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Mark Shields is a nationally known columnist and commentator. |
Pope psychology: Pay not heed to predictions
 |  Pope Benedict XVI at the inaugural Mass outside St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City. |
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 Benedict XVI installed at Vatican Mass.
 Pope's past offers clues to future of papacy.
 The new pope receives mixed reaction from around the world.
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WASHINGTON (Creators Syndicate) -- A liberal Catholic friend of mine tried humor to mask his disappointment at the choice of Pope Benedict XVI, the rigid Bavarian-born Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, to succeed the late John Paul II: "We were looking for a 'good shepherd,' and instead we got a German shepherd."
I told him that that trying to predict how any new pontiff would lead -- or not lead -- once in office was pointless.
Let the record show that when Pius XII died in the 20th year of his papacy in 1958, the College of Cardinals chose the patriarch of Venice to succeed him, a short, overweight 77-year-old with no record as an insurgent -- ideally suited to be a transitional seat-warmer. Wrong.
As Pope John XXIII, this septuagenarian threatened the iron authority of the Roman curia by throwing open the doors and windows of the Catholic Church, that the church and the world might get to know each other.
He convened the historic Second Vatican Council and broke with centuries of papal teaching by declaring that all human beings had the right to practice, both privately and publicly, their religious beliefs.
He angered the affluent by telling rich nations they had an obligation to help poorer countries. When he died, after just four and a half years in office, he was the most beloved of popes.
Papal predictions are to be avoided, but facts cannot be. Church attendance in the West continues to fall. The shortage of priests and seminarians is acute.
The ordination of women, a seemingly rational response to the crisis, is rejected on grounds of doctrine by Rome. More women grow increasingly discontent with their secondary role in the Catholic Church. But as everyone must understand, church teaching does not change. Wrong again.
In his new book, "A Church That Can and Cannot Change," the distinguished Catholic scholar and U.S. Court of Appeals Judge John T. Noonan, Jr. documents where the church has totally reversed its position on a number of moral principles.
For nearly all of its first 19 centuries, the church never found human slavery to be either a sin or an evil. In fact, well into the 19th Century, Noonan points out, "the Dominican and Jesuit orders of priests and nuns of the Augustinian and Carmelite communities" owned slaves.
They were simply following the example of popes Gregory the Great, Pius V and Pius VII. Thank God, the lonely and courageous crusade to abolish slavery was led by the Quakers, the Evangelical Anglicans and the Methodists.
The church changed its teaching as well, Noonan writes, on the sinfulness of usury -- making a profit for loaning money. Three general councils of the church and popes over several centuries defined profits from money-lending to be evil.
Eventually, faced with the increasing need for credit, the church relented and discovered that interest payments on loans were no longer either evil. There is hope for women -- church teaching can change.
With the near-universal tributes of affection to Pope John Paul II from the exalted and the ordinary, these have been wonderfully heady days for the church.
Let me offer one cautionary note to my fellow Catholics drawn from Eamon Duffy's elegant "Saints and Sinners: A history of the Popes."
Duffy reminds us that the papacy was once the prize to be fought over by the great Roman families and that "the key figure in Pope John X's (914 to 928) appointment and his deposition (he was suffocated) was the notorious Theophylact matron Maozia, "who also had been the mistress of Pope Sergius III, whose illegitimate son she bore and eventually helped install as Pope John XI (931-936). We have made mistakes.
Let us note that Cardinal Ratzinger was a theologian, an enforcer of orthodoxy. Now as Pope Benedict XVI, he will have a much different task: He will be a pastor. It's time to pray, not to predict.
