UNITED STATES
U.S. Catholic
By Bryan Cones
I say that in all seriousness, and not because Pope Benedict XVI has not been my favorite pope of all time.
Pope Benedict’s resignation tells me that he knows his role, both his role as bishop of Rome, and his role as successor to Pope John Paul II. Joseph Ratzinger was elected as a short-term caretaker pope, and eight years (or nearly eight) is a sufficient amount of time to let the aura of Pope John Paul II’s too-long papacy dissipate. But I also think Ratzinger knows his limits and what the church needs in a way that Wojtyla did not. While I think Pope John Paul II saw himself as personally called by God to live out the end of his papacy as he did, Benedict, on the other hand, leans into the job with the mind of a professor: The work he set for himself to do is done; now it is time for someone else. And he has had the courage to admit it; I suspect it will become a “tradition,” especially given the long lives contemporary popes can expect to have.
Just who that someone else will be is an important question. Benedict has been steadily promoting Archbishop of Manila Luis Antonio Tagle over the past couple of years, and I wonder if Tagle is not in some way Ratzinger’s chosen successor. Tagle is sufficiently theologically conservative, an outspoken promoter of justice for the poor (without ever crossing the line to liberation theology), and he is from the Phillippines, which means he is from the Global South, from a country of encounter with Islam, and from Asia, or at least the zone of Asia. I’ll be interested to see how Benedict participates (or doesn’t) in the selection of the next pope. He is too old to vote in the conclave, and he’s technically not a cardinal anyway, so I suspect whatever he does will be behind the scenes.
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