The papacy today: Henry VIII had other ideas

NOT SINCE POPE Clement VII was besieged by Henry VIII to annul the son-less king's marriage to Catherine of Aragon a half millennium ago has there been so much commotion over the Vatican's supreme role in shaping the religious path of its followers. You get a sense of the crisis when a reporter asked the ranking information guy for the papacy about the current public relations fallout. The poor fellow told the reporter that he had yet to discuss it with Benedict. Hmmm....

Otherwise, it should be obvious by now that even Holy Week did not provide a useful cover for the Holy Father from the fiery attacks over shrugged-off sexual abuse of kids. Historians tell us that when Henry was rebuffed by Rome on what was known as his "great matter," he simply did what any hot-tempered king would do and broke with the Vatican. It stayed that way with Henry's Anglicans until Benedict decided that the church's ranks needed be filled in the widening gaps and invited the Anglicans to come home to Catholicism. After all of these years of deep suspicions between the two camps, that was a hard act to follow, and I've seen nothing to suggest many took Benedict up on his offer. Maybe Larry King will find a convert and interview him.

There is little evidence that the pope will say or do anything more than what he has done so far, no matter the expressed irritation of some Catholic cardinals and bishops over the stone wall that has been built around Vatican City. As generally happens in times of great stress, a lot of folks on both sides have been anxious to get in their dibs. That includes the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa , the Vatican priest who allowed that the attacks on the pope were a lot like the persecution of the Jews. The front office in Rome didn't buy his comments at all and quickly distanced the Vatican from the priest's remarks. By the way, Cantalamessa's title is "preacher of the papal household."

Now, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, chipped in with a slam at the Catholic Church in Ireland, accusing it of "losing all credibility." That set off several other skirmishes in which he finally apologized to the Catholic archbishop of Dublin, saying he meant no offense by his comments. Cool. That may settle things for a day or two.

The fallibility of Benedict's infallibility

AS A CURIOUS SPECTATOR to the controversy surrounding Pope Benedict these days, I was led to my dictionary to look up the meaning of petty, as in Benedict's dismissal of the raging complaints against him as "petty gossip".

Petty - Of little or no importance or consequence.

Despite all of the stonewalling and immunizing that is emerging from the Vatican, there are a lot of angry folks who don't consider their claims of priestly pedophilia to be petty, no matter whatever Benedict's apologists might call it. Papal infallibility is not in good working order in this instance. And quite likely never has been since it was inserted into the script in 1870 by Pius IX.

As papal historian Garry Wills writes in his book Papal Sin, the pope called together bishops from around the world for the First Vatican Council with the shady motive of having him declared 'infallible". Fearing that a majority of the bishops would not be overly thrilled by the idea, Pius' minions rigged the vote to make it happen. Thus, in a flash, popes have been deemed infallible ever since. It's all right there in papal doctrine.

Among Benedict's legal schemes put up by his defense counsel is that he is shielded from a Kentucky case involving abused children because he is a "head of state". That sounds more like the 1870 papal gambit which, so far as I have read, was not petty gossip.

UPDATE: A reader sends along this quote by Catholic League president Bill Donahue, an insufferable defender of Benedict, who fumes: "It is a sad day when al-Qaeda suspects are afforded more rights than priests.

To which the reader asks: "And how many priests are in Gitmo, Bill?"

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