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John XXIII, Benedict's
Forgotten Pope?
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The
late Father Alcuin Coyle, a Franciscan Friar who worked at the Franciscan curia
in Rome for many years and had a wonderful nose for Roman Gossip once told me
that the Vatican was resisting the beatification of John XXIII despite having
over 20 miracles to the credit of his prayers.
Of course, eventually the powers that held sway at the time had to give
in and permit the beatification as the clamor of the faithful was too
great. To balance out the ticket the
symbol of ultramontane pre-Vatican II Catholicism, Pius IX (pope from 1846 to
1878) was beatified in the same ceremony.
There seems to be little enthusiasm in the Vatican for the movement to
push John XXIII on to sainthood. John
remains a very popular figure among rank and file Catholics but is seen by many
in the Vatican as a traitor to all they have worked for and believe in because
of the way his Council almost overturned their stranglehold on their
bureaucratic power.
The
Roman bureaucracy had long been building up a monopoly on Church
authority. I am not speaking of the Pope
here and of whatever authority is proper to the Petrine Office, but rather of
the immense officialdom that oversees the day to day administration of the
Church. Throughout the nineteenth century
the Roman Curia expanded its power as modern communications—originally the
telegraph, later the telephone, the radio, and television, and in recent
decades the internet has facilitated direct and immediate communication between
Rome and dioceses scattered around the world.
In the Napoleonic era and then at the Council of Vienna, concordats with
the European powers took away the rights of the clergy in most dioceses to
elect their bishops and replaced canonical election with papal
appointments. Missionary countries—and
at the time that included the United States—were never granted the rights of
episcopal election. After Vatican I and the Decree on Infallibility in 1870 the
papacy was supreme in its authority over the western Church and the Curia ever
increasingly tightened its stranglehold over all decision making. The papacy of St Pius X was a time of
particular centralization with the Machiavellian Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val
as Pius’s chief minister. The final
years of Pius XII, particularly the years after his 1954 illness, were another
period in which the Curial officials were able to strengthen their own power at
the expense of the pope on one hand and local bishops on the other.
The
stranglehold that this bureaucracy held on Church decision making was one of
the things that John XXIII was determined to break and his calling the Council
brought the bishops of the world together to provide a challenge to the Curia
as a Council not only provided the bishops with a voice of their own but had
the authority to change structures of Church administration. This they did—or attempted to do—with the
Conciliar Decrees. Lumen Gentium (The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Gaudium et Spes (The Pastoral
Constitution on the Church), and Christus
Dominus (The Decree on Bishops) effectively redefined the role of the Curia
and its relationship to the bishops. The
trouble was, however, that the bishops went home at the end of the Council and
the Curia stayed. The bishops had left a wounded animal. The election of John Paul II marked a policy
of return to the status quo before the Council.
The Curia had already begun its program of reconsolidating its power in
the final years of Paul VI when the Pope, all but paralyzed by a combination of
age and depression resulting from the hostility with which his encyclical Humanae Vitae was received, more and
more withdrew from everyday governance of the Church. Who knows what John Paul I would have done
had he lived, but John Paul II aggressively supported a return to centralized
power. Some say that John Paul never
understood the idea of collegiality and the role of his brother bishops, but I
think he understood it well and rejected it. Shared authority didn’t fit into
his somewhat narrow experience of having lived under totalitarian regimes for
most of his life and the experience of the Polish Church that required lockstep
obedience to the Primate if the Church were to resist the Communist rulers of
Poland after World War II. John Paul may
have thought that restoring the Curia to power strengthened the papacy but in
fact he could never get the control over the Curia himself. It had become an agency “under” the pope only
in name as various desk-jockeys from mighty Cardinals to lowly monsignori began issuing decrees and decisions
independent of the Pope and of one another—creating a morass of contradictory
policies coming from Rome.
Benedict
may have thought that he could alter that—take control of the wild animal and
tame it under his leadership but he has been mistaken. In fact, the whole problem of the papal butler, Paolo Gabriele,
stealing papal papers and turning them over to journalists was meant, at least
in the butler’s mind, of exposing that the Holy Father is no more than a
captive of a cabal of Curialists that are steering the Church in the direction
they think it should go. Well, God bless
Pope Benedict but perhaps more than a “year of faith” commemorating the Second
Vatican Council we need a John XXIII and a new Council to pick up the pieces
and put us back on track.
Incidentally, today is the 54th anniversary Pope John XXIII's coronation
Incidentally, today is the 54th anniversary Pope John XXIII's coronation
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