It is hard to contain my enthusiasm for John L Allen’s book: All the Pope’s Men. It seems to me to represent **exactly** what is most needed in the tragic situation of the Catholic Church's communication with our media-saturated world.
For a heart-breaking situation of profound misunderstanding and miscommunication characterises the `dialogue' between a Church rooted in centuries of tradition and rigorous, painstaking thinking – yes, thinking - and a world of media myths and soundbites, which cannot hope to do justice to anything needing a significant span of attention.
Allen sees this much better than most. As a reporter, whose full-time beat is the Vatican and who knows its inner workings far, far better than nearly any English speaking lay-person, Allen has accomplished something desperately needed here.
Not only is there great journalism in this book - there is also a noble, inspired attempt to create fairness and justice, listening and understanding, appreciation of different perspectives and mindsets, amidst the psychic warfare that typifieses not only the tragic divisions within the Church, but also those between Catholicism and the ideology of the anglophone – particularly American – secularist ethos.
His very first sentence, in fact, reads: ‘The aim of this book is to promote better informed and hopefully less acrimonious conversation between the Vatican and the English-speaking world by identifying the core values and experiences that underlie specific Vatican policy choices.’ He is making ‘an attempt to understand how the Vatican thinks, why it reacts in certain ways and not others, how it sees the world.’
Many traditionalists will be suspicious. Allen works for the very liberal National Catholic Reporter and has previously written far more critically of the Vatican.
I am very happy to say that a certain turning is very evident here. In this book, there is a genuine attempt to serve both liberals and conservatives, by reporting their views fairly and without bias. So that they can simply be heard. Simply be **heard** - for God's sake. This is what is needed. Allen knows it, and is evidently a man who has tried very hard to simply listen himself.
Thus I find something truly uplifting and **sane** as Allen cuts through layer upon layer of prejudice, misperception and mythology to simply render how people in the Vatican really think and how their thinking is necessarily shaped by very different concerns from modern secularism. I think the best I can do at this point, is simply to let Allen speak for himself:
“Critics often complain about a lack of accountability in the Vatican, by which they mean that popes do not stand for re-election, are not subject to recall, and are not otherwise answerable to public opinion as expressed in modern democracies …
Yet it is a **terrible misconception** [Emphasis mine] to believe that Vatican officials do not regard themselves as accountable … Tradition [is what] informs the Vatican’s sense of accountability… policy is based on theological and philosophical principles derived from the tradition, the deposit of faith … Vatican officials believe the defense and transmission of the tradition is the highest service Church leaders can offer to their people …
Vatican personnel by and large do not see themselves as imperialists imposing their will on the rest of the Catholic Church. In many instances ... they see themselves defending the people against elites running roughshod over their rights, [protecting] the simple faithful against avant-garde theologians who would betray the faith, against experimental liturgists who risk transforming the Mass into something profane or banal, or against ecclesiastical bureaucrats.'
Writing as an American himself, Allen can say: `Americans often want to do things their own way, and if Rome puts on the brakes, it's a form of oppression. From Rome's point of view, however sometimes its precisely the reverse - they're saving the rest of the Church from being involuntarily ‘Americanised' ...”
My review of Allen’s MAGNIFICENT effort will continue tomorrow.
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