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ANALYSIS
THE NEXT POPES AGENDA
TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED
DOCUMENTARY
Presenter: Andrew Brown
Producer: Jim Frank
Editor: Nicola Meyrick
BBC
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Broadcast Date:
Repeat Date:
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28.12.03

Taking part in order of appearance:

Eamon Duffy
Professor of History of Christianity, Cambridge
University
John Allen
Vatican correspondent of National Catholic Reporter
Father Richard John Neuhaus
Priest of archdiocese of New York
Editor of First Things
President of Institute on Religious and Public Life in New
York
Timothy Radcliffe
Dominican Friar at Oxford
Former Master General of Dominican Order
Sister Christine Schenk
Runs Future Church in Cleveland, Ohio
Cardinal OBrien

Head of Catholic Church in Scotland

Archbishop of St. Andrews, Edinburgh
John Wilkins
Editor of British Catholic weekly The Tablet
Sister Margaret Scott
President of the Conference of Religious Men and Women
In England and Wales

BROWN: There are more than a thousand

million Roman Catholics in the world probably as many members of
this one Christian denomination as there are Muslims, and their number
continues to grow. The Vatican has its own seat at the United Nations.
This is not just a religion; its also the most completely multi-national
organisation in the world today and its governed in a way thats unique.
Eamon Duffy, Professor of the History of Christianity, at Cambridge
University.
DUFFY: The Pope is an absolute monarch.
Hes subject to the judgement of nobody and his powers in the Catholic
Church are absolutely enormous. For example, he now appoints almost
all the bishops. And although the second Vatican Council enunciated
principles of collegiality that is shared responsibility among the whole
episcopate in practice, if the Pope chooses to interpret that as meaning
they must all agree with him, thats what happens.
BROWN: And that is what has happened?
DUFFY: That is what has happened.
BROWN: The Pope is an absolute monarch.
That does not mean hes omnipotent. Popes can command obedience,
but they cant compel belief. Pope John Paul II has accomplished more
than almost anyone else who held the office. Hes successfully
navigated the fall of Communism and the liberation of Eastern Europe.
Hes stretched the power and authority of his office further than seemed
possible. Could any successor do the same? John Allen, the veteran
Vatican correspondent of the main American Catholic paper, The
National Catholic Reporter.
ALLEN: Popes are constrained to an
extraordinary degree by precedent. The Pope cant simply decide that
Catholics no longer believe in the Trinity, for example. I mean that was
of course settled in the third century. There is also political reality. Lets
not forget that there are four thousand Catholic bishops out in the world
who, if you like, are the kind of middle level of management without
whom you cant do very much, most of whom will not be the new popes
appointees. That of course puts real limits on things. In addition to
which, there is simply the fact that this is a one billion strong church with

all kinds of different currents and ideas within it, and if you go too far or
too fast in alienating any one of those constituencies, things get very
sticky.
BROWN: This is an impossible job
description humanly impossible at least. And the method for choosing
a pope is correspondingly remarkable. Its also changed. No one knows
who the next pope will be, not even the cardinals who will elect him, but
their deliberations next time may have an unusually unexpected
outcome.
DUFFY: They vote by writing names on a
printed slip of paper and putting it in a chalice up to four times a day.
BROWN: Eamon Duffy.
DUFFY: The conclave takes place in the
Sistine Chapel. They will live in a rather posh hotel, which Pope John
Paul II built in the grounds of the Vatican extremely comfortable. This
is a radical departure from tradition. The whole idea of a conclave is that
the cardinals should be as uncomfortable as possible so that they will
very, very quickly elect a pope. Instead they will live in luxury and elect
at leisure. The conclave that will elect the successor to John Paul II is
different from any other conclave for a thousand years because for a
thousand years a pope could only be elected by a clear two-thirds
majority of the voting cardinals. In this new conclave, the rules will be
different. The cardinals will vote four times a day for three days. If they
havent elected a pope, theyll take a break, theyll be exalted to do better
and theyll resume voting for another three days. After thirty votes, the
requirement for a two-thirds majority will be waived and a pope can be
elected by a simple majority, by one vote. This means that a determined
block of forty-five cardinals, one-third of the electorate there are a
hundred and thirty-five electors at present can prevent the emergence
of a consensus candidate and can then shoo in their own candidate
provided they can rally fifty percent of the votes plus one. Its a recipe
for faction.
BROWN: What are the disagreements that
give rise to these factions? How can they be resolved? In this
programme, we ask what are the problems that will fill the next popes
in-tray. What will be uppermost on his agenda, whoever he is? The first
answer, since he is a world leader, is one that is on the agenda of every
President and Prime Minister today. Father Richard John Neuhaus,
Editor of the American conservative magazine First Things.
NEUHAUS:
There is a sense in which between
Islam and Christianity, there is a conflict of longstanding that has only
now been resumed after about a two hundred plus year hiatus. And I
think thats very important for us to understand: Muslims with any
historical consciousness tend to have a much keener appreciation of the
religio-cultural connection in the current conflict. Osama Bin Laden, for
example, in one of his reports very explicitly noted that September 11th
was a symbolically important date. September 11th was the date in 1683
in which the Polish forces turned back the Turks from the gates of
Vienna. It was the last great effort of Islam to advance in Europe and it
was defeated. Whether we are persuaded that thats an accurate reading
of history, its very important for us in the West to appreciate that that is
how many Muslims do understand the conflict. So certainly the Catholic
Church, and the Pope in particular, has a very powerful responsibility for
making sure that the conflict of the 21st century, of which were seeing
the opening chapters, does not become a all out war between religions.

