UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism
Jerry Slevin
No international decision makers today would elect someone over 75 years old as chief executive. The lone exception is the Catholic Church’s Cardinals in their desperate struggle to salvage the world’s oldest absolute monarchy. Its patriarchical positions have provided the Cardinals and their predecessors with a lifetime of unaccountable power and wealth for almost 1700 years. That is about to end, with or without Pope Francis’ help.
Bishops normally retire at 75 years old. Indeed, Thomas Aquinas, who passed on hierarchical ambition and criticized absolute monarchs, retired at 49 years old! Pope Francis will be eighty in a few years, but evidentally couldn’t resist taking the top spot, likely an imprudent choice at best.
Francis’ apparently lifelong pattern of being ambitiously authoritarian, disguised often by his friendly and presumably well-intentioned style, appears ascendant as he ages rapidly. Ex-Pope Benedict has shown that this ambition can be hazardous to one’s health.
Francis’ basic choice upon election was either (1) to announce promptly a specific and transparent offensive reform strategy and pursue it expeditiously or (2) to continue his two predecessors’ flawed and secretive defensive strategy, enhanced with tighter hierarchical discipline, softer public relations’ tactics and a better executed geo-political policy. He so far has mainly chosen the defensive strategy, imprudently and unfortunately.
Given his age and the hierarchy’s escalating scandals, especially in Latin America, he will likely fail. That is, unless he promptly faces the multiple challenges more effectively and honestly than he has so far. In a world of Internet linked democracies with women having voting rights, authoritarian patriarchs are doomed to fail, including Francis and any papal patriarch who may succeed him in a few years.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.