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RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS THE NEXT POPE’S AGENDA TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Andrew Brown Producer: Jim Frank Editor: Nicola Meyrick BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 6252 Broadcast Date: 28.12.03 Repeat Date: Tape Number: Duration: Taking part in order of appearance: Eamon Duffy Professor of History of Christianity, Cambridge University John Allen Vatican correspondent of ‘National Catholic Reporter’ Father Richard John Neuhaus Priest of archdiocese of New York Editor of ‘First Things’ President of Institute on Religious and Public Life in New York Timothy Radcliffe Dominican Friar at Oxford Former Master General of Dominican Order Sister Christine Schenk Runs ‘Future Church’ in Cleveland, Ohio Cardinal O’Brien Head of Catholic Church in Scotland Archbishop of St. Andrew’s, Edinburgh John Wilkins Editor of British Catholic weekly ‘The Tablet’ Sister Margaret Scott President of the Conference of Religious Men and Women In England and Wales BROWN: There are more than a thousand million Roman Catholics in the world – probably as many members of this one Christian denomination as there are Muslims, and their number continues to grow. The Vatican has its own seat at the United Nations. This is not just a religion; it’s also the most completely multi-national organisation in the world today and it’s governed in a way that’s unique. Eamon Duffy, Professor of the History of Christianity, at Cambridge University. DUFFY: The Pope is an absolute monarch. He’s subject to the judgement of nobody and his powers in the Catholic Church are absolutely enormous. For example, he now appoints almost all the bishops. And although the second Vatican Council enunciated principles of collegiality – that is shared responsibility among the whole episcopate – in practice, if the Pope chooses to interpret that as meaning they must all agree with him, that’s what happens. BROWN: And that is what has happened? DUFFY: That is what has happened. BROWN: The Pope is an absolute monarch. That does not mean he’s omnipotent. Popes can command obedience, but they can’t compel belief. Pope John Paul II has accomplished more than almost anyone else who held the office. He’s successfully navigated the fall of Communism and the liberation of Eastern Europe. He’s stretched the power and authority of his office further than seemed possible. Could any successor do the same? John Allen, the veteran Vatican correspondent of the main American Catholic paper, ‘The National Catholic Reporter’. ALLEN: Popes are constrained to an extraordinary degree by precedent. The Pope can’t simply decide that Catholics no longer believe in the Trinity, for example. I mean that was of course settled in the third century. There is also political reality. Let’s not forget that there are four thousand Catholic bishops out in the world who, if you like, are the kind of middle level of management without whom you can’t do very much, most of whom will not be the new pope’s appointees. That of course puts real limits on things. In addition to which, there is simply the fact that this is a one billion strong church with all kinds of different currents and ideas within it, and if you go too far or too fast in alienating any one of those constituencies, things get very sticky. BROWN: This is an impossible job description – humanly impossible at least. And the method for choosing a pope is correspondingly remarkable. It’s also changed. No one knows who the next pope will be, not even the cardinals who will elect him, but their deliberations next time may have an unusually unexpected outcome. DUFFY: They vote by writing names on a printed slip of paper and putting it in a chalice up to four times a day. BROWN: Eamon Duffy. DUFFY: The conclave takes place in the Sistine Chapel. They will live in a rather posh hotel, which Pope John Paul II built in the grounds of the Vatican – extremely comfortable. This is a radical departure from tradition. The whole idea of a conclave is that the cardinals should be as uncomfortable as possible so that they will very, very quickly elect a pope. Instead they will live in luxury and elect at leisure. The conclave that will elect the successor to John Paul II is different from any other conclave for a thousand years because for a thousand years a pope could only be elected by a clear two-thirds majority of the voting cardinals. In this new conclave, the rules will be different. The cardinals will vote four times a day for three days. If they haven’t elected a pope, they’ll take a break, they’ll be exalted to do better and they’ll resume voting for another three days. After thirty votes, the requirement for a two-thirds majority will be waived and a pope can be elected by a simple majority, by one vote. This means that a determined block of forty-five cardinals, one-third of the electorate – there are a hundred and thirty-five electors at present – can prevent the emergence of a consensus candidate and can then shoo in their own candidate provided they can rally fifty percent of the votes plus one. It’s a recipe for faction. BROWN: What are the disagreements that give rise to these factions? How can they be resolved? In this programme, we ask what are the problems that will fill the next pope’s