Of popes and politicians written by Terence Corrigan

[Nat Quinn]

The passing of a pope – head of the world’s largest Christian denomination, and uniquely, also the head of a sovereign state – invariably attracts a great deal of media attention. So, it has been with the death on Easter Monday of Pope Francis.

In the coming weeks, the College of Cardinals will be sequestered to deliberate on a successor. This will be a matter of intense interest both for those inside the Church and those outside, since what is at stake is less who will occupy the Papal Cathedra than what that signifies about the future of the Church, and the consequent influence it will exercise.

Obituaries to Pope Francis have invariably been warm and respectful, hailing his personal modesty, his presumed openness to change in Catholicism, and his commitment to a raft of “progressive” causes. This is a partial understanding of his papacy.

He was a deeply divisive figure in the Church. He was given to expressing or countenancing views that suggested shifts in Church teachings, but he presided over nothing radical. In some cases, such as permitting blessings on same-sex couples, they were hedged in qualifications, so as simultaneously to horrify conservatives and frustrate progressives.

And for all his kindly public persona, Pope Francis could be domineering and even ruthless to those he viewed as rivals. To others, he could be fiercely loyal, even protective, and even when allegations of sexual abuse were involved.

Original mandate

Pope Francis’ original mandate, now largely faded from view, was to deal with the corruption that had become ingrained in the Vatican’s administrative systems. Following the money, in other words, and cleaning it up. Here he initiated significant reform, with some measurable success, though his papacy ended with the Vatican in severe financial trouble.

Ed Condon, canon lawyer and editor of The Pillar, a news and commentary website on the Catholic Church, described Pope Francis as “a contradictory and mercurial pontiff who often appeared less like a sure helmsman of the bark of St Peter and more like a man struggling to ride a horse bolting in several directions at once.” It will be for his successor, and perhaps their successors, to attempt to deal with the aftermath.

Much of this would be recognisable to South Africans, and not just the seven percent who are nominal Catholics. The failure of leadership to set a coherent path, strains and dysfunctions of major institutions, the damage inflicted by corruption, and an evident inability to correct course even as all of this threatens to undo it is an apt description of the state of the ANC.

The Catholic Church and the ANC have a common predicament: each is an institution with a profound sense of mission, a belief that it is keeper of transcendent truths, and a claim on the loyalty of its followers; yet each has had to navigate environments that have constantly called this into question.

For the Church, this has been the problem of centuries: the doctrinal and political challenges of the Reformation, science and modernity, and latterly, the exponential growth of secularism, and rapidly changing social mores about morality and community. The fierce glare of modern media, perhaps nowhere as glaring as in the exposure of clerical sexual abuse, have only served to push this into high gear.

New society

The ANC has, of course, a much smaller historical frame of reference, but to itself and within the context of its own worldview, arguably no less profound. The new society that it pledged to bring into existence looms permanently over the horizon; its own political theology remains trapped in a Cold War world from which it has struggled to emerge. Claims to superior morality echo hollow amid a welter of scandals.

The party itself is in a perpetual state of crisis, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy: a state mysteriously resolved prior to the last election – miracles not being confined to the supernatural realm, it seems – and riven by internal divisions, sometimes ideological, sometimes over the diminishing spoils of office.

For both institutions, new leadership – Pope Francis in the Church, President Cyril Ramaphosa some years later in the ANC – was meant to set a course. Comments Condon: “Francis’s most favourable interpreters, myself among them, have long seen in him a pope with a great personal touch and an almost preternatural ability to communicate with the world on an emotional level. The hope and theory was his pontificate would, in the final reckoning, be appreciated as a time of re-scoring, rather than revolution – of setting the lyrics of the Church’s teachings to new music and new rhythms. Instead, he penned not a new symphony but a violent cacophony, leaving behind him a Church more divided – geographically, theologically, and liturgically – than it has been in decades, and a Vatican teetering on the brink of insolvency.”

With some similarities, President Ramaphosa has been content to contain warring factions beneath the threadbare mantle of a party unity built on access to office for its own sake and the spoils it offers. And while history might assess Pope Francis kindly as having attempted to open the Church to a conversation about its role in the world and its future, President Ramaphosa has entertained nothing so bold.