BROWN: The siege of Vienna is alive in

some Catholic minds too. One side in the Bosnian civil wars was
aggressively Catholic. During that war, it was rather terrifying to hear
the Croat Franciscan Friars referring to their Bosnian Muslim neighbours
as The Turks. But Pope John Paul II has gone further than any
predecessor in his gestures of friendliness to Muslims as he has to Jews.
He was the first Pope to set foot inside a mosque, just as he was the first
to visit a synagogue. Father Timothy Radcliffe was for nine years the
Master General of the Dominican Order, which has nearly two hundred
thousand members in a hundred and sixty countries.
RADCLIFFE:
I think an openness to other faiths
has been absolutely central to the Popes mission. Hes probably been
the pope whos been most open to Judaism of any pope in the history of
the church. Likewise Islam. I think hes open to philosophers, hes open
to poets. I think within the Catholic Church as it were, within inside the
life of the church itself, he tends to be a bit nervous of too much
exploration sometimes, but I think he is a man who in many ways has an
open heart and mind.
BROWN: Would you say that continuing this
openness to Islam is an essential part of the agenda for the next century?
RADCLIFFE:
Id say that its one of the most
important things. If you look around the world today, wherever there is
violence its often where in fact religions meet whether its in Indonesia,
whether its in India - the clash between Hinduism and Islam, whether
its in Northern Ireland the tensions between Catholics and Protestants,
the Middle East. So I think that openness to the great faiths is probably
the major challenge that we face, particularly with Islam. There are some
Muslims in every part of the world who are open to dialogue. In many
places, there are not that many. What we have to be is we have to be
there in friendship waiting for the door to open, so its essentially a very,
very patient task. So we should be there, I think, in companionship at
their service. We the Dominican Order are renewing our institute in
Cairo for that very purpose.
BROWN: The Pope is in a unique position in
his relations with Islam because the church has a political dimension, as
well as a religious and social one. When Pope John Paul II opposed the
first and second Gulf Wars, or when he came out in favour of an
intervention in the Balkans, he was playing a role that was
simultaneously spiritual and political. No other leader on the Christian
side can do this. Its closer to an Ayatollahs role than to an
Archbishops, and that means that the next man has a unique
responsibility to form a bridge between Islam and Christianity at a time
of conflict between Muslim and Christian nations. Within the church,
however, the Popes problems look very different. Sister Christine
Schenk, a nun who runs Future Church, a liberal pressure group in
Cleveland, Ohio.
SCHENK: The most important job the next
pope will have will be to reconnect with the people of God, starting with
his own bishops and starting with the Bishops Council. Theres a
widening gulf approaching a chasm, I would say, between your average
Catholic (regardless of country) and the Vatican, and the bishops
themselves are the first to notice that. Cardinal Rodriguez from
Honduras was recently quoted, I think, in The Tablet saying that the
whole issue of collegiality and collaboration and sharing governance
with the worlds bishops conferences has to be the number one issue in
the conclave.

