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Why all the carping over
the Pope's new cardinals???
I continue to be perplexed and frustrated that almost every Italian Vaticanista, including Andrea Tornielli, and Anglophone commentators like John Allen keep harping on 1) the lack of proportional representation in the College of Cardinals, and 2) too many Italians and too many Curial officials named cardinals - when there are very obvious reasons for both of these circumstances. And yet, the same complaints are raised every time there is a consistory or when the composition of the College of Cardinals is under discussion - so tiresome already - without anyone attempting to look at these obvious reasons, none of which are arcane or ideological, but sheer and practical common sense!
Also, any way you look at it, the objections are a direct reproach to Benedict XVI whom no one could possibly accuse of acting irrationally!
The latest article of this kind is from the arch-fiend Marco Politi who, as usual, unhesitatingly blames it all on this Pope [whom he said in a recent article, 'should never have been elected at all', as though his will were more decisive than the Holy Spirit!).
To Objection #1, the simple answer is that the College of Cardinals was never meant to be a representative assembly.
a. The Church is not a democracy - if it were, she would be subject to change at every shift of the 'democratic' whim, and it would no longer represent faith, which is supposed to be constant.
b. The College of Cardinals is a meritocracy, or so it has been in modern times, after the kings and emperors of Europe lost the right to name bishops and cardinals.
c. Because of this, the churches who have been playing a principal role the longest still have the advantage of merit and a deeper bench to draw from than the younger churches have. In time - and not too far in the future - the churches of the Third World will come to have the quality and quantity of bishops eligible on an equal footing with those of the First World, and their numbers will start to reflect better the proportion of Catholics they represent.
NB: If the present membership of the College of Cardinals represents only 72 of the 180 or so countries with which the Vatican has relations, will Politi et al argue that the Church should name a cardinal from each of those countries not yet 'represented'?
At the Sunday Angelus, Benedict XVI mentioned the three criteria by which cardinals are named: they have served important dioceses with distinction; they have served the Holy See with distinction in offices other than that of being a diocesan bishop; or they have led a distinguished life of study and teaching in the service of the Church. Quod erat demostrandum!
To Objection #2, expressed as 'troppi Curiali, troppi Italiani" (Too many Curial officials, too many Italians) - as if Benedict XVI should have known better, or that he somehow succumbed to Cardinal Bertone's scheming - the answer is:
a. Heads of Curial offices need to deal with bishops around the world to enforce their directives in the name of the Pope. So many bishops are arrogant enough already to consider themselves Pope in their respective domains, that a Curial head of office needs to outrank them ecclesially to be plausible. This is a practical consideration that must have been the original rationale for associating Curial leadership with a cardinal's rank.
No one questioned the practice when it was done by Paul VI and John Paul II (The Curia sort of metastasized in scope and size under them). Why is Benedict XVI being faulted now?
b. Heads of Curial offices are not lightly chosen by the Pope, who names people with special competence in the sector they are assigned to. There is no particular reason why Benedict XVI would choose Italians for the Curia over other nationalities, all else being equal.
It just so happens that this time around, there is an unusual number of new Curial appointees (10 out of 22 Curial heads) which reflects the final turnaround from John Paul II appointees to an almost fully Benedictine curia. (It took seven years for most of the JPII appointees to reach retirement age).
Five of the 10 new Curial Cardinals are Italians who head 'technical' offices concerned with administration and finance - mostly internal to the Vatican and necessarily involving much dealing with the Italian state bureaucracy.
One could understand that Benedict XVI is working on the practical assumption that this is best done by hard-nosed Italians who have had prior diocesan and administrative experience of consequence, and who are also eminently qualified for the sector they are being named to (Legislative Texts, Patrimony of the Holy See, Economic Affairs, and the Governatorate). In their case, too, a cardinal will carry more clout than an ordinary bishop.
The three other new Italian cardinals occupy premier positions - prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, Fernando Filoni, whose long experience as Nuncio to mission countries and five-year service as Sostituto at the Secretariat of State qualifies him eminently for the job; Antonio Maria Veglio, president of the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Refugees; and the Archbishop of Florence, Giuseppe Betori.
Four of the ten new Curial cardinals are of different nationalities: the Brazilian Joao Braz de Aviz, prefect of Religious Orders; the Portuguese Manuel Monteiro de Castro, Major Penitentiary; the Spaniard Santos Abril y Castello, Arch-Priest of Santa Maria Maggiore; and the American Edwin O'Brien, Grand Master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre.
How silly and irresponsible it is to suggest that Benedict XVI elevated the Curial 'technical' chiefs just to gratify Cardinal Bertone and 'pack' the College of Cardinals with persons indebted to Bertone and therefore ready to do Bertone's will! That implies that the Pope is allowing himself to be used as an instrument to influence the next Conclave, and it's a grave insult to Benedict XVI who has never been accused or even suspected of playing political footsies.
If Politi, Allen et al can name any Curial head appointed by Benedict XVI who is incompetent or unqualified for his job, or any extraordinarily outstanding bishop of the Third World whose work and merit the Vatican has ignored all these years and failed to acknowledge with a red hat, then say so. Obviously they can't.
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So there are now 30 Italian cardinal electors out of 125. Although Pius XII internationalized the College of Cardinals so that for the first time in centuries, Italians were no longer the majority, Italian cardinals never voted as a bloc in the decades that they were an overwhelming majority or had a virtual monopoly of the Conclave. For the simple reason that each faction put up its own candidate for Pope. Their failure or inability to unite resulted in John XXIII's unheralded election in 1968, and the election of both John Paul I and John Paul II as the compromise candidates who broke the deadlock between competing conservative and progressive Italian bishops. (Paul VI, like Pius XII before him, was the prohibitive favorite during the Conclave that elected him).
In 2005, the Italians did not have a really strong candidate, and the progressives Martini and Tettamanzi ended up getting 9 and 2 votes, respectively, in the first balloting, knocking them out of contention - while the influential Italian conservative cardinals went into the Conclave supporting Joseph Ratzinger, so one can hardly accuse the Italians of jingoism.
It baffles me whose candidacy Bertone might be preparing for in the next conclave [if he is, I find it distasteful of him to even be thinking about it or making so obvious that he is!] - it certainly can't be his own. He'll find himself like Tettamanzi, whom the Italian media sought to sell - to me, inexplicably - as the shoo-in candidate for Pope in 2005 and ended up getting no more than two votes!
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/02/2012 22:06] |