The Holy Father

Once it was the pride of Catholics to affirm that they were obedient subjects of the successor of Peter. I do not say that the situation has changed completely yet our time is one of re-examination and re-organisation: re-examination of primary doctrines and re-organisation of the structures of the Church. In these circumstances the Holy Father is bound to be sometimes under fire.

Some (a very few) will question the meaning of his office; some (a good many) will question the value of particular things said and particular things done by him.

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Personally I look forward to the time of re-affirmation, when we Catholics will say again without reservations: ‘Peter is our Father. He has the words of truth.’

‘My goodness me!’ some of my best friends may say. ‘Jimmy, what’s wrong with you? You’re becoming a blasted integralist. The Pope is only part of the pattern. What about the infallibility of the College of Bishops? It is the Church who is infallible, not one single man. He’s only the spokesman.’

I am all for free speech and differences of interpretation within the context of common belief. But I would like to point out that the recent salutary changes in the organisation of the Church were not initiated by the College of Bishops or by any lay group.

They began as an inward seed planted by the Holy Spirit in the heart of a single man, our great charismatic leader, Pope John XXIII.

In politics I am a unionist and a democrat. In religion I am a monarchist. Perhaps I can apply the words of W.B. Yeats to my condition: ‘My medieval knees lack health until they bend. . . .’

My opinion is that the Holy Spirit did not only instruct Pope John because he was a great saint; He instructed him because He had already made him Pope. If we do not take this view we may be in danger of following our own intuitions and possible charisms to the point where we begin to rend apart the seamless robe of Christ which is the doctrinal unity of the Church based on the Petrine supremacy.

Undoubtedly we are free today as never before to re-examine and reinterpret our belief. But Peter gave us that freedom. If he had not given it to us we would still be bound; and if, so bound, we had made ideological war on Peter, we would have had no renewal of the Church but only a second Reformation resulting in the formation of several hundred more Protestant splinter groups.

For the safety of His Church, God gave her two unique and peculiar assets. He gave our Mother Mary, a sinless Guardian on earth and in Heaven, so that the sinlessness of Christ was transmitted to one member of the Mystical Body; and He gave us Peter, so that the infallibility of Christ would also be transmitted.

The sins of the successors of Peter have been a matter of common scandal and debate. Yet impeccability and infallibility are two very separate gifts. The first is a rare jewel. The second is, as it were, a peg driven in so that the Church should never slide into irreversible error.

Christ could have given the governorship of His Church to St John, the beloved Disciple; but He did not choose to do so. He gave it instead to St Peter, the burly and impetuous one, the one who made mistakes. Perhaps He chose him most of all because of his qualities of passionate loyalty and manly energy. If angelic purity and mystical knowledge had been the qualities He wanted or even if He had wanted the man whose soul was closest to His own page 579 – then surely He would have chosen St John. But He chose Peter.

It seems almost as if He were saying humorously: ‘This man is a saint of course. I need a saint to get the line started. But what a saint! And plenty of them won’t be saints at all. They’ll be soldiers, administrators, politicians, businessmen, monks and men of the world. I want my Church to be ruled by Everyman. Nobody will ever be under the illusion that I have granted my Vicars impeccability. All they will be able to say is that they are demonstrably human.’

And so the Popes moved down history, carried in chairs, riding on horseback, seated on thrones, suffering in dungeons, living paradoxes of religious authority and secular diplomacy. Undoubtedly the desire for temporal power has been the demon of the Papacy. Yet the men have been misguided who have looked for the qualities of John in the successors of Peter.

Nobody (I hope) has ever thought that the Popes were free from error in that ambiguous field where religion touches on politics. The decision of a reigning Pope to excommunicate an English Queen who had never accepted his spiritual authority made it a certainty that England would never return to the Church as a whole community, and also guaranteed several hundred years of bitter persecution.

No doubt that Pope did what he thought right. But the Holy Spirit did not guard his decision from political error. No promise was ever made by God that any Pope would have that protection.

The Pope cannot tell me what political party I should belong to, except in circumstances when a given political party has as part of its programme the destruction of the Church.

No Pope can tell me who my friends should be, what woman I should marry, what books I should write. The Pope does not govern my choice of a vocation.

