UNITED STATES
Huffington Post
Michele Somerville
Why did Pope Benedict XVI announce his resignation Monday? I’d like to imagine he took a sweeping look at his career as a priest and prelate, and while not discounting the value of this contributions as an intellectual, took note of the degree to which he, during the course of his own and the previous pontificates, permitted the “power” to snuff out so much of the “glory.” I like to imagine remorse moves him to wish to go off and pray — for forgiveness, and for the broken church he leaves in shambles. As a practicing Catholic, I’d like to be able to “take” the “pope at his word,” as Frank Bruni wrote (that he does) in his Feb. 11 New York Times opinion piece. But I cannot. I do not.
Here’s how the papal apologists will spin Ratzinger’s resignation. They will frame the decision as a bold and enlightened step. They will emphasize the humility in Ratzinger’s decision to relieve a church in turmoil of the liability of an aging pontiff. This lacks the ring of truth. For more than five centuries a system, the Roman Catholic hierarchs placed great faith in a system of electing, honoring and burying popes, whereby a cabal of papal advisors kept an aging pope for life propped up (Ratzinger personally handled much of such propping up even before John Paul was in his dotage!). This was the tradition the tradition-loving cardinals favored.
Ratzinger’s stepping down constitutes a dramatic break with tradition in a church in which tradition-loving Catholics cling for dear life to any shred of tradition they can grasp. The papal Public Relations team will deflect any suggestion that departing the papacy in advance of bodily death is in and of itself a soft scandal, and will insist that Ratzinger’s resignation is neither a sign nor a symptom of a Catholic hierarchy utterly compromised by corruption. Corruption among the Roman Catholic prelates is hardly something new, but today’s active Catholics, wherever they stand on the degree of orthodoxy spectrum, still approach the altar in hope that our church might mature as it endures. Joseph Ratzinger’s retrograde disposition with its overemphasis on secrecy and obedience has led a majority of active Catholics to turn a deaf ear to the pontiff.
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