Posted on 04/15/2005 6:12:09 PM PDT by Scenic Sounds
The election of a new pope always highlights political tensions and theological differences between cardinals - and this time they are as sharp as ever.
Even Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican's watchdog on doctrine, has challenged the pious belief that the elections are the work of the Holy Spirit.
In a 1997 interview he pointed out that "there are too many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit would not have picked". Instead, the Holy Spirit offered gentle guidance.
The College of Cardinals can be divided into conservatives and liberals. But within this there are many shades of opinion.
Here are some of the most divisive issues:
Collegiality: a codeword for decentralisation and more democratic decision-making.
Liberals believe that Vatican II, the reforming council inaugurated by Pope John XXIII in the 1960s, endorsed the devolution of power from the Curia to local bishops' conferences.
Under the last Pope, however, the brakes were applied - with the help of Cardinal Ratzinger - and many cardinals privately grumbled about Rome's heavy-handed interference.
Significantly, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, the liberals' favourite candidate, concentrated on the question of collegiality in his address to the cardinals on Monday, especially on medical ethics, the family and sexuality.
He argued that it was necessary to build a greater consensus between the pope and the bishops if the Church was to tackle such questions.
Other faiths: Another issue is the Church's relations with other denominations and faiths. While liberals want to advance these, conservatives say traditional teaching could be diluted by too much accommodation with other religions.
Cardinal Walter Kaspar, the liberal president of the Vatican Council for Promoting Christian Unity, publicly criticised Cardinal Ratzinger for reasserting the superiority of Catholicism over other faiths.
Sex and gender: A major fault line exists, from women's role in the Church to the use of condoms to prevent Aids.
While Pope John Paul II effectively imposed an infallible ban on women's ordination, others have hinted that they would be more open to the idea.
Cardinal Martini, when asked before the millennium whether there would ever be women priests, said ambiguously: "Not in this century."
Cardinal Francis Arinze of Nigeria said that when he saw young men wearing ponytails, earrings and lipstick, he would like to "wash their heads with holy water".
On the use of condoms, two progressive Cardinals, Walter Kasper and Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, appeared to take a softer line than that of Vatican, which imposed a blanket ban on artificial contraception. Both said recently that people with Aids should practise celibacy. If they failed, it could be moral to use a condom to avoid infecting others.
Poverty: While the Cardinals are united in the Christian imperative to combat poverty, they have different approaches.
For example, the Latin-American experiment with the Marxist-inspired "liberation theology" - an attempt to bless popular resistance movements against dictatorship - was suppressed by Cardinal Ratzinger.
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