The process for selecting a new pope will begin April 18th. Contenders are reportedly campaigning for the top position in the Roman Catholic Church. American Catholics are looking for changes from a new pontiff. A new Associated Press poll finds that 60% of US Catholic hope a new pope will support the ordination of women and allow priests to marry. Progressive Catholic leaders are not hopeful. The Boston Globe reports:
''I don't look for much change. Given the pool of likely candidates, with two exceptions they're all pretty much textbook conservatives in the John Paul mold," said the Rev. Richard P. McBrien, a leading liberal theologian at the University of Notre Dame. ''Any progressive Catholic who would expect the new pope to come in and suddenly be saying he'd like to open ordination of women for study, put obligatory celibacy on the table, or rein in the curia . . . they're just being unrealistic."
McBrien, however, does hold out some hope.
When Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II in 1978, he put a halt to many of the most dramatic departures from traditional teaching being pushed by advocates of radical change. During his papacy, he reined in priests advocating ''liberation theology" in the Third World. He definitively declared that ''the church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination of women." He said same-sex couples do ''grave damage" to children. And he oversaw a crackdown on theologians who strayed too far from doctrinal orthodoxy.
But McBrien, like other commentators, noted that John Paul II did not fit easily into American political categories -- although he was conservative on a variety of doctrinal matters and questions of sexual ethics, he was liberal on other issues.
''John Paul II was a strong liberal on immigration, war and peace, social justice, and human rights, and if the next pope is at least as socially progressive as John Paul II, that will be a plus," McBrien said.
The Rev. Dr. Susan Thistlethwaite, president of the United Church of Christ-related Chicago Theological Seminary, writes today in The Chicago Tribune about how some of the pope's more progressive policies made him popular with some Protestants. "He endeared himself to liberal Protestants in his outspoken opposition to the attack on Iraq, trying hard to persuade the United States and Britain to refrain from military action. He has been blunt on the critical importance of environmental protection and has explicitly linked environmental degradation to overconsumption, especially in the United States as well as other western countries," she writes. Click here to read her full article.
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