BROWN: But there are many American

Catholics who disagree with her. Richard John Neuhaus is one.
NEUHAUS:
Its very difficult to generalise and
say that there is an enormous gap whether between Rome and the
bishops, on the one hand, or between the bishops and the people. To
teach, sanctify and govern are the three chief duties of a bishop. And
right of centre among Catholics in this country and in Europe and a good
many also in the curia, they believe this Pope has been a terrific teacher
and certainly has been a faithful priest and sanctifier, but that he has
failed to take the measures both in terms of reforming the curia and in
terms of holding bishops around the world to account; that he has failed
to govern effectively.
BROWN: The Head of the Catholic Church in
Scotland, Cardinal Keith OBrien, has long experience of how the church
is actually governed. Hes been an Archbishop for twenty years and was
given his red hat this autumn.
OBRIEN:
Many attempts have been made in
recent years to decentralise power. I have been at synods of bishops in
Rome and they have been theyre been an attempt to decentralise
power with the Pope listening to bishops from all over the world on a
great variety of subjects. And when I say the Pope listening, he certainly
is a very good listener. And I remember speaking to one bishop at a
synod who said, You know, he said, if I had a gathering of my priests
for two weeks and they were talking at me for about ten minutes a time
from about 8.30 a.m. until 12.30 in the afternoon, he said Id find more
excuses than the Pope does to just absent myself from time to time. So
he does listen a tremendous amount. He absorbs a great deal. So bishops
and cardinals are gathered literally from all over the world, again
involved in consultation processes about every aspect of the churchs
work.
BROWN: So the bishops do contribute to the
decisions reached by the Vatican, but these central decisions are still
binding around the world. Father Timothy Radcliffe spends eight
months of every year travelling round to see his brothers and has
probably seen as much of the global diversity of the Catholic Church as
any man alive.
RADCLIFFE:
Its true we need a degree of
decentralisation. This doesnt mean to say that we should imagine that
the church is madly over-centralised, which it isnt. The Vatican is a
very tiny organisation: fewer people are employed in the Vatican than
the Cabinet office in London. For an organisation with you know one
billion people, there is this image of the church as a monolithic,
monochrome organisation which everybody has to say the same things
and do the same things, and anybody whos travelled around the church
knows that thats utter rubbish. There is more possibility of open dissent
and discussion inside the Catholic Church than there is inside the Labour
party, or the Conservative party for that matter. I mean we have nothing
like the discipline which you find with chief whips telling people how
they are to vote. So lets get beyond this image of this vast, great,
monolithic structure. I mean it simply isnt the case. But there is the
need for decentralisation and I think particularly there is the need to
empower bishops in the government of the church because the
challenges are so different from different parts of the world.
BROWN: Its not just the bishops who want
more independence from the curia, the Vaticans bureaucracy. John
Wilkins, the retiring Editor of the British Catholic weekly, The Tablet,

has spent thirty years watching the church close up. He thinks that the
pressure for change starts at the top with the cardinals.
WILKINS:
They will want a change in this
because and I dont think it matters whether theyre conservatives or
liberals or traditionalists or liturgists or what they are. I was once in
Rome and the late Cardinal Bernadine Archbishop of Chicago said to me
You know, John, they treat us and he was referring to the Roman
curia, the papal civil service they treat us like altar boys here. Now
hes a prince of the church; theyre all princes of the church. They dont
like being treated like altar boys and I think there will be a pretty strong
feeling and its pretty clear already underneath that they want to be
treated in future like princes of the church.
BROWN: The next pope will also have to
deal with the continuing legacy of the second Vatican Council. This
council, meeting for three years in the early 60s, reinvented much of the
church. It introduced masses that werent in Latin and brought a wind of
democracy to rattle ancient shutters, and the dispute over centralisation
might be seen as an example of that. But it was not just bishops whose
lives were shaken up by the council. Sister Margaret Scott runs an order
of nuns in Britain and is the President of the Conference of Religious
Men and Women in England and Wales.
SCOTT: See Im post-Vatican II, so I wasnt
around in the old days so I have no point of reference to compare, but
from what people say we have changed. If you look at religious life itself
tremendous changes, tremendous changes. I mean in the old days
when I entered, you never went home, even if people were dying. But
now you go home. If you need to be have a special arrangement to
stay and look after parents, thats fine; visit in the summer, etcetera. You
know thats just one thing which has more compassion, which is what
its all about. I think we need to humanise and show a more
compassionate face. I think thats terribly important. People need to be
loved and thats the message: God is alive and well and loves you.
BROWN: How is recruitment holding up in
your order?
SCOTT: In our order, in England and Wales
its sort of not holding up. In other parts of the world, it is. Its
interesting. In Japan where we havent had vocations for a long time,
people are beginning to enter again; in the United States where they
havent had people for a long time; South America, there are quite a lot
of people entering; Africa; Vietnam; Philippines; more third world
countries. But in our own situation here, were only thirty-five in the
province and we only have three houses in England. But other
congregations, Ive noticed in the past year suddenly people are
beginning to say at meetings Guess what, we have two novices or you
know somebodys about to enter. Now this is new conversation and this
is giving renewed sort of hope.
BROWN: Two novices may not seem a great
deal, but Sister Margarets remark exposes one of the central facts
confronting the next pope, with which this one has wrestled without
much success. There have never been more Catholics alive than today
and the church has probably never grown so quickly, but at the same time
the number of young priests has fallen off the edge of a cliff in the West.
Seminaries have closed all over Europe and North America. In the USA
today, there are more priests over the age of ninety than under thirty. No
one knows where their replacements are supposed to come from. Eamon
Duffy.

