An anony­mous com­menter says of my Pope posts:

All of this analy­sis is real­ly pre­ma­ture. Could­n’t we just morn the death of John Paul II, send the car­di­nals pos­i­tive ener­gy to make the right deci­sion about the next Pope, and final­ly accept the deci­sion from wise and moral fig­ures with joy and hope? We don’t real­ly know how the Pope will act. He has been a Pope for a day. And the rea­son for tak­ing on a new name is that he has promised to part with his old life and start anew. And even if we did know, we could­n’t change the fact that he is the Pope. So this gets us back to the ques­tion, why do we need to ana­lyze each of these steps? I think that most com­men­ta­tors have a dis­trust if not prej­u­dice against Catholi­cism. That is unfor­tu­nate since these com­men­ta­tors claim to be good lib­er­als who hold no prej­u­dices at all.

Here’s one per­son who is strug­gling with her Catholi­cism because of the selec­tion of Car­di­nal Ratzinger as the next Pope. It’s wrong to sug­gest that the crit­i­cism is com­ing only from anti-Catholic com­men­ta­tors. Many of the harsh­est crit­ics of the selec­tion of Ratzinger are Catholics them­selves, or wrote memo­ri­als to John Paul II which praised the Church and his lead­er­ship of it. The Catholic Church is prob­a­bly the most wide­ly respect­ed of the major church­es among liberals.

Catholi­cism, like all of Chris­tian­i­ty (and any human endeav­or), has two com­pet­ing ten­den­cies. There is the inclu­siv mes­sage of the social gospel – lov­ing your neigh­bor, help­ing the poor, sick, meek, etc.– and there’s the social­ly con­ser­v­a­tive ten­den­cy, the exclu­sivist tra­di­tion which Bene­dict XVI seems to draw on heav­i­ly. Con­sid­er the dis­cus­sion of Domi­nus Iesus, a Vat­i­can doc­u­ment writ­ten by Car­di­nal Ratzinger, in which he stat­ed that all Chris­t­ian church­es oth­er than the Catholic and East­ern Ortho­dox Church­es “suf­fer from defects” and are not “church­es in the prop­er sense.” It declared that any reli­gion but Catholi­cism is “grave­ly deficient.” 

Of course the Catholic church will say it’s bet­ter than every­one else. If some­one else had a bet­ter church, why would you want to be Catholic? But Pope John Paul II prayed at the Wail­ing Wall and vis­it­ed a mosque, show­ing respect for the reli­gious tra­di­tions of oth­er peo­ples. He worked to bring human­i­ty togeth­er. Ratzinger, as the Grand Inquisi­tor, issued harsh con­dem­na­tions of oth­er reli­gions, repressed inter­nal move­ments which opposed his con­ser­v­a­tive vision, and stood in the way of women, gays and the laity in gen­er­al as they sought a larg­er role in their church.

All that is fine. I would­n’t weigh in on the selec­tion of the head of the Evan­gel­i­cal Luther­an Church, or the lead­er­ship of the Bap­tists, or what­ev­er. Reli­gious groups choose their lead­ers and that’s that. To the extent that the papa­cy is a reli­gious post, I agree with the com­menter that Church doc­trine will be gov­erned how­ev­er it’s gov­erned, and the rest of us can just suck it up.

But the Pope is more than a reli­gious leader. Can you name the chief reli­gious fig­ure in any oth­er reli­gion, oth­er than your own and the Dalai Lama? (Triv­ia buffs are get­ting a buzz by remem­ber­ing that Queen Eliz­a­beth II is the head of the Church of Eng­land. But can they name the Arch­bish­op of Can­ter­bury?) The Pope is the leader of a sov­er­eign nation, and the pub­lic hears the Pope as the voice of Chris­tian­i­ty, to the extent any­one can do that. So I can express dis­may at the selec­tion of this pope the same way I expressed con­cern about the rise of the ultra-nation­al­ist right in France. I don’t care what hap­pens to France in par­tic­u­lar, but the French exert great influ­ence on the world, and the Pope exerts a dif­fer­ent sort of influence.

Gov­er­nors delay exe­cu­tions or com­mute sen­tences in hon­or of a papal vis­it. What oth­er leader of a sov­er­eign state would be giv­en that con­sid­er­a­tion? What oth­er reli­gious leader? The pope mat­ters to every­one, like it or not.

I can’t speak for any­one but myself, but I expect that a lot of the pub­lic inter­est in the new Pope’s selec­tion, and dis­ap­point­ment at the choice, is dri­ven by the deep respect that peo­ple have for the Catholic Church. Any­thing which has a chain of com­mand stretch­ing back 2000 years is pret­ty impres­sive. The mar­vels of St. Peter’s and the Vat­i­can muse­ums are a con­stant source of amaze­ment to peo­ple of all faiths. And the Church has done so much, espe­cial­ly under John Paul II, to give voice to the poor, weak, and pow­er­less. It’s a great tra­di­tion, one Catholics should be proud of, and we wor­ry – Catholics and non-Catholics alike – that Pope Bene­dict XVI will betray that tra­di­tion in favor of the unfor­tu­nate her­itage of the Bene­dict XIV. The tug of war between social inclu­sion and social exclu­sion has tipped with his selec­tion, and that’s a shame.

“Tryin’ To Throw Your Arms Around The World” by U2 from the album Achtung Baby (3:52).