not the motorcycle diaries

My money was on Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger for the new Pope. And I was right. I know far too much about the more shadowy workings of the Vatican, not least that Ratzinger’s nickname is ‘The Rottweiler of Christ’. I grew up amongst liberation theology tomes and Basic Ecclesial Communities meetings, watching the loving adults in my life get sacked from their jobs and marginalised by their peers in the church because of the likes of this mang. These are people who believed in god and wanted to be part of a catholic church, but who often had to fight hard, and suffer, because their vision of god and church included people other than old, white, celibate, conservative-thinking men. (Losing one’s job, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the suffering that the Church has caused for people like this, and even more so for those who these people were standing up for - women from all walks of life and people living in dire poverty, mostly).

Under the rule of JPII, Ratzinger was the Cardinal responsible for weeding out dissidents in the global Church and making sure that Catholicism retained its sheen of arch-conservatism - e.g. that only men took up leadership positions and got to wear the nice white frocks and stoles with brocade trim (an essential uniform for the eternal task of policing women’s bodies and the like). It is largely because of Ratzinger’s terrier-like pursuit of those who didn’t keep to the black letter of the Canon Law that any form of living outside that law is still so roundly condemned by the Church. Examples that I remember quite vividly include the ‘re-location’ or ex-communication of priests like Tissa Balasuriya , I was reminded of this recently at the censure of Carol Christ here in Sydney.

To paraphrase Paul Kingsnorth, it’s quite an ordinary event in that no-one could have nor should have expected anything different in the election of a new Pope. I’m largely complacent myself - thankfully, what happens in the Vatican really doesn’t impact on my life these days. But I can’t help but feel echoes of the frustration I remember being surrounded by as a child.