Indian summer Pope
Peter Nichols
Rome
I enjoy listening to Poulenc at the time without very vividly remembering much about it later. With the exception of that theatrically effective last scene of 'The Dialogues OfT he Carmelites' where the nuns are guillotined to an energetic and climactic fugue.
Lately that scene has kept coming back. I could hear it while watching the crowds circle the stone stairs to the second floor of the Vatican Palace to pay their respects to the body of John Paul I. This Indian summer Pope who ruled for a brief month of preautumnal sunshine (after his death came the first cloud bursts) talked about the Carmelites at the best of his few audiences. He knew the novel by Georges Bernanos which Poulenc used as the basis for his opera. The Pope made a point, sometimes too heavily, of bringing in literary references to his talks and recalled these nuns who spoke of love as they went to their deaths as an example of the way a Christian should be ready to face the problem of violence. He saw love as something contagious.
This, in fact, has been the Christian experience. It brought sophisticated grumbles from Julian the Apostate who was put off Christians because — among other reasons— they were helpful not only to each other but to the pagans as well. And that was one of the explanations why he could not break the relationship between the declining empire and the growth of Christianity. Which, in its turn, is also one of the reasons why the Roman Church took a semiimperial stance and still has an administration with the advantages and defects of its dependence on an ancient and absolute monarchy.
John Paul was a plain, good, shiningly sin cere man and hisgoodnesswas certainly contagious in the sense that a great number of people liked to come and hear what amounted to uncomplicated sermons of a traditional kind. One had the feeling that he would have been at home as a priest at any moment in the Christian period. Both his immediate predecessors — John XXIII and Paul VI — whose names he (misguidedly) took were more modern than he was. He disliked microphones, for instance, despite the fact that his voice was thin asa result of an operation on his tonsils. This outlook was part of his charm. He gave the salutary lesson that popularity can come to someone who deliberately avoids being up to date.
He probably did not know what it was, any more than he knew what the Roman Curia was like. Sometimes he seemed to exaggerate his simplicity and some, at the beginning, could not believe that he really meant it when he said that he was just a beginner; he had already been Patriarch of Venice, and to have led one of Italy's greatest sees should have given him some sort of insight into the way the Church's central government worked. But it seems he really did not understand its workings. He is said to have been making some notes about how he envisaged his relationship with the Curia would be just before he died, but nothing will be known about this, even if it is true, unless his successor decides to make these jottings public.
The Curia is timeless; it was the supreme bureaucracy in Europe and always formalistic, aware of its weight and influence — as anyone from Henry VIII or a modern Roman property-developer looking for backing from a Cardinal could understand — it changes sufficiently to avoid transformation. It gives the impression of being largely satisfied with what and how it is. And it is very professional. Some would add pretentious, because of the way it offered a complete series of candidates of various outlooks as possible Popes at the election in which John Paul was chosen.
One of the reasons why he was chosen was because he did not belong to the Curia. He was not in conflict with the Curia. He had not encountered it very much. But he was the eternal figure, timeless through the ages, who would not have anything in common with bureaucracy because it was alien to him—and yet he was forced to try and lead one which felt itself to be just as eternal as he. A heart attack removed him from this impossible situation, and no one will know whether the situation itself was the cause of his death. The strain on him can easily be imagined. Every Pope has his individual strain. John XXIII knew what to had to be done within the sacred palaces but was aware that his time was too short to do it. Paul VI bore the huge burden of trying to bring the Church to terms with the modern world, while allowing nothing of the historical weight of the office to fall from the pack on his back.
John Paul's experience was the most significant for two reasons. The first is that something has to be done about the situation without delay. Paul VI could be allowed to carry his burden as long as he lived as Pope, and he did so for a decade and a half. John Paul Was no sooner there than he was gone, and had to be replaced. The second reason is that the cardinals who elected him made a massive miscalculation which has to be put right. They heard of the need for a pastoral Pope; they acknowledged the demands for decentralisation and a less prominent role for the whole of the Rome apparatus. But it is ' extremely difficult to find a pastoral man capable or interested in the techniques of decentralisation and of real changes in the Curia because the challenge of such problems is rarely felt by a pastor.
The cardinals might have solved their problem by finding their decentraliser first. He could not be a man ignorant of the Curia and the ways of Rome because administrative dismantling needs someone who knows a lot about administration, just as the Pope who will really bring the bishops of the world into a form of co-responsibility must understand both the mentality (which varies widely) of the bishops and the timeless outlook at the centre. These are not sciences to be absorbed by instinct. Contagion does not work in changing the mental habits of centuries. Nevertheless, the unfortunate John Paul was sent forward by his fellow-cardinals to be the pastoral Pope who would decentralise and hence de-bureaucratise the may not have been aware of the ccrhuTuerhIctyehy.of their choice. In a sense they can be thankful that the reignwas so short. It would, of course, have been interesting to see what John Paul would have done had he had the decade that he might fairly have expected. But his death has illuminated in a flash the essential problem facing the Catholic Church: of how it can best deal with its pastoral problems and its organisational questions, both of which still require deep thinking. The combination is after all the primary issue facing any form of organised religion in crisis, of which the Roman Catholic Church happens to be the foremost example.
A Pope who is pastoral has been the urgent suggestion for years, partly because the last three Popes have all come from the diplomatic corps. But it is hard to make anyone explain what they really mean. Do they mean a Pope who concentrates on running his own diocese well, which is no bad idea as Rome is no credit at all to its line of illustrious bishops? Should he be looking at pastoral problems in the Catholic world? But if the papal power is deflected into limited directions, who fills the vacuum?
The Carmelites marched up the ramp to the guillotine singing of love. John Paul had his pontificate cut off practically before he had started. Symbolically, at least, the blade which fell on him was the steel of organ i sational controversies hardened by years of inconclusive debate. At the next conclave, the cardinals will at least know where to begin. They cannot turn back on the popular simplicity of John Paul but if they expect his successor to take the whole Church in hand as well as charming the crowds, they will have to give him more help or they risk seeing him soon follow John Paul up too steep a ramp towards too early an end.
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