Succession
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Succession I’ll touch lightly on the biggest event of the week, which is not the sad loss of the Nationals under the lights last night to the Marlins, nor the prospect of the violent thunderstorms that could come with the collision of cold air with humid mass that has brought temperatures almost to the 90s. It is to be expected. It is a time of transition. I am not of the faithful, so the elevation of Cardinal Joseph Alois Ratzinger is not an issue central to anything in my life. I salute him as Benedict XVI, the name he has chosen. His elevation occurred during an exceptionally long conference call yesterday, which I monitored from my desk at the Bus Station downtown. We emerged from our offices and discovered the White Smoke had issued from the roof of the Sistine Chapel. There was great suspense as my office mates huddled around the little television in the Global Government Affairs office, waiting to see who would emerge from the red velvet curtains. Cardinal Ratzinger- he will not be formally confirmed as Pope until this weekend- seems to be a fellow of firm beliefs, tempered in the crucible of the madness of the last century. The media is calling him the Vatican Enforcer, from his time as counselor to the Pope. He comes as a professional theologian with a background of fighting the liberation theologies that swept through the Church, particularly in Latin America . The iron in his back is well earned. Some called him Rottwilleiller Ratzinger for his devotion to dogma. He cut his teeth criticizing the Holy Office, which once managed the Inquisition. He was so successful at it that John Paul gave him the successor organization, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He is almost certainly the first pontiff who served in a Nazi anti-aircraft unit, and also the first to have left the forces of the Reich under his own power. He entered the seminary in 1939, but with the diminishing manpower of the German army, was conscripted for home service in 1943. He was called up to the Wehrmacht in 1944, and deserted in April of 1945, the same month that Dwight Eisenhower brought the Western Allied Armies to a halt, to permit the Red Army to encircle Berlin for the last battle. Stalin was permitted the coup de grace, in honor of the sacrifice of the Russian people. The young future priest might have seen some of the other young men who left the service on their own. They were hanging from trees and light posts, with crude signs hung around their necks saying this is the fate of the deserter. The Pope did not volunteer. He had no choice, no more than the other strange fruit hanging everywhere, military and civilian, men and women, ordinary citizens who were executed by the last bands of true believers. By April 24, the Soviet army surrounded Berlin , tightening the noose on the remaining Nazi defenders. Fighting street-to-street and house-to-house, Russian troops blasted their way towards Hitler’s chancellery in the city’s center. Joseph headed home. For him, the war was over. It ended for Berlin on the 9th of May, and it was everything the Hitler could have wished for, a Viking pyre for the Reich, since he was of the opinion that the German people had not sacrificed enough and therefore, forfeited their right to live, as only the government was without guilt. For those that lived through the change, it was a beginning and a hard one. Joseph Ratzinger returned to the seminary and was ordained in 1951, the year I was born. I mention the distant echo of the fall of Berlin , in that Benedict XVI is a curiosity, and perhaps an exclamation point. He will be the last world leader to have lived through the cataclysm. Everywhere else the generation that endured the struggle has passed the torch to another. Sometimes to their sons or daughters, some to grandsons. The new Pope comes to office at the age of 78. I can’t help but think of the end of the line of heroes who served in the Kremlin. Nikita Kruschev was a political officer at Stalingrad ; he denounced the excesses of Stalin, and had a good run as General Secretary of the Party. Then there was massive Leonid Brezhnev, the bulwark of the party, the stolid symbol of strength and stability. The Brezhnev years were about stability. Leonid introduced the slogan “Trust in Cadres” in 1965, and in so doing, appealed to the bureaucrats weary of the constant reorganizations of the Khrushchev era. Nearly half the Central Committee members in kept their rank and position through the entire Brezhnev epoch, and the average age of Politburo members rose from fifty-five in 1966 to sixty-eight in 1982. In the West, the Soviets were called the “gerontocracy.” Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982, four years after a Polish priest named Karol Joseph Wojtyla had risen to become Pope. The new Pontiff was vigorous and athletic. At Brezhnev’s passing, he was sixty-two. Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko were the last flickerings of the stable cadre in the Kremlin. I remember them only as old men, unable to endure the pressures of leading the superpower. They were the last gasp of the old regime, ossified, unwilling to change, unable to let go. When finally the last of them were gone, a young apparatchik named Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was ready to take over, and try something new. Benedict XVI is seventy-eight. I wish him well. John Paul left a dramatic legacy, and it is his role, and his fate, to preserve and protect it. For however long he may. He is confronted by the issues of celibacy, and contraception, and the role of women in the church. The world is torn over expanding religions. In the Western Hemisphere , the evangelicals are vigorous. Africa holds 180 million of Benedict’s flock. Islam continues to expand, and one of the places it is most vibrant is in old Europe, the former bastion of the One Church . Benedict will preside over no dramatic change, and he will fiercely defend the Faith. It will be interesting to see what happens next. Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra www.vicsocotra.com |
