People have been talking about the papal abdication all week. Even the ABC thought the resignation of the spiritual leader of more than a billion people a newsworthy topic. Generally, people are very supportive, seeing it, as Cardinal George Pell put it, as “the decision of a serious Christian”.

Benedict’s resignation could indeed be a welcome precedent; but although the Pope made the point in an interview earlier in his pontificate that it could happen, there was no hint of it. As one wit remarked, it was the only secret the butler didn’t know.

However, the papacy of Benedict was fraught with problems. A reliable Vatican source says there is a lot of criticism about the way Rome “does business”: “At a curial and diplomatic level it is very bad. The handling of a series of issues has not been appropriate or good; indeed the whole question of governance was affecting the reputation of the Pope himself.” Even Benedict seems somewhat disillusioned. On Ash Wednesday he cited “divisions and rivalry among the clergy”.

Celestine wrote that he had resigned out of “the desire for humility, for a purer life, for a stainless conscience, the deficiencies of his own physical strength, his ignorance, the perverseness of the people, his longing for the tranquillity of his former life.” It’s not hard to hear echoes of this in Benedict’s own statement of resignation. Significantly, it was on the tomb of Celestine, in L’Aquila, that Benedict laid his pallium, the symbol of his episcopal authority as bishop of Rome, in 2009. He might have been thinking about resignation even then.

So has Benedict simply given up? He made it very clear in a 2010 interview with Peter Seewald that the pope does not resign because things seem tough. On the contrary, he said that is precisely when a pope should stay. A pope resigns only if he realises the papacy is beyond his physical and mental capacity, and consequently beyond his governing expertise.

Sometimes it seems that today’s papacy might be beyond anyone. Like Celestine, Benedict found the bureaucratic demands of the office more than burdensome. He sees the church’s bureaucracy as an obstacle to its holiness. “The more administrative machinery we construct, be it the most modern, the less place there is for the Spirit, the less place there is for the Lord, and the less freedom there is.”

Indeed the church’s labyrinthine bureaucracy was part of the difficulty of dealing adequately with the sexual-abuse scandals. Benedict shifted the responsibility for this more directly to Rome, which was a radical move, but too few remember that. Simplifying the channels of bureaucracy is one of the most important issues facing the church and a primary challenge for the new pope.

The other great challenge is the decline in Catholic spirituality, with the parallel triumph of secular relativism in the West. There is widespread disillusionment with the established church and narrow secularism encourages a view of religion that would remove even its long philosophical tradition from the public domain. To make matters worse, there is a shrinking demographic in Christianity’s traditional European strongholds.

In Spain and Italy, fertility rates of 1.2 and 1.4 respectively are the lowest in western Europe. Aggravating the apparent numerical decline of the church, a new liberalism has taken hold in Europe and North America that wants to diminish the authority of the hierarchy and erode traditional doctrine on issues such as family, life and sexuality, which are non-negotiable areas.

However, it is important to remember that the church is not European, and these are really post-Christian Western phenomena. It is not such a problem in the developing world. For example, in The Philippines, the annual rate of baptisms is higher than the totals for Italy, France, Spain and Poland combined. The three regions of Central and South America, Africa and Asia account for almost three-quarters of all Catholic baptisms. Consequently there is a strong line of opinion that the next pope should come from outside Europe, perhaps even from the developing world.

The Catholicism of the developing world is very conservative, but at least in the developing world religion is seen for what it is: the most important force in human affairs.

The growing number of Christians in Africa, projected to reach 228 million by 2025, has probably the deepest political significance because there the dividing lines are drawn between Islam and Christianity, both of which seem to be polarising towards fundamentalism.

Where Catholicism flourishes, it is not of the new touchy-feely character that tolerates a watering down of doctrine. In the developing world the anti-authoritarian excess in the West that followed Vatican II have been corrected; ancient elements of Catholic tradition and practice such as the Marian emphasis have been revived; and there is frank horror of Western notions of “private” sexual morality.

Already we have seen the fallout from this divide in the Anglican Church over the question of the ordination of practising homosexuals.

The Anglican Church in Nigeria – the single largest Anglican Church – has come to schism with Canterbury, and many are looking to Rome.

Celestine did not come off too well. He was dragged out of solitude by his successor, who locked him up. To add insult to injury, he was put into hell by Dante for his “quitter” mentality. The history of the modern papacy seems almost dull in comparison. The papacy is an evolving institution, and in the persons of John Paul II and Benedict XVI it has reached a very pure form and ideal.

Benedict is acutely aware of all the church’s problems and has a certain vision of the future. He knows he must make way because, just as at the end of the first millennium, the church is changing; and, as at other times of chaos, it needs to renew itself. But the church always emerges from that chaos because its inspiration is divine and its focus universal.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/papacy-of-benedict-was-fraught-with-problems/story-fn562txd-1226579054863