... when away goes the USCCB and makes an unexpected choice for president.
Well, that's the charitable way of putting it. The more accurate and more brutal truth is that the bishops seem to have banded together and slapped the guy who was expected to get the job across the face with an oily kipper.
This is a power play folks. Good thing or bad thing? I suspect a bit of both but power has decisively shifted.
I was thinking about that the other day when I read someone suggesting that Christoph Cardinal Schönborn might be the next pope. My first thought was, "How lovely to speculate about such a thing while the current pope is still alive." I know, it's what the press does but how utterly crass.
My second thought was, "No ill will to the good Cardinal but I suspect that he has as much chance of becoming Pope as I do of being the next world chess champion." And with every newly appointed cardinal, his chances get a little slimmer.
I know some people hate it and others love it, but the plain fact is that John Paul II really changed the church and Benedict is carrying that work on. And the kind of men who go into the priesthood are very different from those who did back in the 1950s and 1960s. Finally, the huge influx of Hispanic Catholics flooding into North America are really going to shake up the church.
Some will hate the changes and others will love them but the change is coming.
I'll say more about some issues raised by my earlier post on the conferences tomorrow.
But who, Jules, are left to shake up? Maybe the choir?
ReplyDeleteI don't disagree that John Paul II really changed the Church, he did. There are approximately 33% fewer Americans today who call themselves Catholic than the day he was "crowned" Pope. Education is a wonderful thing, and once the Hispanics become educated--as they are rapidly--they will follow the same route out the Church door as the other immigrant groups have done, unless the Church moves forward not backward.
ReplyDeleteI understand this argument but the other side uses exactly the same facts to reach an opposite conclusion. They say that the large number of Catholics who left the church coincides exactly with the period in which liberals dominated the USCCB.
ReplyDeleteWho's right? I don't know and I think anyone who is being honest will admit they don't know either. Social change tends to be overdetermined, meaning it's never one thing so much as a bunch of things working together.
All I am willing to say is that the results were an upset and that I think they shift a major change in the power relationship (both of which are pretty obvious conclusions). As to what happens next? We'll see.
I'm afraid my protestant self totally missed the political implications..?
ReplyDeleteI'm not surprised the issues would be opaque to anyone non-Catholic and probably even to most Catholics this stuff is inside baseball to a degree that most people would have a hard time parsing.
ReplyDeleteI'll say more in a new post above.
I agree with you that it was a combination of factors that led to people leaving the Church.
ReplyDeleteBut I think that the statistics show that more people left the Church after JPII became Pope than before. Still, the sheer length of his tenure (I refuse to use the work "reign") as Pope coincided with many other societal changes, which he apparently ignored. The only thing JPII was really interested in was liberating Poland from Communism, I think in his mind everything else was inconsequential--like Maciel and the Legionnaries of Christ for example.
Those who wish to return to the Church of the '50s are like the people who watch Mad Men and want to return to that era. In many cases they're not even old enough to remember what it was really like, and in any case they've idealized a past that never existed.