Posted on 02/27/2005 5:55:32 PM PST by NCjim
THE Pope's hospital, Gemelli, is once again the focus of massive attention in Rome but a few kilometres away a more secluded building is quietly being readied for its role in the future of the Catholic Church.
Hidden inside the Vatican, behind two checkpoints manned by Swiss guards, is Casa Santa Marta, a $US20million ($25.6 million) hostel especially built in the late 1990s to accommodate the cardinals who will eventually gather to select a new pope.
With 84-year-old John Paul II yesterday unable to conduct his traditional Sunday blessing for the first time in his pontificate, the cardinals are obviously already thinking about their choices, and clergy across Australia are wondering what a new papacy will mean for the church at home and abroad.
After the Pope dies, Archbishop of Sydney George Pell and about 115 other cardinals will stay at Casa Santa Marta under strict isolation while meeting twice a day in the nearby Sistine Chapel to vote for a new leader for the 1.1billion-member church.
The process is expected to take about three weeks. While the election is still wide open, academics, clergy and Vatican observers generally agree that some important characteristics of the next papacy can already be discerned.
Now in his 27th year as Pope – his 263 predecessors averaged just 7.5 years in the job – John Paul's is already the second-longest papacy since St Peter's. This has allowed him to stack the college of cardinals so that the overwhelming majority share his basic formula of conservative theology and progressive economic activism.
He has appointed all but three of the 119 cardinals who currently have a vote on his successor and, at most, 30 might be considered liberals on moral and theological issues.
The precise number of ballots will depend on the timing of the vote, as cardinals lose their voting rights on turning 80, as Angolas Alexandre do Nascimento does tomorrow.
Henryk Gulbinowicz of Poland lost his vote in unusual circumstances three weeks ago when it was revealed he was 81 instead of the 76 he had claimed. He had falsified his age as a teenager to avoid Soviet military service.
John Paul has also changed the rules to make it easier for a simple majority to rule in the next papal vote, so there will almost certainly be general continuity with his mix of right-wing morality and left-wing economics.
"No pope rushes in to overturn the decisions of his predecessor, so any changes will take time to show up and will be a matter of emphasis rather than general direction," says a priest at a theological college in Rome.
"Don't think for a minute that a new pope is going to say abortion is acceptable, or (that) priests in the Western tradition can run around getting married, or you can have women priests. That is simply not going to happen."
Perhaps the biggest issue still up for grabs in the papal vote relates to the distribution of power between the Curia, the church's head office in Rome, and the archbishops who run dioceses around the world.
The real debate will be between those who want a pope to centralise power and those who want a leader who will allow more decisions to be made outside Rome, and the numbers seem to be lining up against the centralists.
A backlash against the centralising tendencies shown by the Curia under John Paul would see a new pope who would allow dioceses more autonomy, perhaps so they can adapt their language and practices to more closely reflect local cultures.
That could eventually lead to theological reform and more diversity with the church but not for quite a few years, and many cardinals are determined that the church's universal values must hold sway over local cultural differences.
Australian bishops, for instance, were carpeted in the 1990s for allowing a church culture that was seen as too egalitarian and open to secular influences.
Pell was subsequently hand-chosen by Rome to pull Sydney into line. The Pope has made similar appointments of conservatives to run liberal churches in countries such as India, Austria, Argentina, The Netherlands, Canada and Brazil.
One of the most direct ways that any election for a new pope will affect the Australian church is through the impact it has on Pell's future.
A favourite of John Paul, he is even seen by some as a candidate to replace Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as head of the enormously influential Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.
But Michael Walsh, a British expert on papal elections and author of The Conclave, says he believes the only realistic chance of Pell landing that job would be if John Paul stayed in office for some time.
"Pell has nothing like Ratzinger's intellectual credentials . . . but many people think that wouldn't hurt," he says.
"At times Ratzinger's voice on behalf of the congregation has been confused by the fact that he is such a highly respected theologian in his own right – people are left guessing whether something is his opinion or the congregation's." Ratzinger was due to retire when he reached 75 three years ago but the Pope asked him to stay on for an extra five years.
Like other senior Curia officials his position would fall vacant with the Pope's death but there is a strong chance the new pope would ask him to stay on until he reached 80.
Another issue dioceses around the world will be waiting on is the new pope's attitude to the "New Movements" within the church, which have developed their own power bases cutting across the traditional lines of a bishop's power over his own diocese.
Opus Dei, the best known group, has cardinals from Spain and Peru. But other groups, such as the Neocatechumenates, are faster growing and more influential.
"A lot of people want to see them reined in but no new pope could ignore the fact the new movements are the most successful and fastest growing parts of the church," says Ian Ker, a priest and theological professor at Oxford University.
Dionigi Tettamanzi, the Italian widely seen as the front-runner to become pope, is a supporter of Opus Dei.
He has compared its founder Jose Maria Escriva de Balaguer to saints Benedict and Francis of Assisi as pioneers of movements within the church.
The media and language skills of the new pope will be more important than ever after a globe-trotting multilingual superstar such as John Paul, and Australian Catholics will be disappointed that Tettamanzi does not speak English.
Other contenders are better placed. Honduran Rodriguez Maradiaga, for instance, speaks Spanish, near-perfect English and Italian, and decent French, Portuguese, German and Greek, while the less fancied Ivan Diaz of India speaks 16 languages.
The basic personality of the next pope will also be important to the church's prospects around the world as he will be the new face of an institution struggling in many places to hold its market share.
While they might seem alike to outsiders – celibate male church administrators with an average age of about 70 – the cardinals' personal stories are surprisingly diverse.
Frenchman Jean-Marie Lustiger lost his mother at Auschwitz and grew up as a Jewish boy named Aaron wearing the yellow star imposed on Polish Jews by the Nazis; Francis Arinze of Nigeria was born into the Ibo religion and converted at the age of nine; American Adam Maida is a lawyer who has argued before the US Supreme Court; Juan Luis Cipriani was a Peruvian basketball champion; and Czech Miroslav Vlk worked as a window cleaner for eight years after being banned by communist officials from acting as a priest.
Most have rarely met but their diverse lives will sooner or later bring them together at the Casa Santa Marta.
....Silly!
Geez.
Give the guy a break. He's ill. It's a bit early for the funeral. I wish him well.
And didn't he miss any Sundays when he was shot by that Islamic Swine?
ML/NJ
Sheer media speculation! With the length of John Paul II's papacy, we haven't had to see these mastications since 1978. But now, they will be filling up pages in the news magazines and papers, ad nauseum. As usual, they will be wrong. No one expected Cardinal Karol Wojtyla from that then backwater communist country of Poland to be the Pope and to last till at least 2005! If you want a sure bet, go ask the Holy Spirit.
Speaking English is not a job requirement. St. Peter couldn't speak English.
Chris Wallace was interviewing Francis Cardinal George, Archbishop of Chicago, today, and was trying to get some indications of whom he might vote for. Cardinal George pointed out that John Paul II might outlive him.
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