in-tray. What will be uppermost on his agenda, whoever he is? The first answer, since he is a world leader, is one that is on the agenda of every President and Prime Minister today. Father Richard John Neuhaus, Editor of the American conservative magazine ‘First Things’. NEUHAUS: There is a sense in which between Islam and Christianity, there is a conflict of longstanding that has only now been resumed after about a two hundred plus year hiatus. And I think that’s very important for us to understand: Muslims with any historical consciousness tend to have a much keener appreciation of the religio-cultural connection in the current conflict. Osama Bin Laden, for example, in one of his reports very explicitly noted that September 11th was a symbolically important date. September 11th was the date in 1683 in which the Polish forces turned back the Turks from the gates of Vienna. It was the last great effort of Islam to advance in Europe and it was defeated. Whether we are persuaded that that’s an accurate reading of history, it’s very important for us in the West to appreciate that that is how many Muslims do understand the conflict. So certainly the Catholic Church, and the Pope in particular, has a very powerful responsibility for making sure that the conflict of the 21st century, of which we’re seeing the opening chapters, does not become a all out war between religions. BROWN: The siege of Vienna is alive in some Catholic minds too. One side in the Bosnian civil wars was aggressively Catholic. During that war, it was rather terrifying to hear the Croat Franciscan Friars referring to their Bosnian Muslim neighbours as ‘The Turks’. But Pope John Paul II has gone further than any predecessor in his gestures of friendliness to Muslims as he has to Jews. He was the first Pope to set foot inside a mosque, just as he was the first to visit a synagogue. Father Timothy Radcliffe was for nine years the Master General of the Dominican Order, which has nearly two hundred thousand members in a hundred and sixty countries. RADCLIFFE: I think an openness to other faiths has been absolutely central to the Pope’s mission. He’s probably been the pope who’s been most open to Judaism of any pope in the history of the church. Likewise Islam. I think he’s open to philosophers, he’s open to poets. I think within the Catholic Church as it were, within inside the life of the church itself, he tends to be a bit nervous of too much exploration sometimes, but I think he is a man who in many ways has an open heart and mind. BROWN: Would you say that continuing this openness to Islam is an essential part of the agenda for the next century? RADCLIFFE: I’d say that it’s one of the most important things. If you look around the world today, wherever there is violence it’s often where in fact religions meet whether it’s in Indonesia, whether it’s in India - the clash between Hinduism and Islam, whether it’s in Northern Ireland – the tensions between Catholics and Protestants, the Middle East. So I think that openness to the great faiths is probably the major challenge that we face, particularly with Islam. There are some Muslims in every part of the world who are open to dialogue. In many places, there are not that many. What we have to be is we have to be there in friendship waiting for the door to open, so it’s essentially a very, very patient task. So we should be there, I think, in companionship at their service. We the Dominican Order are renewing our institute in Cairo for that very purpose. BROWN: The Pope is in a unique position in his relations with Islam because the church has a political dimension, as well as a religious and social one. When Pope John Paul II opposed the first and second Gulf Wars, or when he came out in favour of an intervention in the Balkans, he was playing a role that was simultaneously spiritual and political. No other leader on the Christian side can do this. It’s closer to an Ayatollah’s role than to an Archbishop’s, and that means that the next man has a unique responsibility to form a bridge between Islam and Christianity at a time of conflict between Muslim and Christian nations. Within the church, however, the Pope’s problems look very different. Sister Christine Schenk, a nun who runs Future Church, a liberal pressure group in Cleveland, Ohio. SCHENK: The most important job the next pope will have will be to reconnect with the people of God, starting with his own bishops and starting with the Bishops Council. There’s a widening gulf approaching a chasm, I would say, between your average Catholic (regardless of country) and the Vatican, and the bishops themselves are the first to notice that. Cardinal Rodriguez from Honduras was recently quoted, I think, in ‘The Tablet’ saying that the whole issue of collegiality and collaboration and sharing governance with the world’s bishops’ conferences has to be the number one issue in the conclave. BROWN: But there are many American Catholics who disagree with her. Richard John Neuhaus is one. NEUHAUS: It’s very difficult to generalise and say that there is an enormous gap – whether between Rome and the bishops, on the one hand, or between the bishops and the people. To teach, sanctify and govern are the three chief duties of a bishop. And right of centre among Catholics in this country and in Europe and a good many also in the