Election in Rome 1
Katie Grant
Election in Rome 2
R D Kernohan
Take your pick
The Catholic laity are not heard at a conclave. The cardinals, all red hats, gold crosses and solemn expressions, lock themselves in the Sistine Chapel for fear of outside interference, traditionally a bad thing. This is not to say there’s no lobbying.
Before the conclave starts there are general cardinalitial congregations – pre-meetings to the rest of us. Cardinal Murphy O’Connor, Archbishop Emeritus of Westminster and too old to vote, will contribute to these discussions. Cardinal O’Brien’s violent fall from grace means that Scotland’s pennyworth will not be heard so I’m going to offer mine. I don’t expect the cardinals will read the Scottish Review in the Domus Sanctae Marthae, their conclave ‘hotel’ residence, but you never know.
I’m not going to name a candidate: what I want from a pope seems a more sensible question than who should be pope. In any case, a cardinal’s past is often no guide. Cardinal Roncalli, elected as Pope John XXIII, was expected to do nothing, as his nickname, King Log, suggests. His first act was to conjure up the Second Vatican Council and usher in the mother and father of all upheavals. So, cardinal electors, naming no names and with no hidden personal favourite, here are the hopes of this wavering Scottish Catholic.
Physically, it would be good to see a man robust enough to go a few rounds with misbehaving clergy. Over corruption of every kind – moral, financial, political – I’m fed up with the regretful shaking of the head and the odd paragraph in a quavery speech. The new pope needs to bang heads hard enough for the crack to be heard in Glasgow.
Naturally, the Roman church needs a special kind of father, since it’s a universal church. Mass may be said in local languages, but doctrine and practice don’t alter as the faith crosses borders. The new pope will be father to some 1.2 billion children from radically different cultures in various stages of economic, political and social development. ‘One size fits all’ is hardly a sensible model. Yet in both its spiritual and worldly dimensions, the Catholic Church must be ‘one size fits all’ otherwise it’s just another Protestant sect. Any father would find this problematic. But it’s not impossible. A charismatic leader can draw diverse people after him by sheer force of personality and the persuasive, singular truth of his message.
So here are questions I’d like the new pope to answer – and answer as a good father rather than a spiritual politician. What is the singular truth? What can never change without the whole faith collapsing? And what can and should change to keep the church ‘feeding my lambs’ as Jesus commanded St Peter?
I think only one answer is obvious: the church will not be saved by what Cardinal Manning referred to as the ‘beauty of inflexibility’. Inflexibility may be more beautiful than awful modern congregational singing – guitars and wannabe opera stars should be banned – but a church which refuses to make much differentiation between matters of dogma (unchangeable truths divinely revealed, for example transubstantiation), and matters of tradition (not divinely revealed truths and therefore subject to change, for example married priests, contraception, divorcees denied communion), is telling some of its lambs in no uncertain terms to get lost.
Most Catholics understand that the church cannot be a fashionable bellwether. But inflexibility is selective. The church has changed throughout its history. At what point was it so perfect that aspic was rightly poured in? I understand the attractions of inflexibility. It’s the ‘us against the world’ option. It certainly chimes with institutional concerns, but I’d like the new pope to show exactly how inflexibility chimes with Christ’s personal humanity. The Gospels are full of Jesus siding with those society rejected. Is the pope really supposed to be God’s enforcer – a Malcolm Tucker with better manners?
I’d also like the new pope to solve the following conundrum. If homosexuality is the result of genetics and biology, ie if it’s not a choice but simply how you are, and if sex, as Pope John Paul II was keen to point out, is part of a blessed human relationship, then how are homosexual relations a sin? (The argument about whether choosing to be homosexual would be a sin isn’t for today.) That homosexual sex doesn’t carry the possibility of children is true enough, and that this might turn sex into a thoughtless recreation is also true. But since the same can be said of much heterosexual sex, there’s an inconsistency. The church might consider homosexual sex distasteful but distaste is an opinion, not a dogma.
Popes are busy men so the interregnum in the Sistine Chapel is a useful time for contemplation. I’d like to feel that during this time the new supreme head of the church into which I was born remembers that out of the great virtues of faith, hope and charity, charity is the greatest. Clear and unequivocal, this teaching, in which St Paul combined his own intellectual rigour with the humanity of Christ, could turn even the most mediocre cardinal into a truly great pope. We might spare some charity for Cardinal O’Brien.
Let the new pontiff abandon all official titles – Patriarch of the West, Primate of Italy and Sovereign of the Vatican City State. In a beautiful and simple way, when the senior cardinal deacon calls out ‘Habemus Papam!’, let it mean just that.
Katie Grant is an author, a freelance journalist, a part-time lecturer and a broadcaster
