The pending abdication of Pope Benedict XVI is a seismic event in the Roman Catholic world. Even if his successor is not an agent for change in the practice of the faith — and, given the conservative alignment of many within top church leadership, abrupt changes seem unlikely — the very fact of the pope’s resignation signals a significant acknowledgement of one modern reality.
That is: The longevity that modern health technology allows means that many people live well past the point where they can handle any full-time work, let alone the shepherding of more than 1 billion members of the Catholic flock.
So the 85-year-old pontiff made the right decision, one with the best interests of the church in mind, by being the first in about six centuries to leave the post while still living. For an institution that parts from tradition rarely, Pope Benedict’s gesture might well be seen as his most selfless act, a gift to the future health of the church. It set a precedent that should enable his successors to more reasonably assess their capacity to do the work.
Pope Benedict’s legacy includes several acts that already have left a lasting imprint on Hawaii, where Catholicism remains the largest religious denomination. Near the start of his papacy, he approved the selection of Bishop Larry Silva to head the Diocese of Honolulu. And he was the one to canonize Hawaii’s saints, Father Damien and Mother Marianne Cope, who served Hawaii’s Hansen’s disease sufferers, once banished for life to Kalaupapa, the leper colony on Molokai’s remote peninsula.
But it’s his intersects with the larger religious community that people will remember, and not always with approval.
Most significant, the next pope must contend with what must be the church’s most horrific failing of the modern age: its history of indulgence where the sexual abuse of minors was concerned. Pope Benedict ultimately fell short in his efforts to repair the damage. He issued, for example, apologies for the scars the abusers left in their victims.
"I think of the immense suffering caused by the abuse of children, especially within the Church and by her ministers," he said in a 2010 sermon at London’s Westminster Cathedral. "Above all, I express my deep sorrow to the innocent victims of these unspeakable crimes."
However, his outreach was not sufficient to heal the wounds. Many victims advocates said true recompense would require releasing the records of priests found to be predators. Without such accountability, they said, the church would never regain the trust lost in the scandals.
Pope Benedict was widely seen as a scholar — the former Joseph Ratzinger was once dean of theology in his native Germany — who reinforced some of the church’s anchor positions on social issues. Its most high-profile moral debates, often leaning into the political public sphere, arose from church opposition to abortion, contraception and same-sex marriage. This frustrated many liberal-minded Catholics, but the church is extremely divided on these fronts, and others were relieved to see the church hold its ground.
The pope drew more universal praise for his preaching about the church’s responsibility to fight poverty as a route to bring about peace. He was right that hunger and poverty are an underlying cause of conflict around the world, and that his religious community ought to keep that as a focus.
If the predictions of most experts are correct about the field of potential successors, the one replacing Pope Benedict probably will be cut from a similar cloth. But the hope is that he will have the energy and will to lead the church in delivering concrete actions that make the church more relevant in a world that is changing so rapidly around it.
