The Pope and the intellectuals
Peter Nichols
Rome Who is it easier to stop being: Hamlet or John Wayne? The Pope must be wondering. Ever since he was photographed with a broad sombrero over his ruggedly photogenic features to protect his grizzled head from the Mexican sun, he has carried with him the image of the stern, strong, manly, indefatigable and essentially righteous arm of the law who depends more on his masculine instinct than his learning.
His problem is the opposite of Pope Paul VI's, who was unable, until the very last years of his reign, to shake off the label put on him by John XXIII of being Amletico'. Paul VI once caused intense embarrassment by coyly putting on a feathered Indian head-dress that some visitors had given him. John Paul II would have worn it well. Whatever may be said about Paul VI, there was not much of the wild west about him. He needed to seek the common touch which he did not possess and to escape the fate of being known as an intellectual. John Paul H is undoubtedly an intellectual, but that is not why the crowds love him, and it is not why many intellectuals find him hard to take.
He allows no suspicion to emerge of a sense of doubt. That is one of the reasons why the intellectuals do not feel him a kindred spirit, as they did with the selfquestioning torments of Paul VI. Some people say that he is a good listener, but what they usually mean by this is that he listens without interrupting them, and then spares them his comments. He does not succeed in giving even this impression at times, as the account from a Latin American cardinal of his private audience suggests. The cardinal felt that he had a good deal to tell the Pope about his experiments in organising small Christian communities in Brazil, a subject of great importance to the Catholic Church in Latin America. He had barely touched on the subject before the large Papal hand brought him to a stop and he was told that the Pontiff knew all about that subject from his days in Cracow.
John Paul II is, clearly, not a good organiser. At the special meeting which the Pope called last week of the Sacred College, the cardinals rumbled incessantly about its inefficiency. The invitations went out without any prior warning only a month before the meeting was due to take place, and this first summons contained no more exact date than some time in early November. It was not until a second and a third letter arrived that the cardinals had some idea of the subject-matter they would be expected to discuss. When they arrived, they were bound to secrecy, though most of what they talked about could well have been said in public.
This rather bumbling style contrasted with the historic importance given the event. Anything John Paul Il does is made to look historic, even if it is not. This was. It is centuries since the Pope treated the Sacred College of cardinals as his immediate advisors and not just his electors. John Paul II made it clear that this summons would not remain an isolated incident, Next year he has the International Synod of bishops which normally meets once in three years. This presumably means that the cardinals May be back again in 1981 to develop its role as a religious House of Lords, while the Synod can hope, at least, to fashion for itself a more challenging role. Both at the moment are consultative bodies.
The Pope's own opening speech at the meeting of the cardinals last week was first declared secret, It was then released late in the evening, but not to everybody: just the type of behaviour to have visiting journalists, unfamiliar with the ways of the Pope's official channels for public relations, throwing their typewriters around the press room in unChristian frustration. He himself conducted a long public audience in the square a few hundred yards away from the hall in which the cardinals held their plenary sessions, without telling the crowds anything of the presence in the city of this venerable body. On the next day he left the cardinals in plenary session in order to visit workers at Rome's railway stations, which angered at least some of the members of the Sacred College who had come a long way at short notice and at the Pope's bidding, only to see less of him than they might have done.
There was not much clarity about the formal nature of this meeting. All that the Vatican suggested was that the Pope had good memories of the long series of meeting of cardinals throughout much of the summer and autumn of last year, before, during and after the two conclaves, which elected first John Paul I and then John Paul 11. The Pope called it an expression of 'collegiality'. He said this at the beginning of the meeting and he said it at the end, despite the strong public statements in between by some of the cardinals who were adamant that it had nothing to do with the idea.
Cardinal Suenens, the departing Belgian primate, who is one of the most powerful advocates of collegiality, stated very clearly that the cardinals, whether residential bishops or not, were not there as pastors of the international Church. That would require a session of the International Synod of bishops which, he added, he would like to see reinforced. In fact, much of what they talked about had little enough to do with pastoral work. They talked about the state of,the Curia and the Church's finances. A footnote to history was provided by an official estimate of the current year's budget deficit which was 17,000,000,000 lire or nearly £10,000,000. This was the first time that the Vatican had admitted to the amount of the deficit. It was more a gesture than a contribution to knowledge, however. The Pope wanted to support his point that the Church's fabled riches were no more than a damaging misunderstanding. He did not publish the full details of total expenditure and receipts, and the Vatican retains its reputation for deliberate caution.
In one field, however, this reputation is unfounded, and that is in the intellectual one. The Catholic Church has at one and the same time been a magnificent patron of the arts, an oppressor of original thinking, a great instigator of powerful minds, a clumsy failure when dealing with modern science. And so it was of some importance that the Pope reminded the cardinals, after their debates on the Curia and on finances had dominated the scene, that he intended personally to dedicate much of his attention to the problems of culture, science and the arts. He confided this to them on Saturday morning. The same evening he attended a session of the pontifical Academy of Sciences called to mark the centenary of Einstein. He used the occasion to make a first step of real magnitude, with his rehabilitation of Galileo as a Christian. The treatment of the great scientist by the Inquisition is probably the worst individual case of the Church's failure to accept an original mind. And so there was no better base on which the Pope could begin his attempt at finding space at the Papal court for the intellectuals as well. And that is not all. Those who have been attending the Wednesday audiences in St Peter's Square will have noted a marked academic tone which the Pope is now bring' ing to them. He rides in as usual, smiling and waving, on his white jeep. But once the cheers die down as he takes his seat on the dais, he is quite likely to go on for a half WI hour or more of abstruse scriptural coilment. The day he omitted to tell the crowds about the cardinals he read them instead a lengthy lecture based on the second hook of -, Genesis not even saving them his lengthY footnotes.
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