roggenkamp @ 4/20/2005 05:24:00 PM