Michael Walsh: Pope Benedict's Divisions
[Michael Walsh is a writer and broadcaster. He was librarian at Heythrop College from 1972 to 2001. Among his books are The Secret World of Opus Dei (HarperCollins, 2004) and The Conclave: A Sometimes Secret and Occasionally Bloody History (Canterbury Press, 2003).]
There was a legal tag, much used by medieval canon lawyers, that the pope could not be judged by anyone. This did not put him above the law, because the law was God’s law to which all were subject. It meant, rather, than he could not be summoned before a court, even an imperial court, although one way or another that sort of thing very occasionally happened....
These are arcane matters, as mysterious to most Catholics as they are to the rest of humankind, even though RCs are on the receiving end of the Holy See’s governance. What they think of that governance, whether it inspires or alienates or something in between, depends where they position themselves on the long spectrum from conservative to radical. But one thing is for sure. Catholics among her majesty’s British subjects experience from the Vatican a form of governance wholly different from that at Westminster. When the Queen shakes hands with the Pontiff, she will be exchanging greetings with a dictator – a benign dictator in the eyes of some, but a dictator nonetheless.
It need not be that way. It is endlessly parroted that “the church is not a democracy”. That is not really true. The pope is elected, admittedly by a peculiar electoral college; bishops used to be elected. Even the truths of the Christian faith were (and are still when need arises) determined by a show of hands or crosses on a ballot-paper. To suggest that such matters are determined by the pope alone is to turn him into God’s oracle. A good many people think of him in this way, but it is wholly wrong, indeed heretical.
It would be perfectly reasonable, though perhaps nowadays impractical, to turn the election of the pope over to the church at large: the last time that happened was in 1417, not so long ago in the span of the church’s existence. This is not something which, to speak personally, I would advocate. It would invest the papacy with too much significance. To take another Westminster example, I believe of the papacy what John Dunning’s resolution of 1780 declared of the monarchy: "that the power of the crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished"....
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There was a legal tag, much used by medieval canon lawyers, that the pope could not be judged by anyone. This did not put him above the law, because the law was God’s law to which all were subject. It meant, rather, than he could not be summoned before a court, even an imperial court, although one way or another that sort of thing very occasionally happened....
These are arcane matters, as mysterious to most Catholics as they are to the rest of humankind, even though RCs are on the receiving end of the Holy See’s governance. What they think of that governance, whether it inspires or alienates or something in between, depends where they position themselves on the long spectrum from conservative to radical. But one thing is for sure. Catholics among her majesty’s British subjects experience from the Vatican a form of governance wholly different from that at Westminster. When the Queen shakes hands with the Pontiff, she will be exchanging greetings with a dictator – a benign dictator in the eyes of some, but a dictator nonetheless.
It need not be that way. It is endlessly parroted that “the church is not a democracy”. That is not really true. The pope is elected, admittedly by a peculiar electoral college; bishops used to be elected. Even the truths of the Christian faith were (and are still when need arises) determined by a show of hands or crosses on a ballot-paper. To suggest that such matters are determined by the pope alone is to turn him into God’s oracle. A good many people think of him in this way, but it is wholly wrong, indeed heretical.
It would be perfectly reasonable, though perhaps nowadays impractical, to turn the election of the pope over to the church at large: the last time that happened was in 1417, not so long ago in the span of the church’s existence. This is not something which, to speak personally, I would advocate. It would invest the papacy with too much significance. To take another Westminster example, I believe of the papacy what John Dunning’s resolution of 1780 declared of the monarchy: "that the power of the crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished"....