curia, they believe this Pope has been a terrific teacher and certainly has been a faithful priest and sanctifier, but that he has failed to take the measures both in terms of reforming the curia and in terms of holding bishops around the world to account; that he has failed to govern effectively. BROWN: The Head of the Catholic Church in Scotland, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, has long experience of how the church is actually governed. He’s been an Archbishop for twenty years and was given his red hat this autumn. O’BRIEN: Many attempts have been made in recent years to decentralise power. I have been at synods of bishops in Rome and they have been … they’re been an attempt to decentralise power with the Pope listening to bishops from all over the world on a great variety of subjects. And when I say the Pope listening, he certainly is a very good listener. And I remember speaking to one bishop at a synod who said, “You know”, he said, “if I had a gathering of my priests for two weeks and they were talking at me for about ten minutes a time from about 8.30 a.m. until 12.30 in the afternoon”, he said “I’d find more excuses than the Pope does to just absent myself from time to time.” So he does listen a tremendous amount. He absorbs a great deal. So bishops and cardinals are gathered literally from all over the world, again involved in consultation processes about every aspect of the church’s work. BROWN: So the bishops do contribute to the decisions reached by the Vatican, but these central decisions are still binding around the world. Father Timothy Radcliffe spends eight months of every year travelling round to see his brothers and has probably seen as much of the global diversity of the Catholic Church as any man alive. RADCLIFFE: It’s true we need a degree of decentralisation. This doesn’t mean to say that we should imagine that the church is madly over-centralised, which it isn’t. The Vatican is a very tiny organisation: fewer people are employed in the Vatican than the Cabinet office in London. For an organisation with you know one billion people, there is this image of the church as a monolithic, monochrome organisation which everybody has to say the same things and do the same things, and anybody who’s travelled around the church knows that that’s utter rubbish. There is more possibility of open dissent and discussion inside the Catholic Church than there is inside the Labour party, or the Conservative party for that matter. I mean we have nothing like the discipline which you find with chief whips telling people how they are to vote. So let’s get beyond this image of this vast, great, monolithic structure. I mean it simply isn’t the case. But there is the need for decentralisation and I think particularly there is the need to empower bishops in the government of the church because the challenges are so different from different parts of the world. BROWN: It’s not just the bishops who want more independence from the curia, the Vatican’s bureaucracy. John Wilkins, the retiring Editor of the British Catholic weekly, ‘The Tablet’, has spent thirty years watching the church close up. He thinks that the pressure for change starts at the top with the cardinals. WILKINS: They will want a change in this because … and I don’t think it matters whether they’re conservatives or liberals or traditionalists or liturgists or what they are. I was once in Rome and the late Cardinal Bernadine Archbishop of Chicago said to me “You know, John, they treat us” – and he was referring to the Roman curia, the papal civil service – “they treat us like altar boys here.” Now he’s a prince of the church; they’re all princes of the church. They don’t like being treated like altar boys and I think there will be a pretty strong feeling – and it’s pretty clear already – underneath that they want to be treated in future like princes of the church. BROWN: The next pope will also have to deal with the continuing legacy of the second Vatican Council. This council, meeting for three years in the early 60s, reinvented much of the church. It introduced masses that weren’t in Latin and brought a wind of democracy to rattle ancient shutters, and the dispute over centralisation might be seen as an example of that. But it was not just bishops whose lives were shaken up by the council. Sister Margaret Scott runs an order of nuns in Britain and is the President of the Conference of Religious Men and Women in England and Wales. SCOTT: See I’m post-Vatican II, so I wasn’t around in the old days so I have no point of reference to compare, but from what people say we have changed. If you look at religious life itself – tremendous changes, tremendous changes. I mean in the old days when I entered, you never went home, even if people were dying. But now you go home. If you need to be … have a special arrangement to stay and look after parents, that’s fine; visit in the summer, etcetera. You know that’s just one thing which has more compassion, which is what it’s all about. I think we need to humanise and show a more compassionate face. I think that’s terribly important. People need to be loved and that’s the message: God is alive and well and loves you. BROWN: How is recruitment holding up in your order? SCOTT: In our order, in England and Wales it’s sort of not holding up. In other parts of the