False dawn

The new dawn has proven a false dawn.

For both the Catholic Church and the Vatican, the future is deeply uncertain. Each faces calls for reform and renewal, yet to do so threatens to challenge the very essence of what each of them is. Catholicism is the inheritor of two millennia of tradition, and is ultimately answerable to a power beyond this world.

Secular commentators typically forget this when they argue that what the Church needs to more accommodation with society as it is. Besides, there is no guarantee that shifting positions on human sexuality or the meaning of marriage covenants offers a solution. Not without cause, Catholic traditionalists point to the decline into post-Christian mush of many of their Protestant counterparts, and indeed to the sparsely peopled pews in some of Catholicism’s more progressive jurisdictions. Fealty to that tradition is part of the Church’s offering to its faithful.

As an aside, those musing breathlessly on the prospect of an African pope, and assuming he would therefore be a progressive, demonstrate very little understanding of the realities of African Catholicism.

For the ANC, a meaningful renewal would mean a thorough reconsideration of the ideological and policy mix that has brought South Africa to the brink of system failure. In some respects, it has pushed South Africa over the brink.

Indeed, as a secular political party existing in the here and now, and accountable not to the spirits of past generations but to all-too-human voters, this comfortably fits within the realm of the possible.

More than that, there is plenty of polling evidence demonstrating dissatisfaction with the ANC, with the direction the country has been moving. There is also ample evidence that most South Africans would welcome a more pragmatic approach, one that dispenses with the anti-growth, pro-poverty, and corruption-driving dogma of race-based empowerment, employment equity, and the party elevated above all things.

Yet in common with the Catholic Church, reform is resisted because of the ANC’s ideological convictions and self-conception. If the Church wrestles with the challenge of modernity, so too, as Brian Pottinger argued nearly two decades ago, does the ANC. The idea that a “hegemonic” party could manage a society as complex as South Africa, or even lay claim to the undivided loyalty of its members, belongs to another time – one that decisively ended with the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Yet it is in these terms that the ANC still expresses itself.

Divergence

And herein lies a major point of divergence between the two. The Catholic Church at least understands the nature of many of its challenges, even if a response to them – in any way – is fraught with risk. The ANC gives little impression of this, seemingly comforting itself that history ordains its continued incumbency.

The Church can also call on a well of emotional, spiritual, and intellectual commitment from millions of people worldwide. As much as they may bitterly disagree with one another on what “being Church” means in contemporary Catholicism, they value it. This is what two millennia and a supernatural creed produces.

The ANC has nothing comparable. Historic loyalties and affinities may play a role, but it is a diminishing role. South Africa’s people are frustrated and angry. Last year’s election was a verdict on it, a salutary reminder that in politics as in religion forgiveness may be bountiful, but it is not infinite and comes with the imperative of repentance and reform.

Right now, the ANC resembles something like a crooked priestly caste, deluding itself as to the devotion of its congregants and gorging itself on what remains of their dwindling offerings.

Unless the ANC can reverse this, it is heading for accelerated decline and ultimately for irrelevance if not extinction. It would not be the first party to follow that road, nor the first religion to do so. And the only way to avoid this will be for the ANC is to subject its own worldview to critical scrutiny; to be, in other words, more like the political party it is supposed to be, and less like the religion it often resembles. But indications of such a willingness are not encouraging. Pride, as the Book of Proverbs says, comes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.

The decline of the ANC is probably an inevitability, and a precondition for getting South Africa out of its foetid stasis. Though there are grounds for some trepidation.

The decline of a major institution is invariably destabilising and introduces unpredictable possibilities into the surrounding environment. The same holds true for those critics of the Catholic Church who look forward to its dissolution. As the Catholic writer, GK Chesterton, once wrote: “When men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”

This is an injunction that the Catholic Cardinals will be reflecting on, and which the ANC would be well advised to heed, and which South Africa’s people cannot afford to ignore.

 

source:Of popes and politicians – Daily Friend

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