There is great symbolic significance in the fact that popes die rather than resign: It’s a reminder that the pontiff is supposed to be a spiritual father more than a chief executive (presidents leave office, but your parents are your parents till they die), a sign of absolute papal surrender to the divine will (after all, if God wants a new pope, He’ll get one), and a illustration of the theological point that the church is still supposed to be the church even when its human leadership isn’t at fighting trim, whether physically or intellectually or (for that matter) morally.
This last point is underplayed, but supremely important. Catholicism’s resilience has always depended both on the power of the pontiff to sustain unity and safeguard doctrine and on the power of the Catholic faith itself to survive leaders who are wrongheaded, incompetent, senile or corrupt. (There’s a reason why relatively few popes have been canonized, and why Catholics wear their faith’s ability to recover from the Borgias as a badge of honor.) And if papal resignations became commonplace and expected, I worry that they might end up burdening the papacy with a weight it cannot bear — encouraging Catholics to lay far too much stress on the human qualities of the see of Peter’s occupant, and encouraging the world at large to judge the faith’s truth claims on whether the Vatican seemed to be running smoothly, and whether the pope’s approval ratings were robust.
I have never attempted a papal prognostication before in my life, but this is quite possibly my last chance, so why not? I guess that the next Pope will be the last European Pope. Many people were predicting that Benedict would be the last European Pope, but my entirely speculative guess is that the College of Cardinals will seize Benedict’s “early” retirement as an excuse to delay the inevitable: the shift of the oldest European institution into non-European hands. When that happens, perhaps this year or perhaps in twenty years, I believe that European Catholicism will shrivel into nothing. All systems of supernatural belief have been in long-term retreat throughout the Twentieth Century. The brief “Fifties revival” was largely swallowed up by the Sixties, and now the endless revelations of sexual abuse throughout the Catholic world are shattering the cultural Catholicism that used to prevail among the Irish and Italian populations in the U.S. Once the Catholic hierarchy passes into non-European hands, the process will be complete. George Santayana once wisely said that religions are not refuted but replaced. What will replace Christianity is still very much up in the air, but, clearly, Christian belief is departing, without ever being really refuted or replaced.
Afterwords
If you take Mr. Douthat’s logic seriously, he seems to be saying that God made Benedict Pope to punish “us,” even as advocates of the divine right of kings argued that bad kings were God’s way of punishing a wicked people. Well, the divine right of kings has gone the way of all flesh, and I’m guessing that the divine right of Popes is following the same path to extinction.
*In fact, I’ve never been a believer, but I enjoy pretending to be an Episcopalian. It’s a classy church, and it doesn’t commit you to anything. An earnest Episcopalian would be a contradiction in terms. There are such, of course, and they’re awful.
†Christopher Hitchens has plenty to tell you about the recent crimes of the Church here.
