The Pope began his eighth year as religious leader after spending the waning days of his seventh year driving home his view of the Catholic Church, with a divisive crackdown on dissenters and an equally divisive opening to a fringe group of traditionalists.
...he has certainly left a mark on the Church
The coming year will likely see more of the same as the Vatican gears up to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council, the 1962-65 Church meetings that reshaped the Catholic Church and are key to understanding this papacy and the Pope’s recent moves to stamp out liberal dissent and promote a more conservative brand of Catholicism.
At the start of his pontificate, which officially began on April 24, 2005, the Pope promised not to impose his own will on the Church but to rather listen “to the word and the will of the Lord, to be guided by him, so that he himself will lead the Church at this hour of our history”.
Seven years later, he has certainly left a mark on the Church, pressing a conservative interpretation of Vatican II’s key teachings and making his priority the revitalisation of traditional Catholicism in a world.
He set out many of those priorities in a December 2005 speech to his closest collaborators running the Vatican, insisting that Vatican II did not represent a break from the past but rather a renewal of the Church’s core teachings and traditions.
The Vatican last week put those words into action, cracking down on the largest umbrella group of nuns in the US, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. A bishop was appointed to revise the conference’s statutes and review its programmes and publications and accused the group of taking positions that undermine Church teaching on the priesthood and homosexuality, while promoting “certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith”.
Two weeks earlier, the Pope himself lashed out at a dissident group of priests in heavily Catholic Austria who have openly called for ordaining women and relaxing the celibacy requirement for priests.
At the same time, on the very day it announced the crackdown on the US nuns, the Holy See said it was nearing agreement to bring an ultra-traditionalist conservative group of Catholics back into communion with Rome after two decades of schism.
The group, the Society of St Pius X, broke from Rome after rejecting many of the teachings of Vatican II, particularly its outreach to Jews and people of other faiths, and the sanctioning of the New Mass in the vernacular that essentially replaced the old Latin Mass.
To critics, the coincidence was remarkable: The Vatican was somehow rejecting the US nuns who had embraced Vatican II and its call to go out into the world to serve the poor, while embracing the Society of St Pius X which had rejected Vatican II.