I wish I articulated my views of popes and the papacy in Benedict's pontificate as it would have a stronger effect than at present, where it could sound like self-justification. However, I am saying nothing now that I have not said time and time again since John Paul II was pope.
All the case I will make is grounded in an intellectual position, the devotional aspect is not absent - this ties on the emotional that Maolsheachlann is mentioning. I am personally not a natural monarchist, I'm a republican (at least it was instilled into me at an early age at home and in school). I noticed the emotional effect when John Paul II's popemobile passed us on the Via Merulana in Rome on the last Corpus Christi of his pontificate. Bean Ui Shéaghdha was very excited (we had just been at the Papal Mass in St John Lateran), but I was more in the Percy French mode
Ok, I'm exaggerating - I have no animus against any of the Popes (though Paul VI can infuriate me, despite of
Humanae Vitae and the
Credo of the People of God); but I always accepted there was a distinction between the office and the man and had no great appreciation of the type of papal monarchism I would have found among people connected with Opus Dei. I did make a point of reading about the late John Paul I though - there has to be a reason why a man is selected to hold the office for such a short time (and I remember Papa Luciani's papacy, though I was young at the time). With Benedict, it was difficult. I read Ratzinger's writings and greatly admired them (they are largely why I am a Catholic today); I was delighted he was elected to the papacy. Some of my connexions in Germany, an older generation, said a German would never be elected Pope (i.e. so soon after the Third Reich; I know an elderly German who declined taking a position in a lay Catholic organisation on this very basis - Hibernicus probably knows whom and what I refer to - this refusal was a tremendous loss for the organisation in question). But I could say "
wir haben ein Bayer als Papst und ich freue mich" (I am overjoyed with our Bavarian Pope). The problem with a man I admired becoming Pope was a problem of separating this regard for the papacy as an office and the man who might hold it. I had to judge Joseph Ratzinger as I would judge Karol Wojtyla or Albino Luciani or Giovanni Battista Montini or now Jorge Bergoglio as Giuseppe Sarto/St Pius X said in another context:
nec plus, nec minus, nec alitur. Ratzinger differs from nearly every successive Pope who wasn't widely known before election, with the exception of
Hildebrand,
Prospero Lambertini and perhaps
Eugenio Pacelli, after whom a certain former
chief of staff of the Provisional IRA is named. But I think knowing Ratzinger a bit better than the cheerleaders helped me not to loose the run of myself during his pontificate. I also think his departure from office showed his own typical, scholarly and ultimately traditional approach to the papacy. I say traditional here in a way that corresponds to my own traditionalism rather than the ultramontanism of most traditionalists (and most liberals too if the truth be told) which is rooted in the 19th Century, particularly around the papacy of
Pio Nono.
Before I go on, let me say that there is a lot to be said for ultramontanism. The performance of a lot of national hierarchies (French and Spanish for example; and later Austrian) during the age of absolutism, the Baroque or Enlightenment period, shows this to be the case. From the French Revolution to the Italian
Risorgimento, the idea that the Papacy would vanish as an institution and the Pope would be merely an Italian archbishop. Though Pius VII revived the Jesuit Order, the
suppression by Clement XIV was a great blow to the most prominent advocates of papal authority in the age of Enlightenment (NB - recall which order Francis I is a member of; and remember he is the first religious order Pope for a
long time). Also remember there are said to be three popes in Rome, one being the
black pope, another being the
red pope and the one we all know. So there is certainly a Jesuit attitude to authority implicit in the current pontificate. But to recapitulate, the French revolutionaries announced the death of the last pope in
1799, which like reports of Mark Twain's death turned out to be greatly exaggerated, as did subsequent predictions by Italian revolutionaries. In fact the Papacy was considerable strengthened after the French revolution and its effects in Europe, and indeed the attacks on the Papacy by
French,
Italian and
Prussian governments in the 19th and early 20th centuries helped to strengthen it further. A figure like
Felicité de Lammenais could fully recognise this strength. Lammenais is someone I profoundly disagree with, but it is impossible not to admire him as he seems to have influenced all shades of Catholic opinion ever since, but he lived at a time when he could be an ultramontanist, liberal and traditionalist simultaneously. To understand this, one has to understand the shape of the Gallican episcopacy in France around the reign of
Charles X who hankered seriously back to the Ancien Regime. The fact is after the disaster of the French Revolution, the institution of the Papacy was a unifying factor for Catholicism for the rest of the 19th century. This is what the various factions are looking at.
