Yesterday I was stopped by one of my neighbours on our shared drive. Normally a full-of-life type person, she approached me cautiously with a kind of sad demeanour.
“I’m sorry for the loss of your Mr Pope”, she said.
Taken aback slightly, I didn’t quite know how to respond, and simply replied saying, “Thank you”.
I think she could read the slight surprise on my face and quickly said, “If that’s what you say”?
With 600 years since the last papal resignation, and society’s understanding of religion becoming more remote, the truth is she, like all of us, haven’t encountered anything quite like this, and so finding the right social register, particularly when one, as it were, encountered the ‘drive priest’ and is not all that familiar with church register, can be a bit challenging.
Driveway meetings generally aren’t in-depth conversations and we reasonably quickly established that the pope’s resignation wasn’t a funeral.
Once she realised I wasn’t unduly disappointed she concluded our driveway exchange by saying, “Oh, well, good on him, he realised he was too old and not in good health. There’s no disgrace in retirement and at 85 he deserves a break”.
We both collected our morning newspapers and went on with our day’s activities.
However it’s a conversation, along with an article on EWTN that’s occupied my mind.
The EWTN article recounts Benedict talking to the crowd in St Peter’s Square on Ash Wednesday, reiterating the reasons why he is resigning.
While EWTN didn’t explicitly make the point, I must say I was somewhat impressed in the retiring pope’s humility.
- Firstly he acknowledged that his role was a ministry entrusted to him by God on April 19, 2005,
- then he reminded us that the Church is not his Church; rather it belongs to Christ,
- and despite his pivotal role in the last eight years, he expressed hope in the future saying he is confident Christ’s care and guidance for His Church will never be lacking.
- Lastly, he told us he is resigning “for the good of the Church”.
There is a marked difference between the death of John Paul II and the resignation of Benedict XVI.
Yes Benedict leaves the papacy with some mighty big issues to deal with, but there is no funeral, there’s no mourning and there’s no need – real or perceived – to find a super-star replacement.
We of course probably need to remember that most or all of these Cardinals have been appointed either by John Paul II or Benedict, and radical change is probably not the flavour of the day. Nevertheless my hope and prayer is the College of Cardinals see this as an opportunity to mark a slightly different course or change in tone.
And if reports from Rome are true, the city is abuzz. For example, rather than a funeral mentality, after the Ash Wednesday audience Benedict received a prolonged standing ovation, and then at the completion of the “standing O,” a large brass band from Germany processed down the street leading to the St Peter’s Square evidently ‘pounding out a rousing march number’ and carrying a banner expressing pride in “our pope”.
– John Murphy is a Marist priest working in digital media at the Marist Internet Ministry, New Zealand.