In a recent book (Frankly: Six Discussions with the Cardinal), Cardinal Godfried Danneels of Mechelen-Brussels predicts that, if Pope John Paul II becomes incapacitated, he might resign. This was a forecast made previously by Bishop Karl Lehmann of Mainz, president of the German bishops’ conference. Bishop Lehmann later said that he had been misunderstood, while Cardinal Danneels’ remarks brought an unusually curt response from an official Vatican spokesman: “That’s his opinion.”

In a sense what the two prelates said was almost tautological, in that if John Paul were truly unable to perform his duties, no doubt some arrangement would be made. But despite the Pope’s sometimes obvious physical feebleness, there is no evidence whatever that he is not fully able to carry out his responsibilities. Indeed, his continued competence may be precisely what motivates speculation about his resignation.

This speculation by two important prelates is itself perhaps indication that no resignation is contemplated—since if it were, members of the hierarchy would say nothing publicly about it. Bishop Lehmann’s remarks, followed by Cardinal Danneels’, perhaps to be followed soon by still others, seem obviously to be trial balloons. Speakers “predict” what they hope will happen, intending their predictions to help bring it about. When prominent prelates openly speculate about the Pope’s retirement, it is for the purpose of making the idea more acceptable.

Trial balloons?
The fact that the two bishops have spoken publicly might also mean that the idea has been proposed to the Pope and has been rejected, and that an attempt is now being made to mount public pressure for such an action, to discredit the Holy Father by suggesting that important prelates believe that he is no longer fit for office.

The history of the papacy is full of stories of intrigue and conspiracy, most of them far more sordid than this one. Most such intrigues have represented personal or familial rivalries among papabili, but in 2000 the major players should not be accused of mere personal ambition, or even of partisanship in the narrow sense. They sincerely want what they think is best for the Church, but in some ways their sincerity is potentially even more damaging to ecclesial integrity than the petty factionalism and ambition of the past.

Ever since John Paul was shot in 198l, there has been speculation that his papacy is in its last days. Recently this speculation has been fueled (as in Cardinal Danneels’ case) by the surmise that the Pope may step aside once the millennium year is past. However, it is by no means impossible that John Paul could serve another ten years. Scenarios about the next pontificate which circulated in 1990 are now completely obsolete, and those being circulated now may before long be equally irrelevant.

But the lengths to which certain prelates now go to suggest the imminent end of the pontificate reflect an awareness shared by every knowledgeable person: the next papal conclave will be perhaps the most crucial since 1534, when the election of Paul III (although it was not evident at first) cemented the hierarchy’s willingness at last to commit the Church to genuine reform.

It is by no means coincidental that the two prelates who have openly speculated about John Paul’s retirement are both Western Europeans; nor is it coincidental that the acknowledged favorite “liberal” candidate for the papacy is also a Western European: Cardinal Carlo Martini of Milan. The great decision which will eventually face the cardinals is not primarily a geographical one, but it manifests itself roughly along geographical lines.

That Cardinal Martini is the liberal candidate for pope is highly ironic because, at the time of the Second Vatican Council and for some years afterwards, liberals constantly decried Italian dominance of the Roman Curia and demanded that it be internationalized. Under Pope Paul VI that was achieved, and it has been extended under the present Pope. Now, however, the Italian cardinals, including some of those in the Curia, appear to be somewhat “left of center” in their ecclesiastical views, and the bêtes noires of the liberals within the College of Cardinals are the German Joseph Ratzinger, the African Francis Arinze, the Colombian Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, and other non-Europeans. It is ironic, too, that the desired election of a non-Italian pope has bitterly disappointed those same liberals.

Once again, much more is stake than mere national rivalries. The present split goes back at least to the time of the Council itself, and it continues in the ceaseless battle to define the Council’s meaning.

The European influence
Pope John XXIII apparently summoned the Council because he thought the Church was in a healthy condition and that the time had come to mount a major campaign to evangelize the world, the “new Pentecost” of which he spoke. Inevitably, however, that great vision of world evangelization required a certain amount of ecclesial self-scrutiny, and arguably the Council was diverted from John’s original purpose into a preoccupation with the Church’s own internal state, a preoccupation which has only deepened in the ensuing decades.

There was remarkably little real disagreement at the Council, as shown by the fact that every one of its decrees was approved almost without dissent. It might be doubted whether the almost 2,000 prelates were always moved to profound unanimity, but a large majority trustingly followed the conciliar leadership, including signals from two popes, as to what was necessary for the well-being of the Church.

Disproportionately, the conciliar leaders were prelates from five countries: Germany, France, Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands—countries which possessed the oldest and richest Catholic traditions and boasted the most vibrant Catholic intellectual life. Prelates from elsewhere often found themselves confronted by ideas they had never heard before, ideas traceable mainly to Western European thinkers.

