Shadows

Jacinda Ardern announced Thursday that she was resigning as New Zealand’s prime minister.

Admired worldwide for courageous moral stands as well as frank speaking, she admitted, “You cannot and should not do it unless you have a full tank plus a bit in reserve for those unexpected challenges.” Personally popular but politically losing ground, she exemplifies the contradictions of women in leadership. She united her country after an anti-Muslim massacre to pass a ban on most semiautomatic weapons, and established a COVID policy that was noted around the world for both containing the spread and allowing normal lives. She gave birth to a daughter while in office. What happened? Helen Clark, New Zealand Prime Minister from 1999 to 2008, suggested on the BBC that morning that misogyny did her in. The emotional toll took too much gas from the tank.

I was already thinking of shadows because this same week we learned that both Cardinal George Pell and Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI left writings that have been revealed posthumously. What is that about? Not having enough gas in the tank to respond to challenges?

Certainly Benedict had already admitted as much by resigning in 2013. The rather enigmatic article in La Croix International by Loup Besmond de Senneville quotes the former Pope as saying “This volume, which gathers the texts I wrote at the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery, must be published after my death.” Most were written in 2018, it seems, a period when it was questioned whether Benedict wanted to release one of these texts reprinted here reaffirming priestly celibacy.

“When I announced my resignation from the ministry as Successor of Peter on February 11, 2013, I had no plans as to what I would do in my new situation,” Benedict XVI confesses in the book’s short preface. “I was too tired to be able to plan any further work,” he admits. But he says he “slowly” resumed his “theological work” after the election of Pope Francis. “So, over the years, a series of small and medium-sized contributions have taken shape. They are presented in this volume,” he writes.

I hope this is Benedict’s authentic voice. It sounds as if it is. But why posthumous? Besmond de Senneville finds most notable the previously unpublished text “Monotheism and Tolerance.” Judging only from his brief summary, I find stronger statements than I remember from Benedict about the “intolerance”—the “dictatorial claim to be right all the time”—of “modern thought” condemning “the senseless and pre-rational traditions of all religions.” “Christian anthropology” is threatened by “the disruption of the sexes through gender ideology…[which] wants to reshape the world according to its own needs and desires…aiming to achieve, with the legislation that follows, the extinction of what is essentially Christian.” Was Canon Law also threatened legislation? Did a modern understanding of gender roles find it “senseless” and “pre-rational”? Let us lay to rest those aspects of his theology.

Pell never resigned, exactly. But he withdrew from his role in the financial offices of the Vatican to defend himself, successfully, against sexual abuse charges in Australia. He didn’t exactly publish posthumously, either. He didn’t anticipate his death after an operation that many of my friends have undergone without such dire consequences. Michael Sean Winters introduces the situation:

Not since King Hamlet appeared to Bernardo, Marcellus and Horatio on the battlements of Elsinore Castle has a ghost caused so much trouble. The late Cardinal George Pell, speaking posthumously by means of a previously unpublished article and an anonymous text of which Pell is now known to be the author, has shown the face of the opposition to Pope Francis in all its overwrought self-absorption. 

Winters goes on to dispute various points in the previously-anonymous memorandum, and to critique various defenders of its point of view, concluding with my former Archbishop, Charles Chaput. Non-Cardinal. What most surprises me about the memo is how disorganized it is, shifting back and forth among theology, politics, and finances. It is as if Pell kept adding on to a list of things that bothered him that he planned to give to one or all of his fellow Cardinals and then some blogger, in this case Sandro Magister of Settimo Cielo, got a hold of it.

Point 1. A. is “(A) The German synod speaks on homosexuality, women priests, communion for the divorced. The Papacy is silent.” Of course. Later Pell says, “Schism is not likely to occur from the left, who often sit lightly to doctrinal issues.” I find that amusing; I wonder what he’d make of the intentional Eucharistic communities led by women. My guess: schismatic. The memo goes everywhere, from China to the next Conclave, “weakened by eccentric nominations.” Pell lets it all hang out.

Editor Damian Thompson introduces Pell’s more coherent article in The Spectator with this: “He did not know that he was about to die when he wrote this piece; he was prepared to face the fury of Pope Francis and the organisers when it was published. As it is, his sudden death may add extra force to his words when the synod meets this October.”  This may have contributed to the soap-opera flavor of the coverage in The Washington Post. Chico Harlan and Stefano Pitrelli review the whole situation and interview Lucetta Scaraffia, the former editor of the women’s pages of the Vatican newspaper. “The death of Benedict has marked the end of an equilibrium,” she says, and “going forward, dissent against Francis would probably become a ‘free-for-all.’”

Here’s what I mean by a more coherent article. Pell focuses on the document for the Continental phase of the Synod, “Enlarge the Space of Your Tent,” an image in Isaiah, I might note, from the “Old Testament.” Pell emphasizes the content, not the Pope:

Because of differences of opinion on abortion, contraception, the ordination of women to the priesthood and homosexual activity, some felt that no definitive positions on these issues can be established or proposed. This is also true of polygamy, and divorce and remarriage.

However the document is clear on the special problem of the inferior position of women and the dangers of clericalism, although the positive contribution of many priests is acknowledged.

What is one to make of this potpourri, this outpouring of New Age good will? It is not a summary of Catholic faith or New Testament teaching. It is incomplete, hostile in significant ways to the apostolic tradition and nowhere acknowledges the New Testament as the Word of God, normative for all teaching on faith and morals. The Old Testament is ignored, patriarchy rejected and the Mosaic Law, including the Ten Commandments, is not acknowledged.

Think about “the inferior position of women” and reread that last paragraph.

Pell’s main interest seems to be reminding the bishops of their power and responsibility:

[In the document] Baptismal dignity is to be emphasized, not ministerial ordination, and governance styles should be less hierarchical and more circular and participative.

The main actors in all Catholic synods (and councils) and in all Orthodox synods have been the bishops. In a gentle, cooperative way this should be asserted and put into practice at the continental synods so that pastoral initiatives remain within the limits of sound doctrine. Bishops are not there simply to validate due process and offer a ‘nihil obstat’ to what they have observed.

Perhaps that’s the way Pell saw last year’s Australian Plenary Council. This is not a man open to process.

The Post article concludes with Thomas Reese, whose Religion News Service dispatch is more measured, positively evaluating Pell’s controversial interventions in Vatican finances but deploring his lack of courage in the memo anonymously criticizing Pope Francis.

Finally, in NCR, Phyllis Zagano weighs in. On Benedict: “he was behind every statement against the ordination of women, first as priests, then as deacons.” On Pell: “Pell was behind the scenes when the Australian bishops turned down the recommendation to make women deacons in August 2022, though it was later adopted.”

She concludes that traditionalist and progressive “Catholics are walking away in equal numbers, often led by the women of their families who have had enough. Neither Benedict nor Pell, with or without Latin, lace and incense, could stem the tide. But neither will Francis, alone, be able to push it back. If truth be told, the women of the church are leading its reform. Only they can lead its rebirth.”

On to the Synod! Our tanks are still full, despite the misogyny shadowing so many leaders of our Church. We are walking in the light of God, and we shall overcome.