I haven't read the stories yet, but headlines were depressingly familiar: "Abuse survivors give their views on the resignation." I wonder if the writer justified his maliciousness or was unaware of it.
I expect lots of speculation on why he's resigning--and I'll join that crowd and guess that he was feeling too tired and fuzzy mentally, and didn't believe he could be a good pastor or administrator if he wasn't thinking straight. That's what would make me give up if I were in his shoes.
John Paul II was noted for his pastoral skills, but apparently was a lousy administrator. Benedict XVI is noted for his scholarship and insight, but apparently is a lousy administrator. Are you seeing a pattern here? Pastor is not the same as Teacher is not the same as Administrator, and the offices are all supposed to be filled by the same man: the same problem so many Protestant churches have, but with a "congregation" and bureaucracy several orders of magnitude larger. Perhaps a different approach might be in order?
I don't believe Dante was right: popes ought to be able to retire. I wish him all the best.
I've been poking around the New Testament and early church history a bit, and haven't some up with any really solid evidence that Peter was supposed to be numero uno in the church. Jesus re-commissioned him as pastor, but pastoring who? He isn't the head of the church in Acts, and the "this rock" was early on taken to mean the gospel Peter announced. The most convincing argument so far is my own (I think): all the gospels agree that Peter denied Christ. Repenting from that would be good training for being the chief. A ruler, by virtue of the "secular" obligations and distractions of office, will often find himself bogging down and denying the spirit he serves. Peter in the courtyard is the archetype of much of church leadership.
And no, I'm not trying to be cynical: power is dangerous, Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy is unavoidable and humiliation can be good training.
Be that as it may, there's a shortage of proof that Peter's successor was supposed to be numero uno after him.
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Peter is usually listed first. Even though Paul confronts Peter about doctrine, it seems to be important to making his case that Peter did eventually agree with him. Peter certainly seems to be one of very few major figures in Acts, especially at Pentecost and at conferences. There are few visions for the whole church - one is Peter's.
Even with all that, it's not enough, to my mind. If one accepts the premise that God intended one Vicar of Christ from the start, I suppose Peter does finish ahead of the other contenders: James, John, Paul. But there isn't a strong Scriptural justification that this is indeed God's model. The early church seemed to put more weight on councils, and many branches of the church still do - the Eastern Orthodox, for example.
The modern every-man-for-himself model is generally American, though we did get some of it from the German and English schismatics.
True, Peter was certainly a leader, but he seems to be paired with someone else, or participating in a consensus. He might even have been the main leader, but if so it wasn't the "do it my way because I'm the ultimate authority" leadership approach that some of the popes tried out on the Orthodox (with less than happy results).
I'm still a rank amateur at church history, but the books I've read don't show the "Vicar of Christ" business really crystallizing until rather later than seems plausible for a truly apostolic tradition. Nothing is really inconsistent with the secular hypothesis that the main church was in Rome because that was the main city (and when Constantinople that became the main city people tried to make that church the main one--and ran into conflict).
I should bone up on some of those Germans a little more and see where our trends came from. But I suspect we've bettered them in the every man his own magisterium approach.
I am thinking of somewhat later Germans, 17th-19th C.
I think I'd have a hard time being a Catholic, despite having few problems with what I consider the most central doctrine, just because of a lot of what I consider to be encrustations of tradition that are mistaken for ultimate truth.
But it's true that I tend to undervalue the role of tradition in keeping the Church active in our lives over centuries and in the middle of turmoil.
Still, although I can see good historical and practical reasons for putting one guy in charge and saying he's infallible, or requiring celibacy from priests so they didn't get caught up in dynastic struggles, I can't take any of those things seriously as fundamental matters of faith. So I guess that makes me an irretrievable Protestant: always determined to judge matters for myself, and not admitting anyone else to be an ultimate arbiter between me and God.
Thing is, if all Christians were exactly like me, the Church would never have survived as an institution.
IIRC papal infallibility and male priesthood are supposed to be fundamental, but celibacy is a discipline that could be changed anytime. But there's also devotion to the saints, and ...
I think God is using all the denominations to display fragments of what should have characteristics of the unity. That in some way, though the unity should not have been broken, it will nevertheless have been good that each was here.
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