Two Screaming Popes

Last week I went to see my spiritual director. As well as touching on my prayer life, work and personal circumstances, we usually end up talking about things like folded chasubles. However we have to face the fact that we've almost certainly done that subject to death, and this time found ourselves discussing the new Pope (and the old one). S.D. is quite well connected and having been ordained a long while can put a lot of things into context.

During our discussions the phrase 'hermeneutic of bollocks' was raised, and not by me, it has to be said. Ex-Pope Benedict used to talk of the 'hermeneutic of continuity', by which he meant trying to emphasise that the changes that followed in the wake of the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s had not been intended by the Fathers of the Council, and by Pope John XXIII, as a dramatic rupture with the practice of the past, but as a development, as a restatement of eternal truths. To a certain extent this was true, in the sense that the old liturgies and theologies were not simply junked; that isn't the way most Churches work, especially the Roman Observance. But the phrase 'hermeneutic of continuity' became a rallying point for all those conservative Roman Catholics who, in their hearts of hearts, felt that the new Mass heralded by the 1960s wasn't, in a deep way, legitimate; that the Old Mass, the Extraordinary Form as it became known, was not 'extraordinary' at all but normative. Worse, there was a sleight-of-hand going on to paint the two as actually identical, which is simply untrue, as untrue as claiming they're completely unconnected. There is a world of difference, politically as well as liturgically, between a pre-Vatican 2 Solemn High Mass in which the priest faces away from the congregation, only he and a server communicate, and which parts of the service are deliberately inaudible, and the Novus Ordo Mass where the priest faces west, the congregation join in and sing hymns, and everyone takes communion from the elements consecrated there and then, notwithstanding that they're both celebrations of the eucharist under some form. 'They are', enthused S.D., 'politically completely opposite', and no Benedictine revisionism can erase the fact.

There are conservative Roman Catholic bloggers denouncing Pope Francis, who has dispensed with some of the more recondite liturgical fashions promoted by Papa Benny, as an emissary of the Devil (mind you, you have to be a sedevacantist to manage this with anything less than catastrophic cognitive dissonance). I even read somebody lamenting how Francis has hypocritically acted against the 'poor' who he claims as such a priority for the Church by putting honest Italian artisans who spend all their time knocking up mozettas, crucifixes, fanons and Papal slippers out of business. He's upset a lot of people - paradoxically while remaining a perfectly orthodox Roman Catholic bishop on most matters that matter. What he isn't is the sort of figure who can act as a talisman for romantic reactionaries who like looking up lists of European nobility in the Almanach de Gotha. Benedict had just enough of that about him to make it make sense, to make such people fantasise that he was going to get the seda gestatoria and the papal ostrich feathers out of storage. But he wasn't, and his successor has made life even more restricted and less picturesque for whoever comes after him. As S.D. put it, 'Once he looked at the Papal apartments and said, I don't need all this, he made it impossible for anyone else to move back in. What are they going to say, "I really feel God is calling me to live like a Renaissance prince"?'

The scene in the attached photograph could never have happened at any previous point in history. Two popes, equally legitimate, equally recognised, existing at the same time and cordially meeting. Papa Benedict's decision to resign changes the game forever in the sense that it made the Papal office significantly more like the sort of positions heads of organisations occupy in other Churches, or even in the secular world. But, more radically, what we now have is two Popes who differ; while their doctrine, their philosophy, their theology comes inevitably from the same formation, their emphases, their styles, their preferred fashions do not. Two Popes, icons not of identical tradition, but of personal preference. For the first time ever, the mirage that Rome is eternal, unchanging, and monolithic is impossible to maintain. It's gone. In its place is a reality of ambiguity and choice, and the conservatives may howl and deny it all they like.

Amazing how sometimes the Holy Spirit sees to it that the consequences of our actions are exactly the opposite of the ones we intend.