Patrick Jamieson, Victoria

I was just over thirty years of age, a new parent, and working in Church communications in Ottawa, in the Year of Three Popes, 1978. It would take me a while to figure out what had just happened.

The church was entering its Polish winter according to the scuttlebutt of our progressive Vatican II circles. Father Bob Ogle was elected a Member of Parliament for Saskatoon East, defeating Otto Lang, Trudeau the First’s Justice Minister. After fifteen years of Vatican II, change was still in the air. In his memoirs Ogle said he had a strong premonition about his future under the new pope. It could have applied to the entire Catholic Church.

My boss at the time, an experienced and well respected progressive priest in Ottawa circles, when I expressed my puzzlement over John Paul II, smiled saying:

“You can’t make a silk purse out of a pigs ear, and that is a biblical quote.” He was from Cape Breton and not much got by him in the universal church with his wry Scottish nature.

Joseph Ratzinger was JPII’s enforcer; a pit bull type around all the creative theological thinking and thinkers. These were the ones who had fed my masters level theology studies between 1975 and 1977 in Toronto and then Vancouver. Looking back now I can see how I got in just under the last wave of the heady post Vatican II decade. The wheels of change were turning all right.

The cold war which has brought the church to the current verge of schism started then and there.

When Cardinal Ratzinger was announced as elected as pope in 2005, Ted Schmidt said on CBC TV that we could have done better, the church deserved much better.

My comment of disappointment to the media here in Victoria was that in my circle he was considered ‘The Prince of Darkness.’ A literary reference, this went over like a lead balloon, I had never had direct irate calls prior to that moment. A friend who was born on the same day and the same year was also featured welcoming him as one more beloved pope. Such was the irony, and the division.

2. THE NEW PARADIGM

What sort of abiding symbolic figure does he seem ten years after retirement in 2013?

Every four hundred year, the church and the world has gone through a paradigm shift under European leadership. In the fourth Century, Constantine made Christianity the imperial religion and the dissenters fled to the desert,

In the 8th Century, Monasticism, the flowering of this movement formally established itself. Benedictine Monasticism and its offshoots became a bulwark against the so called Dark Ages.

In the Twelfth Century, the East West split of the church, the Orthodox departed from Rome’s leadership – and the 16th Century saw The Protestant Reformation.

The Twentieth Century, after the Cataclysm of the World Wars, saw the further battle over the Reforms of Vatican II with appropriate rapprochement; but the threat of the present schism over and against the forward looking vision of Jesuit Pope Francis prevails.

In this historical context, I see Ratzinger as Benedict XVI as an instrumental figure in this overall development; perhaps even a stranger symbolic figure in death for the ultra-traditionalist faction who refuse to fall inline with the spirit of Vatican II, as they express it. He was the last nail in the coffin of the old model.

3. AEONS

Psychologist Carl Jung has a different way of viewing the last 2000 years of history for this Aquarian Age. He measures it in aeons.

Aion is his researches into the Phenomenology of Self. He depicts the first thousand years as the Christian millennium; as the Christian era. The last 1000 years as the Anti-christian era, perhaps peaking with Hitler and The Rise of the Third Reich. This matches Hegel and Marx’s Dialectic of History. Thesis versus Antithesis resulting in Synthesis; the third aeon which we are fulsomely entering, an era of poly crisis Synthesis.

Each paradigm renders an era barely recognizable from what has gone before. Benedict XVI, with his red silk slippers and departure from Concilium, the forward looking theology journal of the Second Vatican Council, presents us with a political enigma.

My pet thesis is that Joseph Ratzinger early recognized the handwriting on the wall. He was far from the leading theological light following the council, conceding the limelight to Karl Rahner, Joseph Schilebeekx and most notably the radically progressive Hans Kung. Kung, who became after John Paul II’s ascendency, the alternate ‘pope’ of the progressive camp since 1978, that infamous year of three popes.

Ratzinger instead went the political path, in order to control, correct and contain these radical element as he saw them. John Paul II placed him in control of the Doctrinal Office to harass his rival theologians as a bureaucrat, strong on rules and regulations.

Ratzinger went so overboard in this direction that when he was called on the carpet by the Congregation for Doctrine, Bishop Remi De Roo came back to Vancouver Island with an alarming perception. De Roo repeatedly said he felt he met the face of evil for his troubles.
Such was the depth of Ratzinger’s embrace of his watchdog role and the use and development of his rules, regulations and enforcement technique of containment. The Church was back to fear and loathing of the medieval era.

4. THE CONTAINMENT

1978 to 2013 is 35 years in the direction of Vatican II including a long era of its containment by two successive popes, as Richard O’Brien described their era in his first post Vatican II encyclopedia of Catholicism.

The lens of his life of Joseph Ratzinger is an apt way to view the authoritarian integralist vision of John Paul II. Benedict obviously ran out of energy to complete the job. Perhaps his earlier liberal heart gave way in the assigned task of extinguishing the spirit and flame of Vatican II.

Thank God he failed. Out of the phoenix ashes arose Francis, from a continent other than Europe to give impetus to a more truly universal church.

(See related article titled “Catholic Paradigm Shift:  10 Years of Pope Francis Dismantling the Papal Court” in the ‘Other News’ Category.)

Recently I sat at St. Andrew’s Cathedral in Victoria for 11 am Sunday Mass, observing and absorbing the energy of the United Nations that the RC Church has become worldwide.

The theology from the pulpit may be alarmingly weak following the model of Remi De Roo and his synodal church, now being enacted by Pope Francis worldwide, not without schismatic reaction.

But post Benedict there is something significant emerging two thirds way into the Century of Vatican II.