Martin Henry
IN LIFE, and certainly in death, John Paul II drew the whole world to himself. Across religious, political and cultural barriers, people have found a firm centre in his global leadership. A conclave of the 117 scarlet-robed voting Cardinals convenes next Monday in the city of the seven mountains, the seat of the Church, to select a successor to occupy the office of supreme authority in things spiritual and things temporal, in matters heavenly, matters earthly and matters in the lower realms.
The American Republic, now the world's only political super-power, does not dip its flag as other nations do before the head of state of the country in which the Olympic Games are held. But we see the awesome spectacle of President George W. Bush and former presidents Bush and Clinton on their knees before the body of the head of the tiny Vatican state.
The princes of the Church should have no great difficulty with the new papal mandate next week: It will be to continue with the extraordinarily successful pontifical work, that is the bridge-building work, of the illustrious Pontifex Maximus John Paul II, to heal the rifts within the Church and within Christendom and to consolidate papal authority before whom "princes bend the knee and kings their glory bring".
The real question is which of their number can best advance such a clear mandate. John Paul II was the first non-Italian pope in 450 years and there has not been a non-European for much longer. The numerical centre of gravity of Roman Catholicism is now in the Third World, particularly in Latin America, and is poor and non-white.
If the Church were a democratic institution concerned purely with spiritual matters this might have been a primary consideration. But the restoration and consolidation of its sorely missed temporal power and influence, concerns for its financial base, and its conservative dedication to tradition so greatly exemplified by John Paul II are likely to be more dominant factors.
NOVELISTIC SCENARIO
In his masterfully realistic novel of history and prediction, Vatican, Malachi Martin, a former Jesuit professor and Vatican insider, paints a graphic picture of a conclave after John Paul II. The result was the elevation to the papacy of an American monsignor who had been secretly elevated to Cardinal by John Paul II. That novelistic scenario is not likely to play out as Martin envisaged it. But the writer is making a larger point.
The Church will be using its highest office to build a strong bridge to the political super-power of the day as its key strategic geopolitical objective as it has done with other powers in the past. Cambridge historian John Cornwell reveals in his book, Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, how the political manoeuvres of Eugenio Pacelli on behalf of the temporal power of the Vatican helped to precipitate not one but two world wars. The Catholic Cornwell had set out to defend Pius XII but ended up in a 'state of moral shock "The material I had gathered, amounted not to an exoneration but to a wider indictment," Cornwell wrote.
Malachi Martin prognosticates elsewhere in 'The Keys of this Blood' that "a no holds barred competition involving every human being on earth is on about who will establish the first one-world system of government that has ever existed in the society of nations." With the USSR/Russia safely dead as a major player and Bush on his knees at the Vatican, calculated collaboration rather than competition will be more the order of business.
Reagan and John Paul II brought down the Soviet Union via Solidarity in the Pope's native Poland. This is a far cry from the rocky relationship between the Church and the assassinated President Lincoln. Lincoln publicly accused the Church of fomenting the secession of the slavery-defending South which led to the Civil War. Pius IX wrote to Jefferson Davis addressing him as the President of the Confederacy, making the Vatican the only foreign power to recognise the South.
During the Lincoln presidency, Pius IX published his Syllabus of Errors, elements of which attacked fundamental principles of the American republic which Lincoln was fighting to preserve, principles anchored in the Constitution itself. The Syllabus condemned notions of freedom of conscience and religion, of salvation outside of the unerring Catholic Church, of separation of church and state, of the Church not possessed of temporal power nor authorised to use force to enforce its dogmas. Not one of these has been repudiated, nor indeed can be repudiated, by an infallible Church and Pontiff.
An Anglophone pope with a multi-faith background, a pope with vast diplomatic skills, experience and connections, a pope who was shaped by John Paul the Great, a pope very much like the pope of Malachi Martin's informed imagination may well be selected at conclave as the ideal.
Martin Henry is a communications specialist.
