Today CNN and the major tv networks showed complete coverage of the cardinals taking their oaths one by one at the start of the conclave. My wife likes to watch the mid-day news and was perturbed when it was pre-empted by the showing of this almost meaningless ritual. I say almost meaningless because the networks did send their highly paid anchors to Rome, so they do need to justify that with something worthy of airtime. The only truly newsworthy event is the actual voting and the smoke that announces the results to the world. As a born but not practicing or believing Catholic I should know it by heart by now but I had to look it up. White smoke means they have elected a pope, black smoke means no pope yet.
When I was a child the Catholic Church seemed to be experiencing a real renaissance. The world was changing, particularly in the US, which had the wealthiest and most active Catholic population. The end of that war brought the suburbanization of America. The church I went to as a child was a modern building, with a forward thinking pastor. Catholics were no longer isolated in parishes based on their parents or grand-parents homeland. The no longer lived in almost exclusively Catholic neighborhoods. The post war generation was the first that was raised as truly American Catholics. (Yes, the national parishes still existed but they were moribund.) They were ready to act as adult Christians and not blindly follow the rulings of their religious leaders. The Church too saw the need to change. The War showed them the evils of anti-Semitism and the need to truly wipe it out among Catholics.
Changes were made and ulitmately those changes were far smaller than they appeared to be at the time. The liturgy was now in the local language. The priests abandoned the old vestments and faced the people in the pews. Nuns lost much of their headgear and in future years many gave up their habits for secular clothing.
With the quick death of Pope John XXIII, who initiated the Vatican council, the promise of the council which was to open up the church was slowly abandoned. The entire point of opening up the church was to restore a moral leadership to an institution whose jobs often seems to avoid moral leadership. In the US during the 1960’s we saw nuns and priests protesting the war, we saw them involved in the civil rights marches. The flurry of activity from priests and nuns, over time, became something of a novelty and something that has never propagated up to the hierarchy.
Today we see an increasingly irrelevant papacy. The church is moribund in Europe, its home. Yes, there are the beautiful buildings but except for Ireland, Italy and Poland few come to pray in them. Even in the US, the people no longer follow Vatican dictates (just look at birth rates among US catholics). The late Pope John Paul II, only had influence because he had some moral power. He was a Polish patriot and was actively supporting the struggle against Soviet domination in his home country. Other than that can anyone think of any moral stand from a bishop or cardinal? Perhaps Catholicism will exist as Judaism exists for Jewish atheists, as a cultural remembrance. I don’t think today’s educated Catholics need to be led by a bunch of old men.