When it comes to assessing the 19th Century, I think a lot of Catholics pay lip service to Newman when they are stronger admirers of Manning and Cullen. Now I don't want to run down either cardinal; both have much going for them, especially as builders and administrators. I have a friend, an elderly widow, who is very touched by the fact Cardinal Manning treasured his wife's personal prayer book and visited her grave on a very frequent basis. Though Cullen was an extremely dynamic prelate, I somehow think referring to him as Ireland's Carlo Borremeo as an overstatement. And Cullen's ultramontanism had its limits. The Holy See, I believe, would have preferred co-establishment of the Catholic Church with the Anglican Church (which was a proposal) where Cullen opted for the separation of Church and State which followed the Anglican
disestablishment. The disputes between Newman and both are not the point here; Newman on one hand and Cullen and Manning on the other had very different opinions on papal authority. The Archbishop of Tuam,
John MacHale had a similar, if not stronger, opinion as Newman on papal infallibility (this is immortalised in one of James Joyce's stories "Grace" in "Dubliners"). Cullen and McHale clearly didn't like each other, and the dispute between Cullen and Newman is well known. This was replicated elsewhere. In Croatia, for example, Bishop
Strossmayer, was quite similar in attitude to MacHale. There is an apocryphal story that the opposition of the Bishop of
Little Rock led to the headline in Arkansas of "Little Rock hits Big Rock". And there is the opposition by Rev Professor
Ignaz von Döllinger which led to the creation of the
Old Catholic Churches which Döllinger (Dowling in Joyce's story) never joined. Döllinger, initially an ultra-conservative, had a following in Munich and elsewhere in Bavaria which didn't go into schism but left the Bavarian church weakened for a couple of generations afterwards. I am not making the argument ad Hitlerum by saying that this was a contributory factor in the weakness of the Church in the face of the rise of Nazism in Munich in the 1920s. So there is a complex and multi-layered history behind this idea.
In regard to my own position, which is very much that of the inopportunists, it's coloured by a couple of perspectives. But let's begin with devotion. Bear in mind the two sources of revelation are the Scripture and Tradition - and I will appeal to both. Begin with Scripture, at which point any Protestant reader is going to be flabbergasted, but the Catholic view of the papacy is rooted in Scripture, especially the Gospels and the Acts. And not just the transmission of the keys in Matthew 16. The three-fold commission of Peter is reflected on Matthew 16, "and on this Rock, I build My Church", Luke 22 "Confirm thy brethren" and John 21 "Feed my Lambs etc". The incident of the encounter of the apostles with the Risen Lord in John 21 is almost a microcosm of the overall picture of Peter in the Gospel - casting the net over the side of the boat for fish in spite of previous lack of success, jumping enthusiastically into the water at the sight of the Lord, eating breakfast in the painful situation of a fire of coals, reminiscent of another coal fire at another time. To compound this, the Lord asks Peter three times if he loves Him. At one and the same time, there is the affirmation "flesh and blood has not revealed this to thee, but My Father in Heaven" and the rebuke "Get behind me Satan". Archbishop Fulton Sheen would say a chain is no stronger than its weakest link and we see Peter saying "it is good to be here" at the Transfiguration, but cutting off the High Priest's servant's ear in Gethsemane. If this picture of Peter is integrated into meditations on the rosary - it affirms the faith. Think of St John, the Apostle who stood by the foot of the cross, on the morning of the Resurrection. When Mary Magdalene told them the tomb was empty, John and Peter ran there. John got there first, but the crucial point is that he waited at the entrance for Peter and allowed, the Pope, go in first before he went in himself. Both St Luke and St Paul affirm that the Risen Lord appeared first to Peter, though nothing is said of this manifestation. In all Gospels, Peter first proclaims that Jesus is Christ, though it is subtle in John "Lord to whom shall we go, Thou alone hast the words of life" - both are in the context of the feeding of the multitude which prefigures the Last Supper and in John it comes after the discourse on the Bread of Life and in the Synoptics, it comes before the Transfiguration, which prefigures the passion, crucifixion, resurrection and ascension. In a devotion which is based on Scripture and strongly expressed in the liturgy (and I am very much of the opinion that the extraordinary form and the eastern liturgies are superior in expression of what's in scripture than the ordinary form; but I also believe that this is not transmitted very well through Low Mass or choral dominated Masses; I believe it is necessary to draw the worshipper right into the Mass, with all the expressions of Old and New Testament. I think the Eastern Catholics a lot more successful at this).
