Church in Search of Itself Benedict XVI And the Battle for the Future

Chapter One Politics Toward a People's Church For more than six hundred years, it has been the same scenario. A pope dies. The cardinals assemble. After a good many prayers calling on the Holy Spirit, they lock themselves in the Sistine Chapel, surrounded by some of the most stunning art in the history of humankind, to vote, twice each morning and twice each afternoon, in a series of solemn, silent, and secret paper ballots, until a two-thirds majority agrees on the successor. When he responds, he does so with the same single Latin word used by so many of his predecessorsAccipiam"I will accept." He proceeds to announce his new name, while over in a corner of the chapel the papal chamberlain burns the ballots with some dry straw in a centuries-old stove, sending three white puffs of smoke above the Roman rooftops to tell a waiting world,We have a pope! The same prayers, the same ballots, the same three puffs of smokealways the scrupulous insistence on sameness by a group of men as committed to their history as any community on the face of the earth, to emphasize the fact that they didn't invent all of these formalities yesterday, that they are only following ancient traditions, and passing them on to the next generation. But in the spring of 2005, the cardinals coming to Rome to elect Pope John Paul II's successor were being challenged to play new kinds of roles in a different kind of story. It was different because, although every element in their protocol mirrored the conclaves of 1378, 1566, 1846, and 1978, one important dynamic fact had changed: the waiting world had changed, changed more in the past quarter century than it had changed in all of human history. The old waiting world was a passive worldexcept in Rome, where its people, at least for the first thousand years of the Church's history, were asked to ratify, viva voce, the man chosen to follow in the steps of Peter. But for almost a thousand years since then, the cardinals who gathered and voted were verbs, and every other Catholic in the world a passive recipient of the action of theverbs. We have given you a pope, the cardinals said in effect. Rejoice and be gladin our choice. In 2005, however, in a world that had suddenly shrunk to the size of a village, new mass-mediated channels of communication among the people of the world marked a shift in the grammar of the Roman Catholic Church, one that scholars predicted would have a profound, positive effect on the Church's existence for the rest of the twenty-first century. Through these channels, Catholics were finding the kind of active voice not exercised in the Church since the first few centuries of its existence in Rome. Electronic miracles have compressed time and space, so that now we live and work in new kinds of microcosms and macrocosms that alter our perceptions of everything, accelerate the pace of change, and create the need not only for a new grammar, but for a new geometry of power, moving from the pyramidal to the circular. The shift was largely driven by new information technologies that made it possible, for example, for a cameraman working for RAI, the Italian state-owned television giant, to stand on a Vatican City rooftop, focus his Sony Betacam SX television camera with the fourteen-inch X2 Yashinon telephoto lens on the golden pectoral cross of a cardinal crossing Saint Peter's Square, and flash that image out to every television on earthand to many cell phonesinstantaneously and in color. And so, when the cardinals gathered in the spring of 2005 to prepare for the Church's change of command, the whole world was present in Rome, courtesy of the mass media. Interviews and commentary about the event started beaming out from Rome to eveKaiser, Robert Blair is the author of 'Church in Search of Itself Benedict XVI And the Battle for the Future', published 2007 under ISBN 9780307278142 and ISBN 030727814X.