With Pope Benedict’s death, Vatican enters a new era

When Pope Francis presides at the funeral of his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI on Thursday, the event will offer something that does not come along often in a Roman Catholic Church that is 20 centuries old: It will be something new.

Papal funerals ordinarily have occurred between a papal death and a papal election. There will be no election this week. Pope Benedict was the first pope to resign in more than 600 years. The last pope to resign, Celestine V (1215-1296) was denied a papal funeral by his successor. (The case of Gregory XII in 1415 was more complicated than a simple resignation, yet no pope presided at his funeral, either.) The world has never seen a sitting pope preside at his predecessor’s funeral rites.

We are in new terrain.

There are other reasons why the Catholic Church is in new terrain, too.

Pope Benedict’s election in 2005 was the result of unusual circumstances. Pope John Paul II had held the papal office for 27 years, the second longest pontificate since the beginning of the church. John Paul globalized the College of Cardinals, naming cardinals from all over the world for the first time, which has been a great thing for a global church. A consequence of John Paul’s lengthy papacy intersecting with the most cosmopolitan group of cardinal-electors ever was that the cardinals were not so familiar with one another as they might have been if they had mostly been Europeans meeting together regularly. They came from every corner of the globe and had never assembled quite like that before the conclave to elect John Paul’s successor.

This was a new problem. When the cardinals gathered in 2005, few of them were well-known to the whole group. The most well-known cardinal among them was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and the cardinals trusted him.

Ratzinger’s relatively quick election was a signal that the cardinals had recognized their new problem and settled quickly on a solution in the shape of the one person they all knew. Not necessarily a caretaker papacy, but Benedict XVI at least certainly was elected to be a figure of continuity.

And this is finally how Benedict XVI’s papacy really must be understood, as a continuous extension of John Paul II’s papacy. Together, the John Paul II-Benedict XVI pontificate lasted 35 years, an extraordinary duration. Three generations of Catholics — late Baby Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials — never would have known a different style of papal leadership or vision for the Catholic Church before Pope Benedict resigned. For that reason, John Paul II and Benedict XVI have had an outsized impact on how we think about the Catholic Church today. Our whole understanding of Catholicism is shaped more by their lengthy and (thanks to television and internet) very publicly visible ministries.

Almost certainly this is why Pope Francis has been unsettling for so many Catholics.

Pope John XXIII, who opened the Second Vatican Council, joked that his job was both to be the pope for people who have their foot on the gas and for people who have their foot on the brake. No one would disagree that the years immediately following Vatican II were years that favored people with their foot on the gas.

For even more years, John Paul II and Benedict XVI had their foot on the brake.

Pope Benedict’s legacy, like Pope John Paul’s, is inseparable from this fact. 

Having come to leadership in the Catholic Church 15 years into the implementation of Vatican II, John Paul and Benedict spent 35 more years not quite reversing Vatican II, but certainly shifting its emphasis and minimizing its reforms.

There were several far-reaching consequences.

One consequence, especially visible in the United States, was a sustained effort to appoint bishops who shared their wariness of the modern world. The complexion of the church in the United States was transformed by John Paul’s and Benedict’s appointment of bishops who favored confronting the modern world instead of engaging it. The polarizing culture wars that seized U.S. politics were — at least in part — a result, because Catholics led by those bishops are so numerous and influential in the United States.

Another consequence was the chilling of theological discourse. Many theologians were investigated, some were silenced to restrain possibilities unleashed by Vatican II. Both John Paul and Benedict had been professors, and these two professor-popes re-adhered the church’s theological imagination to its pre-Vatican II certainties against the voices of theologians with different experiences of gender, sexuality, and culture who raised new questions.

Sidelining those voices gave the impression of a church focused inward to admire the elegance of its theology without engaging the real problems people face today.

This approach also tended to draw converts and men for priesthood who were attracted a church determined to resist the passage of time.

But perhaps the most important consequence was the re-centralization that John Paul and Benedict accomplished across their three-and-a-half decades of church leadership. The years immediately after Vatican II were a time when local bishops and national conferences of bishops around the world experimented with new ways to govern and to teach the church. This experimental spirit was cut short by a desire to rein in the implementation of Vatican II. Church governance became more centralized in Rome, and lay participation in ministry and governance was put back inside old boundaries.

Regrettably, during years when transparency and accountability might have averted some of the suffering and scandal of sexual abuse, the church became more opaque and enclosed because of a desire to assert greater, central control over the whole church after Vatican II.

A great deal of damage has been done to the Catholic Church and its members across the last several decades. Yet now the Catholic Church is in new terrain.

Pope Benedict’s death after a decade as pope emeritus brings the definitive drawing-down of the curtain on the John Paul II-Benedict XVI era.

It is an opportunity for Pope Francis to lead the church into a next, third era of Vatican II, and to heed Pope John’s advice not to be a pope for those with a foot on the gas or on the brake, but for both.

Steven P. Millies, a political theorist, is professor of public theology and director of The Bernardin Center at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. Follow him on Twitter @stevenpmillies