The scripture finds other expressions too, and a survey of the
high crosses of Monasterboice will show. In the first millenium, the pilgrimage to Rome was an important focus for Latin Christendom. The poem in Old Irish:
is translated:
shows this. But the point is that this can only have meaning where the pilgrimage to Rome is commonplace. And in the early middle ages, the pilgrimage to Rome was an arduous and and dangerous undertaking but it built up a sense of shared faith which forged a fellowship in a way that the institution of the
Hajj among the
Five Pillars of Islam is comparable. From the point of view of secular historians, the Roman pilgrimage was very important as the early Irish kings came in direct contact with their continental counterparts which led to modernising in Ireland. One factor which gives the lie to Shakespeare's depiction of the 11th King of Scots,
Mac Bethadwas that he left Scotland in a stable state that he could go on pilgrimage to Rome and return without a major upheaval. This is the first millennium picture of Rome which Benedict was somehow close to.
There were many negatives too. If Pugio talks of incompetant and downright evil popes, one should look no further than the
Counts of Tusculum who made the
Borgias look like pious boys.
St Peter Damian excoriates these and others in his
Book of Gomorrah, particularly
Theophylactus of Tusculum. The reform of the Church that came after, particularly between the pontificates of
St Leo IX and St Gregory VII gives me temptations to snapshot traditionalism, in 1054 comes one of the worst blunders in the history of the Church with the
excommunication of Michael Cerularius. The Hildebrandine Reform spread outwards, in this country noteworthy in the career of
St Malachy of Armagh. But if papal authority did expand, perhaps up to the time of
Innocent III, a century later Philip the Fair of France could force Clement V into
suppressing the Templars, something Enda Kenny is apparently expert on. The Babylonian Captivity of the papacy, the Great Schism of the West and the struggle between papalists and conciliarists which reached some conclusion after
Pius II became pope. But the Reformation took place then, with the events of the Counter-Reformation such as the Council of Trent and the foundation of the Society of Jesus which solidified the perception of the Papacy in Catholic eyes. I've already given a picture of the post-enlightenment expansion of the papacy above.
The Holy See received a particular importance in Ireland due to the Penal Period and then Cardinal Cullen afterwards, but the influence of Daniel O'Connell saw a politics develop which had more in common with Belgium than the Catholic states in Europe. But the late 19th century saw the collapse of these with enhanced papal prestige in the early 20th century. What we are looking at now is a work in progress in regard to the relationship between the papacy and the Church. I think that Benedict XVI more than anyone else had the measure of the limitations of the Papacy. Francis probably has an Ignatian vision of the papacy, but I don't believe he has the energy or vision necessary to effect this, which I think is a good thing overall. The Catholic world, ironically for an institution nearly 2000 years old is on a learning curve and in the case of the faithful, we need to learn how to be faithful when everything around us seems to be going to hell and the pope doesn't seem to be helping.
We have heard about filial affection and the necessity of viewing the pope positively. But first, pray for the Pope. That's our duty. The Americans say we get the politicians we deserve because of how we vote (true); Catholics get the religious, priests, bishops and popes we deserve, commensurate with their prayers. If anything, we have been blessed in our popes. Secondly, look before you leap. If an allegation is made in respect of Pope Francis, study it carefully. I have found on study that the liberal interpretation has yet to stand up. Remember the Pope is a Jesuit. In the event that the Pope does something that needs criticism, has anyone considered writing to him? Also, consider the papacy in the light of scripture and tradition as above and I am sure many of you know things not listed here - I only wished to give a flavour of how to think.