world, it is. It’s interesting. In Japan where we haven’t had vocations for a long time, people are beginning to enter again; in the United States where they haven’t had people for a long time; South America, there are quite a lot of people entering; Africa; Vietnam; Philippines; more third world countries. But in our own situation here, we’re only thirty-five in the province and we only have three houses in England. But other congregations, I’ve noticed in the past year suddenly people are beginning to say at meetings “Guess what, we have two novices” or you know somebody’s about to enter. Now this is new conversation and this is giving renewed sort of hope. BROWN: Two novices may not seem a great deal, but Sister Margaret’s remark exposes one of the central facts confronting the next pope, with which this one has wrestled without much success. There have never been more Catholics alive than today and the church has probably never grown so quickly, but at the same time the number of young priests has fallen off the edge of a cliff in the West. Seminaries have closed all over Europe and North America. In the USA today, there are more priests over the age of ninety than under thirty. No one knows where their replacements are supposed to come from. Eamon Duffy. DUFFY: There’s been a collapse of vocations both to the priesthood and the religious life in the West because the clerical profession is now actually not prestigious. It’s atrociously paid. There isn’t even now the respect and status that a man had a right to expect till the present generation. I have been told repeatedly by Irish clerical friends that they won’t wear their dog collars in the street because they will be abused. BROWN: In Ireland? DUFFY: In Ireland, in rural Ireland. I have a friend who works as a priest in England but has a mother who lives in the West of Ireland and she likes him to dress as a priest when he goes home. He was walking along the street with her in a small town in the West of Ireland and a man he’d never met in his life shouted across the road “Pervert!” Now that’s a very common experience. BROWN: For this to happen in a small Irish town is profoundly shocking, but so are the scandals that gave rise to it. They revealed something corrupt in the church. But what? For liberals, the scandalous thing was the abuse of power; for conservatives, it was the result of a lack of discipline and the presence in the priesthood of uncelibate homosexuals. Richard John Neuhaus. NEUHAUS: What we need are men who understand that the call to radical discipleship that the priesthood is, is something that comes to a person – a fully manly man, a person of normal, strong (as all young men have) erotic desires, passions, needs – and that it is a call to conform one’s life in obedience to Christ with Christ as the model in a way that is lifelong and with no winks and no nudges and no footnotes and no escape clauses, and that if you’re not ready for this, you’re not ready to be a priest. BROWN: Even those who think the problem with paedophile scandals was child abuse, not homosexuality, are worried about the demographics of the clergy. DUFFY: There’s a real danger in the Western Catholic Church that the clergy will become a profession for homosexuals. BROWN: Eamon Duffy. DUFFY: Now there have always been homosexual clergy and many homosexual clergy are first class, marvellous priests, but I think everybody sees that it would be undesirable to have the clergy predominantly homosexual - it would create a barrier between the clergy and the lives of the people they minister to. So if we’re to keep the balance right, we have to ensure that a significant number of heterosexual men get ordained, and it looks as if in the West the only way of doing that is to ordain married men or to allow those who are ordained to marry. It will of course bring disasters because if you have married clergy you will have divorced clergy and you will have adulterous clergy. BROWN: The crisis over celibacy is not acute worldwide. The effect of traditional Catholic roles and the way that they’re perceived depend on the societies around them and the alternatives available. A nun’s life of poverty, chastity and obedience sounds like pure deprivation to a modern woman who expects more out of life, but contrasted with some third world lives it seems a much better deal: poverty’s better than starvation, chastity’s better than rape and obedience within a community is better than arbitrary violence from strangers. It’s widely admitted that many priests in the global South have mistresses, but it’s also tacitly accepted in those countries. Timothy Radcliffe. RADCLIFFE: It’s clearly the case that in many parts of the world celibacy has actually largely broken down - many countries in Latin America, parts of Africa, to some extent in the United States. So if the beauty of celibacy should be that it witnesses to the kingdom - if it turns out to be the case that it’s being largely ignored or bypassed, then not only is the witness not being given but a very negative witness is being given and so we have to ask is it possible now… either we have to provide celibate priests with considerably more support or we have to explore the possibility of them being married. BROWN: These discussions may seem unreal, but that’s a measure of the gulf that has opened up