AUSTRALIA
ABC – Religion and Ethics
Scott Stephens et al.
ABC RELIGION AND ETHICS 13 MAR 2014
There are indications the so-called “Francis effect” may be more of a media-driven epiphenomenon.
But what happens when the media can no longer sustain their “progressive” narrative about the pope?
The papacy is, to be sure, an office particularly susceptible to projection, to a sort of idolatrous fixation that cannot help but reflect back to us our own hopes and personal agendas.
Every pope has to navigate that perilously fine line between the apostolic – which demands not just prominence but publicity, a winsome embodiment of the Christian faith that must prove attractive, even beautiful – and the deferential – or, to use the more properly Christian term, the kenotic, the self-emptying refusal to arrogate to himself either adoration or fetishisation, and the corresponding preparedness to embrace the offense that must necessarily follow from bearing courageous witness to Jesus Christ.
In his important essay, “The Primacy of the Pope and the Unity of the People of God,” then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger stressed the inherently martyrological dimension of the papacy, that the “vicariate of Christ is a vicariate of obedience and of the Cross; thus it is suited to the measure of man, and at the same time surpasses him as much as being a Christian does in the first place.” It is for this reason, insists Ratzinger, that
“the man most suited to become pope is the one who, from the perspective of the human choice of candidates, would be considered the least qualified in terms of the ideals of political shrewdness and executive power. The more a man resembles the Lord and thus (objectively) recommends himself as a candidate, the less human reason considers him capable of governing, because reason cannot fathom humiliation or the Cross.”
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