DUFFY: Theres been a collapse of

vocations both to the priesthood and the religious life in the West
because the clerical profession is now actually not prestigious. Its
atrociously paid. There isnt even now the respect and status that a man
had a right to expect till the present generation. I have been told
repeatedly by Irish clerical friends that they wont wear their dog collars
in the street because they will be abused.
BROWN: In Ireland?
DUFFY: In Ireland, in rural Ireland. I have a
friend who works as a priest in England but has a mother who lives in the
West of Ireland and she likes him to dress as a priest when he goes home.
He was walking along the street with her in a small town in the West of
Ireland and a man hed never met in his life shouted across the road
Pervert! Now thats a very common experience.
BROWN: For this to happen in a small Irish
town is profoundly shocking, but so are the scandals that gave rise to it.
They revealed something corrupt in the church. But what? For liberals,
the scandalous thing was the abuse of power; for conservatives, it was
the result of a lack of discipline and the presence in the priesthood of
uncelibate homosexuals. Richard John Neuhaus.
NEUHAUS:
What we need are men who
understand that the call to radical discipleship that the priesthood is, is
something that comes to a person a fully manly man, a person of
normal, strong (as all young men have) erotic desires, passions, needs
and that it is a call to conform ones life in obedience to Christ with
Christ as the model in a way that is lifelong and with no winks and no
nudges and no footnotes and no escape clauses, and that if youre not
ready for this, youre not ready to be a priest.
BROWN: Even those who think the problem
with paedophile scandals was child abuse, not homosexuality, are
worried about the demographics of the clergy.
DUFFY: Theres a real danger in the
Western Catholic Church that the clergy will become a profession for
homosexuals.
BROWN: Eamon Duffy.
DUFFY: Now there have always been
homosexual clergy and many homosexual clergy are first class,
marvellous priests, but I think everybody sees that it would be
undesirable to have the clergy predominantly homosexual - it would
create a barrier between the clergy and the lives of the people they
minister to. So if were to keep the balance right, we have to ensure that
a significant number of heterosexual men get ordained, and it looks as if
in the West the only way of doing that is to ordain married men or to
allow those who are ordained to marry. It will of course bring disasters
because if you have married clergy you will have divorced clergy and
you will have adulterous clergy.
BROWN: The crisis over celibacy is not acute
worldwide. The effect of traditional Catholic roles and the way that
theyre perceived depend on the societies around them and the
alternatives available. A nuns life of poverty, chastity and obedience
sounds like pure deprivation to a modern woman who expects more out
of life, but contrasted with some third world lives it seems a much better

