We returned home last Thursday after having buried my beloved mother, and having seen her body lying cold and flat in the coffin in the chapel of rest the day before. I said the Subvenite and the Libera me and associated prayers from the English Ritual, as this would be my only chance to do so. I had already said a Requiem Mass the day my father broke the news and another on the eighth day. They were sad events, even for believers as some of us are, and they seemed to pull our family together as funerals usually do. New intuitive understandings came through the sadness and the resolve to go forward in life courageously. Having lived many years on the European Continent, I had forgotten how English our family is with our sense of discretion and dignity in all adversities!

I had the use of our laptop computer and wi-fi was available everywhere we went, so I was able to keep up with e-mail and service this blog. I got rid of a couple of trollish comments, the usual “convert to the true church or <whatever>” slogans, and approved others from new commenters. I wrote up my interesting experience of attending a Baptist service in Leeds (not wearing clerical dress) and a reflection about the Pope.

The articles flying around the internet and the newspapers are very disorientating as we are led into the same old dilemmas of conservative rigidity against doing away with dogma (theological or moral teachings), ordaining women and applauding the LGBT agenda. It all seems to be about categories of thinking that are foreign to any individual human being! Last week, for me, was just not the time for thinking about all that.

What does this papal abdication mean? Has he really just discovered a gay clique in the Vatican? If so, he’s bloody slow on the uptake since the rest of us have known or heard about it for thirty years! Is he giving up because men in the Curia won’t let him do anything against the “new orthodoxy” going back to the time of Paul VI? That’s what a pontificate of unfinished jobs seems to point at. We seem to have had a Pope whose intellectual work and thought fill us with admiration but who never had any kind of practical sense. There are so many possibilities that are probably just as wrong as each other.

If people want to lay bets on who is going to be the next Pope, that’s up to them. I find such speculation idiotic. However, the general future direction of the Church is a concern of all of us, even for those of us who didn’t do any Tiber-swimming last year or the year before. If it all continues as now, some will suspect a conspiracy of the “bishop emeritus of Rome” secretly governing through a “puppet” papacy. We’ll see how big the cranky fringe gets. Many would like the Church to go like ECUSA with Ms Jefferts Schori at the helm, taking traditionalists to court if they don’t hand over their property and claim to use the word “Catholic” to describe themselves. That seems to be what Hans Küng and the various large liberal groups of the English and German speaking worlds would like. Then there is a Southern Cone tendency as in the Anglican Communion, but which in the case of the Roman Catholic Church would probably mean writing off the western world. There is of course the possibility of a return of the intégriste and conservative right with a new Pope from Opus Dei, perhaps open to a deal with the Society of St Pius X. Such a Pope might take a name like Pius XIII and a certain proportion of folk would be happy to read infallible pronouncements every morning at breakfast on the BBC news on the wireless! Maybe as much as 80-90% of the Catholic world would be alienated.

Has Benedict XVI realised what effect his abdication would have? Perhaps, like in The Name of the Rose, he has ignited the dry tinder that would bring down the entire corrupt institution, from which a new Church would grow “brick by brick” in some far-off future. Some refer to the “prophecies” voiced by Ratzinger in the 1960’s according to which the Church would be something other than the Vatican and old institutions of Europe. At the end of the 1960’s, like Louis Bouyer and others of the ressourcement school, Ratzinger perceived a crisis in the Church. Church buildings and institutions would rapidly become things of the past and there would remain few faithful. He saw the need for a less clerical priesthood involving ordaining men established in life and their occupations or giving them non-ordained ministries. He clearly hoped for a more interior and spiritual Church, and some way to bring back the alienated popular classes.

This blog has had some lovely comments these last few days, especially from Michael Frost and Stephen K. There are some real pearls of wisdom. The conservatives and liberals might make a caricature of Benedict XVI’s idea of the small and “pure” Church. The concept simply means different things to different people. At the extremes, the Pope is accused of being some kind of Donatist or Manichaen sectarian, and on the other, of seeking to further the “Judeo-Masonic conspiracy” of destroying the Church to foster the goals of the Devil. Neither agenda seems to be in character.

What would remain of Catholicism if the entire clerical structure were discredited as the anti-clerical media is obviously hell-bent on doing? We have to see between the cracks, between what the journalists want in terms of women bishops and gay bishops, birth control, abortion and the rest – and what really seems to be wrong. There is a real problem with the bureaucracy and the Vatican that seems to have become something like the Court of Versailles in the 1780’s or Moscow in the 1980’s. If there is some kind of upheaval to come, would that make things even worse or bring good? I am unsure.

Another idea comes into my mind, why the abdication came just before the beginning of Lent. The message of Benedict XVI is one not of following the political agendas of the day, but of introspection and examination of conscience. The themes of Lent come through: our mortality and the fear of God, temptation, the light of God in the soul, the Transfiguration, the exorcisms of the rite of Baptism and finally the Paschal Mystery of the Transitus Domini. It’s all being timed liturgically. That’s how it looks to me.

Benedict XVI was always one for mystagogical catechesis, a point that will certainly be missed by those stuck in theological systems that ignore the tradition of the Fathers and an earlier vision of the Church.

Wait and see…