ROME
Sydney Morning Herald
BARNEY ZWARTZ
March 04, 2013
As cardinals gather in Rome to elect a new pope, the Catholic Church faces either a Vatican Spring or a new ice age, says its most senior theologian, the dissident Hans Kung.
The most urgent need, Dr Kung wrote in The New York Times last week, was a pope ”not living intellectually in the Middle Ages”. Otherwise the ossified institution risked shrinking into an increasingly irrelevant sect, he wrote.
Many Catholics, unsettled amid the ”turbulent waters and rough winds” to which Pope Emeritus Benedict referred in his final public speech last week, share Dr Kung’s trepidation.
Part of the problem is that there are at least a dozen plausible candidates, amid an ocean of imponderables. The church, US surveys show, is ready for the first non-European pope in 1500 years, but there is a strong counterargument for returning to an Italian – after all, the pope is the bishop of Rome.
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