between the modern secular imagination and the traditional Catholic Church. Cardinal Keith O’Brien. O’BRIEN: After our last visit to Rome, our ad limina visit with the Pope, the Scottish bishops – we were more or less told by the Pope that Scotland doesn’t seem to be any longer a Christian country. And we can say that about other countries in these islands and just over the water, over the channel. When you think of the way in which many, many people lead their lives, when we think of the standards of morality in our countries at this present time, it’s not as if we are living true to what we might call our baptismal promises at this present time. And, consequently, a tremendous effort is needed by church leaders of all denominations to help with that re-evangelisation of our countries, of our cultures. BROWN: So one of the things you’re saying is that in Europe the division is no longer between Catholic and Protestant as it was for five hundred years; it’s between Christians and the rest? O’BRIEN: Yes, I would say that. And one might say we are meeting a common enemy as it were in the secularism and the secular humanism in the society. BROWN: Secularism is in part a consequence of the changing role and expectations of women in society, and this is something that can threaten the church at a very vulnerable point. Religion has always been deeply concerned with families. Most people never convert to any religion; they are introduced to it by their mothers, so a church which alienates mothers will lose their children. Feminism may be for many people a word which applies to a purely Western and middle class phenomenon, but Sister Christine Schenk disagrees. SCHENK: I’m a nurse midwife. I served in inner city Cleveland for over twenty years. One of the tenets of public health is that if you take the mother and the unborn child as the locus of healthcare, you will affect the health of the whole community and when you look at international health efforts, always those are geared to serving women and children. Women themselves are coming forward and saying what we need to do, from the developing world, is education. We don’t need birth control, we know about that. What we really need is education and we need to be empowered in our own societies. So this is far from an issue of the global North; this is an issue for the whole world. So in my own view the whole notion of feminism is for all of us. BROWN: For all of us. The Catholic Church for all its quirks really can claim to deal with everyone on earth. Catholics are among the grandest people in the world; they are also among the poorest and most wretched. John Allen of the ‘National Catholic Reporter’. ALLEN: When it comes to the confrontation with capitalism, it is obvious that the Pope is painfully aware of the struggles of the impoverished majority of the human family and believes that the new globalised system being created in many ways is cruel and is amoral in the sense that it seems to be designed so that an increasingly greater share of the world’s wealth will be concentrated in an increasingly smaller number of hands. Having said that, however, what the church does not have is a clear alternative to offer and this, I think, is one of the great intellectual challenges awaiting the next pope. BROWN: The extraordinary global quality of the church was brought home to me by the Pope’s visit some years ago to the city of Tromsoe in Norway, high above the Artic Circle. In the bright daylight of an arctic summer evening, the snow on the hills around, I watched Pope John Paul II preach there in a mixture of Polish, Norwegian and Vietnamese to a faithful Catholic audience, some of whom had come there as boat people from a war on the other side of the world. They had not only travelled for thousands of miles, they had travelled in time – from a pre-industrial society to one on the edge of post-modernity – but they had stayed Catholic throughout their journey. This reach across time and space is obvious to the historian Eamon Duffy. DUFFY: One shouldn’t underestimate the resilience and adaptability of the Catholic Church as an agent of modernity. Look at the role that the Catholic Church played in modernising 19th century Ireland, its key role in the formation of national politics with the church supplying the educational machinery to transform Ireland from a peasant culture into a culture that could accommodate itself to industrial modernity. So I think Catholicism is an extraordinarily resilient box of tricks which can both straddle very different societies and help societies to accommodate themselves to social change. Its track record is good. BROWN: What the church did in Ireland in the 19th century, it may have to do for most of the rest of the world in the 21st. In Africa, inner city Cleveland and many other places, it is churches that provide many of the public services that we expect the state to provide – healthcare, education and an example of idealism and fair dealing. It is far more likely that churches, and especially the Catholic Church, can help poor countries to help themselves than the United Nations can. For all the undoubted evils and divisiveness of religion, it remains the best hope of anyone who wants rich and poor nations to feel part of the same world, made of the same flesh. The next pope’s agenda is everyone’s. 5