This does not imply a sinister plot; some of the theologians who influenced the Council (Ratzinger himself, notably) were unimpeachably orthodox. What was significant was less their ideas than what often lay behind those ideas, the usually unspoken concerns of the Western European prelates who played the leading roles on the floor of the Council.

At the beginning of the Council, prelates from, for example, the United States, Ireland, or Australia might have been inclined, if asked what changes needed to be made, not to propose any, on the grounds that Catholic life in their countries was flourishing. But the same could not be said in most of the European nations whose representatives did so much to shape the direction of the Council. In those countries (except perhaps for the Netherlands) church attendance and religious vocations had been declining for some years, and there was a palpable secular spirit. In some ways those countries were religiously top-heavy; they spawned a brilliant Catholic intellectual life even as the Church’s popular base continuously weakened. Thus Western European prelates came to the Council with a concern most of their fellow bishops did not have to face: how to stem the decline.

Responses to the Enlightenment
Why the decline had gone farther in Western Europe than anywhere else in the world is not entirely clear, but at the root of any explanation is the phenomenon of the 18th-century Enlightenment, which placed faith and reason in opposition to one another, declared Christianity a pernicious superstition, and announced the “liberation” of mankind from all authority. In some places (notably England, hence also America) the hostility between the Enlightenment and Christianity was blunted. But on the Continent it was often naked, and over a long period of time it took a significant toll on religious belief.

Faced with this situation, the leaders of Western European Catholicism (and even more of Protestantism), after 150 years of resistance, eventually sought accommodation with this aggressive secularism, hoping that by showing the Church to be open-minded and rational they could disarm the hostility and once again make religion credible. Naturally they could not surrender entirely to the secular spirit, and for a time they were concerned to make a clear distinction between what was essential to the faith and what were expendable cultural forms. But Western European Catholicism gradually got into the habit of merely deferring to the secularists, of assuming that the Church had everything to learn from its cultured despisers but little to teach them. Supported by an impressive array of influential thinkers, the leaders of Western European Catholicism formulated a strategy, as a pledge of honesty and good will, of going as far as possible to meet the secularists’ concerns, to accept the general legitimacy of secular criticisms.

The conciliar decree Gaudium et Spes struck a balance between openness to the world on the one hand and an equally strong insistence that the world is finally lost without the Gospel. The two strands of the decree—positive sympathy toward human aspirations, unflinching judgments about the ultimate inadequacy of humanism—were not contradictory, but synthesizing them required a subtlety and profundity of mind which were quickly lost amid the post-conciliar euphoria.

No more than anyone else did the conciliar fathers foresee the worldwide cultural upheaval which erupted almost immediately after they adjourned: the systematic assault on all settled beliefs we know now as the 60s phenomenon. Rather than having the leisure to ponder the conciliar teachings, to allow their meaning gradually to unfold, Catholics found themselves immediately having to confront every kind of question in an atmosphere of almost hysterical frenzy. The slightest hesitation in the face of these powerful cultural pressures was then condemned as a betrayal both of humanity and of the true spirit of the Council.

The Church in the Netherlands immediately and proudly thrust itself forward as the laboratory which would show the rest of the Church how renewal should be achieved. Within an amazingly brief period of time practically every religious certainty was itself under attack, and it became obvious that Dutch Catholicism was prepared to remake itself in the most revolutionary ways in order to accommodate the culture. At least at first, churches in other countries did not go quite so far or so fast, but very quickly the Dutch pattern attracted admirers seeking to duplicate it elsewhere in the Western world. The Western European hierarchy could not endorse every aspect of this model of renewal, but they fell into a policy of almost limitless toleration, of only the mildest efforts towards moderation. Above all the strategy of accommodation was itself not questioned, only some of its undeniable excesses.

These leaders, with occasional dissenting voices, in effect made an act of faith that a headlong plunge into modern culture would make the Church more credible and more popular than she had been, would begin attracting the skeptics to her embrace. But before long the accommodationists essentially had no other strategy except that of adjusting to the world, so that “renewal” simply came to mean identifying the most pressing secular movements—Marxism, the sexual revolution, feminism, environmentalism, etc.—and providing religious support for them, every independent religious belief condemned as an obstacle to human progress.

Very quickly avant-garde Dutch Catholicism burnt itself out, to the point where the very existence of what was supposed to be the universal model of renewal is now scarcely even remembered in other countries. But, ironically, the experiment in the Netherlands did have lasting importance, although not the kind its admirers claimed for it. It is the most compelling example of what happens to a society where religion willingly surrenders its moral authority.

Nowhere was the accommodationist strategy tried as thoroughly as in the Netherlands, but it has been tried to one degree or another in most countries of the world, and it has manifestly failed, leading to an increasingly moribund Church and an increasingly secular society. (Thus a few years ago the Holy See had to order the German bishops to cease providing women with certificates which allowed them to have abortions legally.)

