Après moi, le deluge, Louis XV was reputed to have said to the Dauphin, his doomed successor. And flood there was. The Bourbons were swept away, only to come back again and then to recede permanently to the periphery of French society.

The now Emeritus Pope need have no fear that his successor and the institution will be swept away, but he may well witness a few waves of cleansing water course through the corridors of his old residence as well as through the church at large.  Not a tsunami, nor a cataract but more than a trickle.

For instance, some British bishops, a retired cardinal and the current Bishop of Menevia, and the highest figures of the German hierarchy, including a prominent eminence long associated with of one of the Roman dicasteries or Curial congregations (departments), have boldly raised issues in public that always drew automatic Vatican censure in the immediate past: the possibility and even desirability of a married parochial clergy to complement the celibates and the compelling need to address the role of women in the church that is neither antediluvian nor faddish.

Although the remarks of Cardinals Karl Lehmann of Mainz and Walter Kasper, Past President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, predate by a week the official resignation of Benedict XVI, they speak to the unfettered and liberating atmosphere that pre-conclave conversations and public interviews can and should generate.

Lehmann and Kasper urge either the restoration of the ministry of deacon -- there is ample historical evidence that women exercised a form of diakonia in the first millennium of Christianity -- or create a new diaconal office for women that could see them participating in various modes of church governance.

This is all for the good; the opening up of serious matters of ecclesiological consequence, of moving to redress inequities and injustices that have no place in the communion that is the Body of Christ, and in mobilizing a disengaged laity by offering hope for revitalized and credible church structures, these kinds of public -- yes, public -- airings can only be seen as a boon of the Spirit.

They speak to a higher resolve, a noble seriousness, light years away from the trivial obsessions over papal vesture -- what happens to the red shoes? -- or the endless demonizing of the Roman Curia -- we must wrest control of headquarters from the Italians -- and moves the discussion and analysis where it should be: the purifying springs of renewal.

Bio:

Dr. Michael W. Higgins is CTV's Papal commentator. He is also:

  • Vice President for Mission & Catholic Identity, Sacred Heart University
  • Chief Consultant, for 鈥淪ir Peter Ustinov鈥檚 Inside the Vatican鈥� 6-part series
  • Author of Bestsellers: Power and Peril: the Catholic Church at the Crossroads , (HarperCollins, 2002) and Stalking the Holy: In Pursuit of Saint-Making (Anansi, 2006)
  • Author of Award-winners: Heretic Blood: the Spiritual Geography of Thomas Merton (Stoddart, 1998) and Suffer the Children Unto Me: An Open Inquiry into the Clerical sex Abuse Scandal (Novalis, 2010)
  • Past President of St. Jerome鈥檚 in Waterloo & St. Thomas In Fredericton NB