Saturday, 16 April 2005
 
In the third of four press briefings sponsored by the International Movement We are Church, Paul Collins, PhD, a well-known Australian church historian, called for a return to local election of bishops and issued a stinging critique of the former papacy of John Paul II and Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) as “reactionary.”
 
Among the most formidable challenges facing the new pope is “the legacy of John Paul II, whose 26-year papacy gave him unprecedented ability to centralize the papacy of the church,” Collins said. It was “reactionary, with no sense of contemporary theology, biblical studies and church history.”  There was “no demonstrated understanding of the historical conditioning that gives context to all philosophy, ethics, and theology.”
 
Cardinal Ratzinger, he told reporters, “while profoundly aware of recent developments in western theology, shared the same historical amnesia.”
 
“What the church needs now is a genuine return to tradition, a pope who can recover legitimate approaches to church authority, which have been obscured by extreme interpretations of the definition of papal infallibility and primacy.”  The church needs now “the new ideas and new sense of purpose that comes from a decisive change in leadership style.”
 
Among the challenges facing the new pope are:
 
The need to recover a Gospel vision of servant leadership. History reveals that ideal was quickly abandoned, “by any New Testament norm, the modern papacy is seriously deficient.”
The profound need to restore the church’s “traditional doctrines of communion, collegiality, and the role of the councils,” Collins says. “There is a real sense in which the Wojtyla papacy has been an extreme realization of papal extremism. We need a pope who is willing to share the government of the church with the bishops, priests and laity. A minimum requirement would be that bishops were elected locally, not appointed by a manipulative, arcane process presided over by the Congregation of Bishops in Rome.”
 
Collins, a priest of 32 years, is a writer and television broadcaster. He resigned over the Vatican’s investigation of his book, Papal Power in 1997. His latest book, Upon This Rock, published in 2000, is a general history of the church’s popes.