Pope urges leaders to put rivalry aside
2013-02-14 20:27
Vatican City - With passing phrases and striking images,
Pope Benedict XVI is assembling a last testament to his Roman Catholic Church,
urging its leaders to put aside their rivalries and think only of the unity of
the faith.
The message, slipped into statements both before and
after his shock resignation announcement on Monday, reads like a veiled rebuke
to leading cardinals jockeying for influence in the upcoming conclave and in
the papacy that it will produce.
His vague comments could also be hints that it was
internal Vatican power struggles, such as those which led to the Vatileaks
scandal involving Benedict's butler last year, which prompted him to take the
almost unprecedented step of quitting the leadership of the world's largest
church.
Benedict, 85, will step down on 28 February, triggering a
new conclave - the closed-door papal election - in mid-March with no
discernible front runner and several factions already putting forward their
ideas for who or what the new pontiff should be.
The German pope urged the faithful on Wednesday to
"show the face of the church and how that face is sometimes
disfigured".
"I am thinking particularly about sins against the
unity of the church, about divisions in the body of the church," he said.
"Overcoming individualism and rivalry is a humble
sign," he added during his last public Mass in St Peter's Basilica.
Italian newspapers, whose Vatican watchers are weighing
every word uttered by Benedict these days, seized on the terms "disfigured
face" and "rivalry" as what the Milan daily Corriere della Sera
called "signals hurled at the conclave".
Sodano vs Bertone
Several analysts highlighted the well-known rivalry
between Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the former secretary of state or number two man
at the Vatican under Benedict's predecessor Pope John Paul II, and the current
deputy, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.
Sodano, who as dean of the College of Cardinals will help
the electors prepare for the conclave, has never hidden his disdain for the
scandal-plagued Bertone, whose role as Vatican chamberlain is to organise
events leading up to the conclave.
Since succeeding him in 2006, Bertone has purged several
of Sodano's protégés from the powerful Secretariat of State, dispatching them
to ambassadorial posts abroad or less central roles within the Vatican itself.
Many of the gaffes of the Benedict era, from his giving a
lecture at Regensburg in 2006 which angered Muslims to the purloined papers
that led to the Vatileaks scandal, are blamed by the Sodano camp on what they
see as Bertone's mismanagement.
The leaked papers published in May in the book "His
Holiness" documented cases of petty corruption and in-fighting within the
Vatican walls, many of them reflecting an internal backlash against Bertone and
his leadership.
The trial last October of Benedict's butler for leaking
the documents left many questions about a suspected wider Vatican intrigue
unanswered. The Vatican has never published its own internal inquiry into the
scandal, which may have revealed to Benedict in-fighting on a greater scale
than he had imagined.
Bad fish
Watching their schedules carefully, the Rome daily La
Repubblica reported that both Sodano and Bertone have "launched a round of
contacts with the most influential cardinals" in preparation for the papal
election due to be held in mid-March.
Benedict, who before the 2005 conclave that elected him,
had denounced the "filth in the church" due to sexual abuse and the
"dictatorship of relativism" threatening the faith, has stepped up
warnings against church rivalry and disunity recently.
On Saturday, two days before announcing his resignation,
he brought up the issue of clerical arrogance when he warned seminarians in
Rome against excessive pride in themselves because God had chosen them to
become priests.
"It would be triumphalism if we thought God has
chosen me because I am so great," he said. "That would really be
mistaken triumphalism."
In a speech on October, in the wake of the Vatileaks
trial, he recalled that "in the Lord's fields there are always weeds... in
Peter's nets, there are also bad fish".
In a little noticed decision back in 2007, Benedict
changed the 1996 conclave rules issued by John Paul II to bring back the
traditional two-thirds majority needed to elect a pope.
John Paul's rules called for cardinals to switch to a
simple majority if they were deadlocked after 13 days of voting, a move
Benedict thought could lead to a disputed papacy rather than one on which two
thirds of the voting cardinals had signed off.
There is concern that Benedict's resignation, making him
the first living former pope since the bitter schisms of the Middle Ages, might
make him a focus for opposition to his successor - though he himself stressed
on Thursday that he was "withdrawing into prayer", to lead a
cloistered life "hidden from the world".
