ATICAN CITY — With a puff of white smoke from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel
and to the cheers of thousands of rain-soaked faithful, a gathering of Catholic
cardinals picked a new pope from among their midst on Wednesday. The name of the
new pope, the 266th pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, by tradition would not
be revealed until he appeared on a balcony on the front of St. Peter’s Basilica.
“Habemus papam!,” the crowd shouted in Latin, waving
their umbrellas. “We have a pope!”
He inherits a church wrestling with an array of
challenges that intensified during his predecessor, Benedict XVI — from a priest
shortage and growing competition from evangelical churches in the Southern
Hemisphere where most of the world’s Catholics live, to a sexual abuse crisis
that has undermined the church’s moral authority in the West, to difficulties
governing the Vatican itself.
Benedict abruptly ended his troubled eight-year papacy
last month, announcing he was no longer up to the rigors of the job. He became
the first pontiff in 598 years to resign. The 115 cardinals who are under the
age of 80 and eligible to vote chose their new leader after two days of voting.
Before beginning the voting by secret ballot in the
Sistine Chapel on Tuesday, in a cloistered meeting known as a conclave, the
cardinals swore an oath of secrecy in Latin, a rite designed to protect
deliberations from outside scrutiny — and to protect cardinals from earthly
influence as they seek divine guidance.
The conclave followed more than a week of intense,
broader discussions among the world’s cardinals where they discussed the
problems facing the church and their criteria for its next leader.
“We spoke among ourselves in an exceptional and free
way, with great truth, about the lights, but also about shadows in the current
situation of the Catholic Church,” Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna, a
theologian known for his intellect and his pastoral touch, told reporters
earlier this week.
“The pope’s election is something substantially
different from a political election,” Cardinal Schönborn said, adding that the
role was not “the chief executive of a multinational company, but the spiritual
head of a community of believers."
Indeed, Benedict was selected in 2005 as a caretaker
after the momentous papacy of John Paul II, but the shy theologian appeared to
show little inclination toward management. His papacy suffered from crises of
communications — with Muslims, Jews and Anglicans — that, along with a sex abuse
crisis that raged back to life in Europe in 2010, evolved into a crisis of
governance. Critics of Benedict’s secretary of state, Cardinal
Tarcisio Bertone, said he had difficulties in running the Vatican and appeared
more interested in the Vatican’s ties to Italy than to the rest of the world.
The Vatican is deeply concerned about the fate of Christians in the war-torn
Middle East.
The new pope will also inherit power struggles over
the management of the Vatican bank, which must continue a process of meeting
international transparency standards or risk being shut out of the mainstream
international banking system. In one of his final acts as pope, Benedict
appointed a German aristocrat, Ernst von Freyberg, as the bank’s new president.
He will have to help make the Vatican bureaucracy —
often seen as a hornet’s nest of infighting Italians — work more efficiently for
the good of the church. After years in which Benedict and John Paul helped
consolidate more power at the top, many liberal Catholics also hope that the
next pope will also give local bishops’ conferences more decision-making power
to help respond to the needs of the faithful.
The reform of the Roman Curia, which runs the Vatican,
“is not conceptually hard, it’s hard on a political front but it will take five
minutes for someone who has the strength. You get rid of the spoil system and
that’s it,” said Alberto Melloni, the author of numerous books on the Vatican
and the Second Vatican Council. The hard things are “if you want a permanent
consultation of bishops’ conferences,” he added.
For Mr. Melloni, foreign policy and the church’s
vision of Asia would be crucial to the next pope. “If Roman Catholicism was
capable of learning Greek while it was speaking Aramaic, of learning Celtic
while it was speaking Latin, now it either has to learn Chinese or ‘ciao,'” he
said, using the Italian world for “goodbye.”
Ahead of the election of a new pope, cardinals said
they were looking for “a pope that understands the problems of the Church at
present” and who is strong enough to tackle them, said Cardinal Miloslav Vlk,
the archbishop emeritus of Prague who participated in the general congregations
but was not eligible to vote in a conclave.
He said those problems included reforming the Roman
Curia, handling the pedophilia crisis and cleaning up the Vatican bank, which
has been working to meet international transparency standards.
“He needs to be capable of solving these issues,”
Cardinal Vlk said as he walked near the Vatican this week, adding that the next
pope needs “to be open to the world, to the troubles of the world, to society,
because evangelization is a primary task, to bring the Gospel to people.” The sex abuse crisis remains a troubling issue for the
church, especially in English-speaking countries where victims sued dioceses
found to have moved around abusive priests.
On Wednesday, news reports in California showed that
one cardinal elector, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, the former archbishop of Los
Angeles, the diocese and an ex-priest had reach a settlement of almost $10
million in four child sexual abuse cases, according to the victims’ lawyers.
Becoming pope also has a human dimension. In one of
his final speeches as pope before he retired on Feb. 18, Benedict said that his
successor would need to be prepared to lose some of his privacy.
0 comment(s):
Post a Comment