ROME LETTER: The frail and ailing 81-year-old Pope is bent double like a question mark, with the unspoken question being: who exactly is running the show, writes Paddy Agnew.
"WE have a Pope who is literally bent double like a question mark. We don't know if he can function for a full day and the problem is that any bureaucracy will fill a power vacuum. People (in the Curia) will keep telling you that he's fine but there's no way to check it out.
"The real problem though goes back to the 1983 Code of Canon Law which failed to make any provision for circumstances in which the Pope is mentally or physically incapable of holding office, if he falls into a coma or something terrible. For example, where would America be if Ronald Reagan were still president, he is now suffering so badly from Alzheimer's that he doesn't even remember being president".
The speaker is Father Richard McBrien, Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, and author of the recently published Lives of the Saints (Harper, San Francisco). He made the above remarks during a lively news conference with Vatican correspondents in Rome last week.
Observations similar to his are often heard in and around the Vatican, sometimes even from junior Curia figures but always rigorously off the record. In his forthright manner, however, Father McBrien put his finger on one of the many difficult and delicate questions surrounding this late phase of the reign of John Paul II.
The frail and ailing 81-year-old Pope is indeed bent double like a question mark, with the unspoken question being: who exactly is running the show? Close collaborators of the Pope (and indeed a whole plethora of visiting diplomats, government heads and VIPs) always respond, without hesitation, that appearances can be deceiving and that the Pope is mentally as alive and alert as ever.
Presuming that to be the case, though, we are still left with the other issue raised by Father McBrien regarding a physically or mentally incapable Pope at some unwanted moment in the future. Asked last week what he made of occasional media speculation that the Pope had covered such an eventuality with a letter of resignation, reportedly now in the safe keeping of Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Father McBrien pointed out that such a letter has no basis in Canon Law and could always be contested as false.
Whatever the future may hold for John Paul II, Father McBrien does not accept the oft-repeated cliché that his successor will be a carbon copy of the theologically conservative, politically innovative Polish Pope. The reasoning is that since the Pope has "packed" the College of Cardinals, having himself appointed more than 90 per cent of the Cardinal Electors, then the next Pope will follow the broad outlines of his epoch-making pontificate. Father McBrien disagrees. "History shows that the longer a Pope remains in office, the less likely it is that he will be followed by a photo-copy of himself. There is a pendulum effect at work here.After all, John XXIII was totally different from Pius XII, and Paul VI very different from John XXIII and John Paul I very different from Paul VI and so on.
"I also believe that people (the cardinals) will look for a transitionary Pope, someone not in his 50s, or 60s or probably even 70s. Someone who will give us a chance to catch our breath and work out where to move at the end of this long pontificate".
Father McBrien suggests that while John Paul II has been outstanding on foreign policy - social justice, human rights, the downfall of East bloc communism and the projection of a positive image of God in the world - he has been less successful on domestic policy. "The internal government of the Church is in serious difficulty and the next Pope will have to reign in the Curia, will have to respect the role of local bishops. Under this Pope, there has been a re-centralisation of authority that runs contrary to the spirit of Vatican II."
Father McBrien argues that in the modern Catholic Church, there has been an "inflation" of the Papal office with the Pope functioning as some kind of thermostat which determines what a good Catholic should be. "In the end, a good Catholic is the one absolutely in line with the Pope and this leads to schizophrenia."