The Question: What can Pope Benedict XVI say and do to repair the growing rifts between the Vatican, the clergy and the laity in America?
“Nothing” is my first thought: you don’t send the problem to fix the problem.
The problem is not the excellent scholar Joseph Ratzinger, or this good man in the papal role. The problem is the traditional autocratic papacy itself, of which he is the current embodiment.
The Roman pope is the structural descendant of the Roman emperor, whose power was absolute. Most of the Roman Church’s modern woes have this absolute power (in lesser forms distributed in the hierarchical pyramid of bishops under the pope) as a component.
In the Roman Republic, which was an influential model in the making of America, all free Romans (of course, not their slaves) had mouths as well as ears. In the Roman armies, the generals had mouths but not ears - and all on the pyramid beneath each had ears but not mouths. The republican form of government died when General Octavian proclaimed himself Caesar Augustus Imperator (Emperor) and ruled the Roman realms on the model of the Roman army: under him, the Republic had become the Empire. Only the Emperor had a mouth.
The sociomodel for the Roman Catholic Church was not the Roman Republic but the Roman Empire. Under the imperial papacy, only the Pope has a mouth. A sad instance is the 1968 “Humanae Vitae,” Paul VI’s rigid instruction for Roman Catholics’ sexual behavior – flatly rejecting the unanimous opinion of the commission he had appointed to study the subject and make recommendations to him. (He had a mouth, but no ears.) Without the wisdom of balancing principle and prudence, the traditional and the existential, the encyclical condemned all artificial conception-control (miscalled "birth control"), a stance cutting the official Church off from the sexual-societal-environmental realities of life as it was being lived and continues to be lived in the West. The authority and even dignity of Rome suffered a massive blow, and the wide-world had a laugh at a male celebate - living out his life in a male world - instructing men and women what to do about sex.
Since the Second Vatican Council, pressure for power-sharing has increased; and even during the Council, some were using the British-historical analogy: it took the 1649 regicide to re-model British power from “empire” to “commonwealth.”
Americans love shows, and the papal shows will be media successes. But no matter what the Pope says or does during his few days in America, the rifts will continue to increase until the weight of Rome’s self-inflicted humiliations sinks the resistance to the emergence of a power-sharing structure in which all Roman Catholics have both ears and mouths.
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