Challenges for new pope: Secular Europe, relations with Islam
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By DON MELVIN Cox News Service - Published: April 10, 2005
VATICAN CITY — In the week since his death, praise almost beyond measure has been lavished on Pope John Paul II. But for all his strengths, the talk among Cardinals who have gathered in Vatican City is of the daunting challenges his successor will face.
John Paul's accomplishments are not in doubt: He played a role in the fall of communism, visited the far corners of the world, reached out to those of other faiths, and drew young people to him in an almost mystical way.
He may well have earned the title that some are trying to bestow upon him: Pope John Paul the Great.
But as old problems are solved, new ones arise. As communism has crumbled, radical Islam has risen. As the church flourishes in Latin America and Africa, it has withered in Europe. As a Pope focuses outward, he may pay too little attention to the church's internal management.
According to people who have talked with the cardinals now gathered in Rome, most of the men who will elect the new pope are concerned with the rising secularism in Europe, the church's sometimes difficult relationship with Islam, and the need to strengthen its internal governance.
And there is the explosive issue of sexuality, which includes priestly celibacy, homosexuality and gay marriage, birth control, abortion and in vitro fertilization.
But while there is general agreement on the nature of the challenges, there are serious divisions over the best ways to respond to them. Overcoming those divisions, some of which cut deep, is another of the challenges the pope will face.
Europe, the Church's own backyard, is a significant problem.
"Some people look at Europe and see it spiritually tired, if not dead," said Father John Wauck, who teaches at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome and is a member of Opus Dei, a controversial personal prelature.
Christians failed to get a mention of God in the proposed European Union constitution. Rocco Buttiglione of Italy, appointed last year as the European Union's Justice Commissioner, had to withdraw because of his views that homosexuality is a sin and women should stay home to care for their families. And the union seems to be infected with a "radically secular culture," Wauck said, one on the verge of legitimizing gay marriage, abortion and euthanasia.
Beyond that, attendance at Mass has declined significantly throughout Europe. Some of the world's great cathedrals stand almost empty Sunday after Sunday.
The problem for the church is clear but the proper response is not.
Some cardinals say the church needs more democracy and transparency in the way it is run in order to fit into the modern era and gain acceptance.
Others say no: The church must be bolder and less equivocal in stating what Catholicism is all about. What is needed, they say, is not compromise but evangelism.
"We're in mission territory in Europe," said Wauck. "People will have to decide, am I going to follow Brussels or the church?"
A similar divide exists over how to handle the relationship between the Catholic church and Islam, each of which has about 1 billion members.
John Paul II was the first pope to enter a mosque, the Omayyad Mosque in Damascus in 2001.
Some cardinals think the church should continue to reach out to moderate Muslims and take care to do nothing inflammatory.
"The next pope will need to be someone capable of dialoguing with the different religions of the world, and particularly Islam," said the Rev. Keith F. Pecklers, a Jesuit professor of theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University. "Islam is on the rise, and Christianity, at least in the developed world, is in decline."
But another group, said John Allen, the Vatican correspondent of the National Catholic Reporter, is skeptical that there is such a thing as moderate Islam. They think what is needed is "tough love;" their buzzword is "reciprocity."
If Muslims are allowed to build the largest mosque in Europe in Rome using Saudi money, this group asks as an example, should not Catholics be allowed to import bibles into Saudi Arabia?
And if the treatment of Muslims in Europe is a matter of concern, what about the fate of Christians in Arab lands, many of whom are leaving?
"The nightmare scenario is that one day we'll wake up and the Holy Land will be empty of Christians," Allen said.
Then there is the issue of the internal management of the church, which many cardinals feel was neglected during John Paul's peripatetic travels.
Some feel there has been insufficient contact between Rome and bishops who are not up to snuff or who stray from church doctrine. And some feel the training of candidates for the priesthood should be strengthened.
"These are the people who have to communicate the faith to other people," said Father Peter Gumpel, a theologian and historian.
And the church's response to the sexual abuse of parishioners, often children, by priests in various countries has been seen as woefully inadequate — and even, at times, complicit.
"The sadness of the sexual scandals has not helped the credibility of the church," Pecklers said.
But attention to church management can take many forms.
Reform-minded cardinals favor a more ecumenical style. But other cardinals long for more discipline from the top so that various agencies of the church march in lockstep.
In few areas do the differences seem more difficult to bridge than the area of sexuality. Wauck said the next pope must continue John Paul's espousal of "a culture of life," which includes not only opposition to abortion and euthanasia but "a view of human sexuality and its connection with life."
Support for in vitro fertilization, for example, has no place in Catholic teachings, he said: "Sexuality and birth ought not to be two separate things," he said.
But Pecklers sees in such views the seeds of the church's decline.
"Particularly in the area of sexual morality, there is a divide between the way the church is run and the reality of people's lives," he said.
Over the course of the 26 years of John Paul's reign, he said, the Catholic Church has become quite polarized between right and left.
"The next pope," he said, "will need to work to heal that rift."
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