deal: povertys better than starvation, chastitys better than rape and
obedience within a community is better than arbitrary violence from
strangers. Its widely admitted that many priests in the global South have
mistresses, but its also tacitly accepted in those countries. Timothy
Radcliffe.
RADCLIFFE:
Its clearly the case that in many
parts of the world celibacy has actually largely broken down - many
countries in Latin America, parts of Africa, to some extent in the United
States. So if the beauty of celibacy should be that it witnesses to the
kingdom - if it turns out to be the case that its being largely ignored or
bypassed, then not only is the witness not being given but a very negative
witness is being given and so we have to ask is it possible now either
we have to provide celibate priests with considerably more support or we
have to explore the possibility of them being married.
BROWN: These discussions may seem unreal,
but thats a measure of the gulf that has opened up between the modern
secular imagination and the traditional Catholic Church. Cardinal Keith
OBrien.
OBRIEN:
After our last visit to Rome, our ad
limina visit with the Pope, the Scottish bishops we were more or less
told by the Pope that Scotland doesnt seem to be any longer a Christian
country. And we can say that about other countries in these islands and
just over the water, over the channel. When you think of the way in
which many, many people lead their lives, when we think of the
standards of morality in our countries at this present time, its not as if we
are living true to what we might call our baptismal promises at this
present time. And, consequently, a tremendous effort is needed by
church leaders of all denominations to help with that re-evangelisation of
our countries, of our cultures.
BROWN: So one of the things youre saying
is that in Europe the division is no longer between Catholic and
Protestant as it was for five hundred years; its between Christians and
the rest?
OBRIEN:
Yes, I would say that. And one
might say we are meeting a common enemy as it were in the secularism
and the secular humanism in the society.
BROWN: Secularism is in part a consequence
of the changing role and expectations of women in society, and this is
something that can threaten the church at a very vulnerable point.
Religion has always been deeply concerned with families. Most people
never convert to any religion; they are introduced to it by their mothers,
so a church which alienates mothers will lose their children. Feminism
may be for many people a word which applies to a purely Western and
middle class phenomenon, but Sister Christine Schenk disagrees.
SCHENK:
Im a nurse midwife. I served in
inner city Cleveland for over twenty years. One of the tenets of public
health is that if you take the mother and the unborn child as the locus of
healthcare, you will affect the health of the whole community and when
you look at international health efforts, always those are geared to
serving women and children. Women themselves are coming forward
and saying what we need to do, from the developing world,
is education.
We dont need birth control, we know about that. What we really need is
education and we need to be empowered in our own societies. So this is
far from an issue of the global North; this is an issue for the whole world.
So in my own view the whole notion of feminism is for all of us.

BROWN: For all of us. The Catholic Church

for all its quirks really can claim to deal with everyone on earth.
Catholics are among the grandest people in the world; they are also
among the poorest and most wretched. John Allen of the National
Catholic Reporter.
ALLEN: When it comes to the confrontation
with capitalism, it is obvious that the Pope is painfully aware of the
struggles of the impoverished majority of the human family and believes
that the new globalised system being created in many ways is cruel and is
amoral in the sense that it seems to be designed so that an increasingly
greater share of the worlds wealth will be concentrated in an
increasingly smaller number of hands. Having said that, however, what
the church does not have is a clear alternative to offer and this, I think, is
one of the great intellectual challenges awaiting the next pope.
BROWN: The extraordinary global quality of
the church was brought home to me by the Popes visit some years ago to
the city of Tromsoe in Norway, high above the Artic Circle. In the bright
daylight of an arctic summer evening, the snow on the hills around, I
watched Pope John Paul II preach there in a mixture of Polish,
Norwegian and Vietnamese to a faithful Catholic audience, some of
whom had come there as boat people from a war on the other side of the
world. They had not only travelled for thousands of miles, they had
travelled in time from a pre-industrial society to one on the edge of
post-modernity but they had stayed Catholic throughout their journey.
This reach across time and space is obvious to the historian Eamon
Duffy.
DUFFY: One shouldnt underestimate the
resilience and adaptability of the Catholic Church as an agent of
modernity. Look at the role that the Catholic Church played in
modernising 19th century Ireland, its key role in the formation of national
politics with the church supplying the educational machinery to
transform Ireland from a peasant culture into a culture that could
accommodate itself to industrial modernity. So I think Catholicism is an
extraordinarily resilient box of tricks which can both straddle very
different societies and help societies to accommodate themselves to
social change. Its track record is good.
BROWN: What the church did in Ireland in
the 19th century, it may have to do for most of the rest of the world in the
21st. In Africa, inner city Cleveland and many other places, it is churches
that provide many of the public services that we expect the state to
provide healthcare, education and an example of idealism and fair
dealing. It is far more likely that churches, and especially the Catholic
Church, can help poor countries to help themselves than the United
Nations can. For all the undoubted evils and divisiveness of religion, it
remains the best hope of anyone who wants rich and poor nations to feel
part of the same world, made of the same flesh. The next popes agenda
is everyones.
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