The urge to accommodate
As has often been pointed out, it is possible, by looking at the Anglican Church in England, the United States, and other “advanced” countries, to see exactly what the Catholic Church would be like if the accommodationists realized their agenda. The strategy of accommodation merely confirms the secularist assumption that Christianity is no longer credible and has nothing of importance to say. Hence it directly contributes to the Church’s continued decline.

No doubt some of the hierarchy in countries where accommodationism reigns have some misgivings, and no doubt they recognize that the Church appears to be in a much healthier state in those countries which have not followed the Western European lead. But the basic assumption of accommodationism is the belief that sooner or later all societies are fated to travel the same historical trajectory. Thus, despite its seemingly moribund condition, Western European Catholicism does after all provide the model for other countries, which will inevitably undergo the same experiences. This is an assumption which is imperialist in a radical sense: the belief that Europe necessarily leads the world and that no society can travel a different path.

The election of John Paul II was ostensibly part of the “modernizing” of the Church in that it broke the Italian monopoly on the papacy. But whatever the cardinals may have expected at the time, his election also meant that accommodationism would be rejected, with the new Pope coming from a Church which had not had the luxury of pursuing accommodation, but had profited from the opportunity to recognize the failure of accommodation in the West. (A few years ago retired Cardinal Franz Koenig of Vienna, reputed to have played a major role in John Paul’s election, allowed himself to make strong public criticisms of the pontiff, suggesting that the cardinal now regrets his actions in the 1978 conclave.)

Beyond Europe?
But John Paul’s unusually long pontificate has by no means achieved the complete defeat of accommodationism, not least because the chief failure of his pontificate has been the failure to use the power of appointment to put the government of the Church firmly in the hands of prelates who share the Pope’s vision. Those who now urge him to step down are men whom he named to high office, and it is an open question whether a majority within the College of Cardinals shares his outlook.

The accommodationists at least sometimes sense that they are losing, not only because of actions on the part of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith but because most of the signs of ecclesial health—religious vocations and lay movements, for example—can be seen in orthodox quarters. But having committed themselves to the accommodationist strategy almost 40 years ago, liberal prelates can scarcely turn back now. To do so would require a fundamental change of heart, an admission of crucial errors of judgment which have adversely affected the spiritual lives of millions of people. Despite all evidence to the contrary, accommodationists must allow themselves to believe that their strategy for the renewal of the Church will yet bear fruit, not merely accelerate the continued decline.

The next pope, even in the unlikely event that he were Cardinal Martini, will not be an avowed accommodationist. All that would be required for accommodationism to triumph, however, would be papal passivity: refraining from teaching controversial doctrines, tolerating dubious enterprises, making ambiguous pronouncements about disputed matters.

Although even the most liberal bishop would never say so, the division within Catholicism now is between those who continue to regard the Church as a divinely ordained institution whose teachings derive from God’s own revelation, and those who see the Church primarily as a human community, a group of people who in some vague sense look towards Jesus as the spiritual center of their lives but possess no special wisdom, no ultimately saving truth, other than what is available to all sincere people. This explains the fury which has greeted Cardinal Ratzinger’s issuance of Dominus Iesus, a document which merely reiterates Jesus’ role as the only redeemer of mankind and the unique truth of the Catholic Church, classical doctrines which are now declared in effect to be heresy.

In the Western world some branches of the Church, notably in the United States, manifest both sides of this divide and are the arena of often bitter conflict. In some parts of the non-Western world it appears that the accommodationist mentality, at least as regards secularism, has had little impact.

In a peculiar way Western accommodationists are themselves the opposite of “multicultural,” in that their agenda is essentially the agenda of the bourgeoisie, technologically advanced West, their understanding of truth is essentially the understanding formulated by the European Enlightenment of the 18th century. Although they pay lip service to the idea that the Church can no longer be seen as essentially Western, their view of reality seems to be defined by the editorial pages of the major Western newspapers.

The dynamic of recent Catholic history might plausibly suggest that, having gone outside Italy to find a pope in 1978, for the first time in over 450 years, it is almost inevitable that the time has now come for the College of Cardinals to look beyond Europe, and it is ironic in the extreme that some Western European prelates are now engaged in what seems almost a conspiracy to restore ecclesiastical hegemony to a part of the world which appears to be, at least for the time being, religiously exhausted.

The Conclave That Never Happened

Among Catholics in general, and Vatican-watchers in particular, there is always an impulse—not always a healthy one—to identify the next Pontiff. The following quotations, drawn from publications that appeared in print six years ago, should drive home the pitfalls of this pastime.

“Once again the Pope’s health is a matter of interest and concern, and that, in turn, raises the issue of papal succession. The Holy Father has fallen twice in recent months, breaking first his arm and then his hip.”

—Rev. Richard McBrien National Catholic Reporter
June 17, 1994