IRELAND
Association of Catholic Priests
The King is Dead: Long live the King?
Pope Benedict XVI has not died. Rather, in a decision that has deservedly won him great praise, he has announced that he is to resign on health grounds. Nonetheless, attention has immediately switched to his successor: should it be a younger man? Should he come from outside Europe? What challenges will a future Pope face, and what does this tell us about a suitable candidate?
I suggest that there is a more important question. What should the role of Pope involve?
We have become accustomed to speak of the Supreme Pontiff, of a monarchical-style papacy, of Roman ‘hands-on’ intervention world-wide. But it was not always so and need not be so. It would be a good question for Sean Brady and his fellow Cardinal electors to ask if it should be so.
In Ireland our own former President Mary McAleese has written of the constitutionally incoherent nature of the Catholic Church’s organizational structure, with its unresolved tensions between papal primacy and Episcopal collegiality. She was, perhaps unwittingly, echoing the words attributed to Pope Pius IX in 1939: ‘The Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, has become a monstrosity.
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