But when Pope Paul defines Catholic doctrine for the whole Church, I do not seize a magnifying glass to find what loopholes I can discover in some interpretation that I find it personally inconvenient to accept. No. I read; I try to understand; and then I bend my head and say: ‘So be it. Peter has spoken.’ Is this a shameful docility? I think not. Without it I would lack a Leader and a Faith.

We learn to love the Holy Father. That is the secret of Catholic integrity. Love makes the road easy for us – not indeed the unreflective love of a child, since we need adult discrimination to apply the general principles of the Faith to our own particular circumstances.

But I remember that fortunate time in Bombay not long after I had been received into the Church, when an Indian Catholic friend most generously gave me his entire collection of Papal Encyclicals, each in the form of a small pamphlet. And as I browsed through them, a new pattern slowly revealed itself to my mind and heart – the pattern of authoritative knowledge, the page 580 mode of intervention of the Holy Spirit in human affairs.

Our modern age had not been left without a mirror that would show it its own features. The evils of capitalism, the evils of Nazism, the evils of monolithic Communism, the gross evils of modern warfare – these were exposed in the clearest language. If we have failed to benefit by the exposure, it is certainly not the fault of the Popes. If our world had followed the Popes, there would be no bitter nationalism, no greed and no arms race. We would be quietly building the Utopia of which we have dreamed since the beginning of time.

But the Hierarchy of Latin America prevented the thunder of Leo from being heard in their churches, because it would have disturbed the modus vivendi that linked the Church with an unequal social system.

And the Hierarchy of England muffled the words of Benedict pleading for a just peace, because the centuries-old ghetto mentality of English Catholics made them fear any breach with local nationalism.

The Popes have been like a man leading a horse by means of a rotten rope. Too strong a tug and the rope will break. It is not the strength of Papal authority but its weakness which has done most harm to the Church and the world. And that weakness is not the fault of the Popes but of ourselves.

One of the most heartening features of religious life in our own times is the increasing spiritual prestige of the Holy Father in Protestant and agnostic circles.

It has been brought about not by a change of doctrine but a change of tone in matters ecumenical. When Pope John said to a Jewish delegation, ‘I am your brother Joseph,’ he spoke in familial terms, a kind of speech that had always been possible but which nearly all the hierarchy had lacked the courage to use.

And our own devotion to the Holy Father is itself familial. He is not the chief bureaucrat of a State organisation. He is not a demagogue gaining popularity from a careful mirroring of the ephemeral desires of a million voters. He is in fact a Father given to the Church, who deserves and requires filial love.

When Pope John threw open the doors of the Church to the winds of change, a light was revealed to the world which had hitherto been visible only to the faithful. The world, ignorant of or indifferent to doctrine, nevertheless recognised that John fulfilled its perennial wish for a true guide and father. This was possible because John’s heart beat at one with the Sacred Heart of Our Lord. If he had not been the kind of saint he was, either the doors would have stayed shut, or the open doors would have let in confusion.

But as it is, the right Pope for the times was given to us, and the ecumenical frost of four hundred years melted in a day. But John died, a sacrifice on the high altar for the sake of peace and brotherly love; and we were left to mourn him and consider his successor.

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The position of the present Holy Father is difficult. One may perhaps draw a fruitful parallel between it and the position of Nehru in India after the death of Gandhi.

Nehru was not a charismatic leader. It was his task to bring to fulfilment the seed that Gandhi had planted. The Indians were divided in their opinion of Nehru. They missed the massive originality and personal benignity of Gandhi. Nevertheless, without Nehru the Indian society could not have been adequately controlled and integrated.

The parallel is of course imperfect. Yet we would be wiser not to complain about what Pope Paul is not (a charismatic father-figure recognised equally as such by those within and those outside the Visible Church) but to honour him for what he is, a holy and dedicated leader struggling with enormous tasks.

We have of course the right to criticise. Our new maturity has been granted and will not be taken from us. But the obedience that came partly from awe and partly from habit must be replaced by an equally meticulous obedience that springs from love.

The Holy Father will rarely command our obedience. It is not the fashion of the times. Nevertheless I think we should obey even when we are not commanded. The new freedom requires a new mode of obedience.

Peter has not stepped down from the difficult earthly Headship of the Church.

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