VATICAN CITY
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
JOHN ALLEMANG
The Globe and Mail
Questions are being raised about backroom tactics at the Vatican after Britain’s highest-ranking cleric, in the wake of abuse allegations, decided not to attend the conclave to elect the next pope.
Cardinal Keith O’Brien resigned his post as Archbishop of Edinburgh, it was announced on Monday, a day after The Observer newspaper reported that four men had made complaints to the Vatican’s representative in Britain – and just a week after the influential cleric had stated that Pope Benedict’s successor should move to change the church’s law on priestly celibacy. He had also expressed his belief that the next pope should be an outsider from Africa or Asia rather than Europe or North America, a suggestion that could be seen as threatening to the influential lobby of Italian bishops and to the Curia, the powerful Vatican bureaucracy.
“This will send a shock wave through the College of Cardinals,” said Thomas Reese, the Jesuit author of Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church. “This hits at the very core of what it means to be a cardinal. The most important thing they ever do in their lives is to go to a conclave and elect a pope – and this guy is not going.”
Cardinal O’Brien’s withdrawal from the conclave he was obliged to attend under church law comes at the same time that Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles is being pressured to stay away because of his reluctance to deal directly with issues of priestly abuse early on in his tenure as archbishop.
“Are these attempts to undermine cardinals outside of Rome?” Father Reese asked.
“I think some of the cardinals will believe that there’s a conspiracy to affect the outcome of the conclave,” said Michael Higgins, co-author of Power and Peril: The Catholic Church at the Crossroads and a CTV Vatican analyst. “And when you argue that there’s a conspiracy in Rome, there usually is. Rome is full of rumours, whispers and conspiracies because it’s not a transparent place – things are veiled, things are secretive.”
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