UAmong the first pictures of the new year is one that should have already made history. Pope Francis stands at the coffin of his predecessor. Despite the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI. In 2013, the Catholic Church does not provide for a pope to escort his predecessor to the rest. The law of the Church does not know the case of the Pope’s resignation to this day, let alone the fact that he, as Bishop of Rome at the age of 75, like all other bishops, would have to relinquish his office.
To this day, no provision has been made for a pope to be unable to fulfill his official duties. Even before Pope John Paul II, who died in 2005, had been ailing for years, it would have been high time to consider constellations such as dementia or brain death. Even after the assassination attempt on him in May 1981, it was unclear what would happen at the head of the church if he did not regain consciousness.
Benedict XVI shied away from the responsibility of making appropriate arrangements. By resigning from office, he also confronted his successor with another problem: a two-pope cohabitation, the symbolic and performative framework of which he himself defined in his departure in such a way that his successor could not influence it.
Ratzinger’s fait accompli made it impossible for Francis to resign even after a few years. He could not certify the “desacralization” of the papal office allegedly intended by Ratzinger as groundbreaking. Three popes would have been two too many. But the Argentine didn’t want to make provisions for every eventuality, at least during his predecessor’s lifetime. Any standardization that deviated from the theory and practice of a “papa emeritus” could have been interpreted as a disapproval of his predecessor’s highly personal decisions.
Francis wants a more catholic, that is, more all-embracing church
Not letting a shadow fall on the beautiful appearance of papal cassock togetherness was not unwise. Just as wisely, Francis allowed many years to elapse before undoing the rehabilitation of the pre-conciliar rite of Mass, which had been one of Benedict’s most symbolic decisions. If the Argentine had distanced himself from the person and concerns of his predecessor early on with clear words and a confrontational style, the resistance would have been even more fierce, which he soon encountered from the phalanx of cardinals and curials by the grace of his predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI should counter.
For there was one thing Francis had left in no doubt in the first year of his pontificate: he wanted to bequeath to his successor a church that was literally more catholic, i.e. more all-encompassing, than he had found it. The first break with both of its predecessors was marked by the upgrading of the Roman Synod of Bishops established after the Second Vatican Council to a genuine advisory body of the Pope. The second was the shift of weight within the College of Cardinals from the Global North to the Global South, where many more Catholics live there than in Europe and North America combined.
Both processes are ongoing, making it likely that Francis intends to continue for the time being, despite increasing health concerns. And not only is the criticism of him from the Catholic religious right growing ever sharper, but so is the impatience of those who hope for a reform of the church, head and limbs. Because even if the Pope has the faithful all over the world questioned again and again about all the “hot issues”, a synod of bishops remains a synod of bishops. Women and non-clerics have only one vote in it, as far and as long as the Pope wants it. And regardless of whether a cardinal is to come from Benin instead of Berlin, the college of cardinals remains a hermetically sealed male domain.
On the other hand, hadn’t Benedict increased the proportion of Europeans in the College of Cardinals to 54 percent, although only a third of the world’s Catholics still lived in Europe and North America? And hadn’t John Paul II declared many things in the field of gender relations as willed by God to be non-negotiable that had long since been deconstructed as “invented traditions”? Viewed in this way, the “long” 20th century of the Church has only come to an end now, with the funeral of Benedict XVI. How it will survive the coming decades is one of the many questions of the 21st century.