The College of Cardinals has chosen Joseph Ratzinger to be the next Pope. The executive summary is, Don’t expect any changes in Church doctrine or practice, except for more cracking down on dissent and intellectual heterodoxy, for the next several years.
Listening to a blurb on NPR last night, the one thing Ratzinger has going for him is that he’s not stupid; he’s been called one of the preeminent theologians of his generation. Indeed, the joke goes …
Cardinal Ratzinger and two other prominent theologians die in a car crash and arrive in heaven. God asks to speak with each of them privately.
The first theologian goes in, and, a few minutes later, comes out, in tears. “How could I have been so wrong?”
The second theologian goes in, and, likewise, reemerges a few minutes later, wailing, “How could I have been so wrong?”
Ratzinger goes in, and then, after a long interval, God comes out, weeping, “How could I have been so wrong?”
Of course, the office also shapes the man, and it will be interesting to see how Ratzinger goes from being the official enforcer of Catholic orthodoxy to being the pastoral leader of a billion Catholics. It will also be interesting to see how the selection of a European comes across to much of the non-European Catholic world, and how a perceived hard-liner is seen in the more liberal West.
I’ll keep him (and the Church he leads) in my prayers. They’re going to need it. (As, of course, do we all, self included.)
UPDATE: And it’s officially Pope Benedict XVI, who enters office at age 78. At his age, not to be morbid, I strongly suspect we’ll not see as long a tenure as the previous pope, and that may be a sign of hope for folks looking to other directions for the Church to take.
Okay, I saw that punch line coming a mile away!
One thing I’ve noticed: Several religious figures and theologians interviewed on the radio have been using cardinal (no pun intended) numbers, rather than ordinal numbers, to refer to the Popes. That is, they say “Pope John Paul Two” and “Pope Benedict Sixteen.” Is this a common practice when referring to the Pope? I don’t hear it from ordinary shlubs like us. (I did hear an announcer on classical music station, of all places, read a commercial for a production of Shakespeares “Richard Three” once!)
No, it should definitely be ordinal. Weird.