Another Conclave, Another Pope…

Next week the Cardinals will begin their closeted deliberations which should result in a new Occupant of the See of St. Peter. The speculation on the result–and the process–has filled social and traditional media. I’m not here to “make book” (literally for many people) on who will end up winning that contest, but a few observations are in order.

First, since Francis stacked the College of Cardinals so thoroughly, many believe that we will get yet another Pontiff in the mould of the recently passed Argentinian. In reality he wasn’t supposed to be elected in the first place, given that his predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI did a great deal of stacking of their own. But he was. When the white smoke emerged from the Sistine Chapel, I was in a Catholic hospital; I told them, “You better wake up, you’re getting a new boss.” Neither they nor I realised just how significant that statement was.

The truth is, however, that every conclave since Vatican II has been a nail biter in its own way. Since they “flung open the windows” of the Church there has always been a danger that someone would make a major pronouncement that would radically alter the idea and course of the Church, something I warned about back in 2005 in Just One Bull Away…. The greatest brake on that is the fact that the Church has taught that the Pope is infallible only since 1870; it taught the infallibility of the church long before that. Making such a change would undermine the confidence of the faithful in the institution once the reality of such a pronouncement sinks in. The progressives would be joyful, but the hard experience of Main Line Christianity in the U.S. indicates that they might stay but most others, over time, won’t.

Ultramontane Roman Catholicism is in a perpetual pickle because it insists on a) top-down governance and b) uniformity of life and practice, neither of which are a given in the history of the church, especially before Trent. That’s why Francis went after the Trads the way he did; he didn’t see an alternative spirituality (one well rooted in the history of the church) but a challenge to uniformity with the possibility that some day their idea would be the idea of the church. Like the Young Turks, who dispensed with the Ottoman millet system under the influence of European nationalism, he couldn’t see using the Trads as a way to advance the Church in places where it wasn’t making much progress (such as young people with children.) For the Young Turks the end result was the Armenian Massacre; for the Church, it was not so brutal but in ecclesiastical terms it was brutal enough.

For the rest of things, his ambiguous pronouncements produced more heat than light. The last time the Jesuits made those kinds of pronouncements, they got the Provincial Letters and eventual dissolution of the order (after another brutal suppression, this time of the Jansenists.) How this conclave comes out may determine whether such events come to pass. In the meanwhile Francis’ successor might consider undoing something that ultramontane Roman Catholicism was supposed to have dispensed with: la regale, or giving Yi Xinping and his subordinates the power to choose/approve Catholic bishops in China. Louis XVI and his ancestors, who wielded that kind of power, deserve an apology from their “infallible” church.

As for me, I took my leave because I had had enough, not of the rich intellectual and historical traditions, but because of the institutional machinations that plague Roman Catholicism. Until those change–and I’m not holding my breath no matter how this conclave comes out–the best way to be a part of those traditions is to be outside of the institutional Church.